My gardening style is often trial and error. This was especially true prior to taking the Master Gardener training and taking horticultural classes at Solano Community College. One of the key take-aways from Master Gardener training was to purchase and plant vegetation that is native to the area, or an area with a similar climate, in order to maximize the probability that the plant will thrive. With that lesson in mind, my plant choices have slowly evolved from choosing something pretty at Home Depot, to picking drought-tolerant, pollinator-attracting plants indigenous to areas with a Mediterranean climate. There is still a good deal of trial and error involved, however.

Twenty years ago, and long before I became a Master Gardener, my husband and I planted three dwarf citrus trees when we moved into our current home. The orange tree (Citrus sinensis) is now 20 feet tall, and about as wide, and the variegated Eureka lemon tree (Citrus x limon ‘Variegated Pink'), which we recently cut down, had reached a height of 15 feet. I now realize that the error lay in my belief that these trees truly were “dwarf”. I naively thought that any tree labeled “dwarf” would remain cute and small, and continue to fit nicely in the compact spot where we had planted it.

As Dave Wilson Nursery explains on their website: “Most semi-dwarfing rootstocks do not control fruit tree size as much as most people expect. Rootstocks can help to improve fruit tree soil and climate adaptation, pest and disease resistance, precocity (heavier bearing in early years), longevity, and ease of propagation in the nursery. To date, no rootstocks have been developed which do all these things plus fully dwarf the scion. Pruning is the only way to keep most fruit trees under twelve feet tall.” https://www.davewilson.com/home-garden/backyard-orchard-culture/

The University of California Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources (UCANR) states that dwarf trees produce inferior fruit, and recommends pruning standard-sized trees rather than purchasing dwarf varieties. http://homeorchard.ucanr.edu/The_Big_Picture/Tree_Selection/

I attended a presentation about the new Backyard Orchard, where a representative from Dave Wilson Nursery shocked the crowd by cutting a five-foot whip (a very young tree without branches) right in half. The purpose was to curtail the growth of a normal-sized fruit tree. The nursery also advocates summer pruning (another shocker!) to keep a fruit tree's size in check. The speaker said that, when harvesting fruit, if you need a step stool to reach the top of the tree, the tree is too tall for a home grower.

The bottom line is that, regardless of what the label says, most trees will grow beyond a dwarf size. Pruning is your best option to maintain a manageable-sized tree. I'm going to try again, with a new Meyer lemon tree (Citrus x meyeri). I'll prune drastically over the first two to three years, and faithfully thereafter. Hopefully, this time my citrus tree efforts will be more “trial” than “error”!