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Mandarin- Citrus Reticulata
It’s one of the best times of the year in our garden, it’s the time of year when we can go out into the backyard and pick ourselves a little round ball of sweetness, all in its own wrapping.
It’s Mandarin Time!
We renovated our home about 5 years ago and during the renovation, I nurtured a quite a few trees that I wanted to keep, now when I say nurtured, I actually mean, occasionally water when I could get to them in the middle of a building site! The Imperial Mandarin was one of the trees I wanted to save and I’m so glad that I did. We moved it about 3 times and it has been treated pretty badly actually if I’m completely honest and yet still she produces heaps of fruit every year.
I’m into the shapes of trees within the landscape including my own garden and this one is a lovely round-shaped specimen. I always have my arborist check it when he comes to attend to our other trees about every 18 months. He reduces the height of it because I am pretty short and the thought of climbing a ladder to pick fruit is just madness. So, we keep it at a manageable height.
This year our yield has been slightly less than previous years because I didn’t quite time the pruning correctly and we trimmed some of the fruit off when they were teeny tiny but that’s OK too, it is nice to give the tree a bit of a rest every now and again. Actually, this particular variety can produce much more fruit than its limbs will bear so reducing the canopy is not such a bad idea.
I chose an Imperial Mandarin (fruiting April-July) because the fruit is small and sweet with an easy-to-peel skin, which is great for encouraging kids to eat fruit. Ours are so good that there is not much convincing required. There are lots of other varieties which are suitable for Perth gardens like Hickson (June-August) and Honey Murcott (August-October) and honestly, I would recommend a Semi-dwarf variety rather than a full-sized tree as most people just don’t have the room for a big fruit tree in a suburban block and it is more difficult to keep an eye on the health of your citrus trees if they are too big.
This tree actually gets plenty of good tucker-Mandarins love to be fed. We use Mature Compost and Citrus fertilizer as well as Sulphate of Potash and Liquid Powerfeed.
We mulch it with Lucerne straw mulch, to keep the roots cool and it gets watered twice a week through the spring-summer months via drip irrigation at the root zone and a hand watering top up on very hot days.
The sweet, tasty fruit look lovely from an aesthetic viewpoint in the Autumn garden.
What’s not to love…
