How to Protect Your Citrus Tree from Hard Freezes

Mary Gonzalas:

Hey everybody, it’s Mary with Nelson Nursery and Water Gardens, and I have some tips for you to protect your citrus through hard freezes. So the first thing is plant your citrus in a big pot and you can just move it inside. But if you don’t have that option and you want to plant it in the ground, here’s your first step. You’re going to make sure you have a nice layer of mulch around your tree, water very deeply so it has lots of water, and that water actually insulates the soil and the roots because it’s very important to protect the roots of your plants.

The next thing, as we saw during that super bad freeze, Yuri, we lost a lot of citrus. So you can use something as simple as bubble wrap around the trunks of your trees. You’re going to wrap it, and again, we’re looking to insulate. So we’re going to wrap this around, and especially when you get to our larger trees, really focus on where your graft is. So we want to wrap that graft up good, and we’re going to follow up with that with using either frost cloth or blankets. Again, we want to wrap that as well. So we’d wrap this around.

Now if we’re working with a tiny tree, and you can actually cover the entire thing with frost cloth, remember this very, very important thing, we want the ground to stay warm, so do not what we call lollipop. So that means cover the whole plant to the ground and make sure you secure it down. So that will guarantee that we’ll have a nice, safe, protected citrus tree that’s going to continue to thrive for you and produce fruit for you in the spring. So protect your citrus with these tips.