Autumn Citrus Care

As the citrus harvest season starts, help keep your trees healthy, well fed and protected to promote the best quality fruit. Here are our top citrus care tips for autumn.

1. Pest Watch

Citrus trees for signs of pests. Common insect pests include scale, which appear as raised white, brown or pink coloured bumps on stems, leaves and fruit, and aphids. Masses of tiny aphids enjoy feasting on tender new leaves and stems and cause leaves to curl under. Scale and aphids are both sap sucking insects and excrete a sweet sticky substance called honeydew.

Ants are attracted to honeydew and if you see ants moving up and down your citrus tree, it's likely to be a sign of a sap sucking insect like scale or aphids.

The disease black sooty mould, appearing as a black film over the leaves, is another consequence of honeydew. Living off the honeydew, the black sooty mould will disappear once the sap sucking insects are controlled.

Another citrus pest during autumn is citrus leaf miner. The adult citrus leaf miner moth lays her eggs on new autumn foliage and the eggs hatch into larvae that create silvery tunnels in the leaves and cause leaves to twist and distort.

It's easy to protect your citrus trees from aphids, scale and citrus leaf miner with regular sprays of Yates Nature's Way Citrus & Ornamental Spray . Based on natural pyrethrin and vegetable oil, it's a ready to use spray that will control common citrus pests like aphids and scale and help prevent citrus leafminer damage.

2. Feed your citrus trees

Feeding citrus regularly is the key to promoting bucketfuls of juicy fruit. Citrus are very hungry plants and lack of nutrients can lead to a decline in fruit quality. Yates Thrive Citrus Liquid Plant Food is a complete plant food that has been specially formulated to provide citrus with the nutrients they need. Apply Yates Thrive Citrus Liquid Plant Food around the root zone of in-ground and potted citrus trees every 1-2 weeks during autumn, while citrus trees are busy maturing their fruit.

3. Be fruit fly alert

In fruit fly prone areas, citrus fruit can be vulnerable to attack by fruit flies, even from when the fruit are still small and green. To control the adult fruit flies before they get a chance to lay eggs, which turn into destructive maggots, apply Yates Nature’s Way Fruit Fly Control as a band or spot spray onto the trunk or lower foliage of trees. There is no need to spray the actual fruit. It’s important to re-spray the plants each week (or sooner if there has been rain) to maintain effective protection.

4. Retain moisture in the soil

In addition to nutrients, having access to sufficient moisture is important for fruit quality. Citrus trees have a shallow root system and can dry out rapidly. Keep the soil or potting mix moist with regular, thorough watering. Applying Yates Waterwise Soil Wetter around the root zone of in-ground and potted citrus will help water penetrate evenly and effectively down into the roots and spreading a layer of mulch around the root zone will help retain moisture.