well hello everyone and welcome to another quick mi short here on the emma gardner channel i hope you all are going to enjoy this because i get asked a lot of questions about my citruses and sometimes i just really want to do them and and today is that day that i really just want to cover some of those questions because i've been getting a lot of them lately for some reason and a lot of them are coming around the lines of i brought my citrus in for the winter and i have some yellowing of leaves what is wrong well i'm going to cover the yellowing of leaves in another episode because there's multiple reasons for that this isn't on my short so i'm going to cover one reason why why your leaves might be turning yellow and kind of tie that into watering of citrus so the first reason why your leaves are going to be turning yellow is over watering a lot of times citruses are grown in very sandy well draining soil so you're going to want to look at your your soil type that's in your pots if you've moved them into a basic compost it's not going to fly they need one part sand to one part compost that way you have a lot of very well draining soil so that if you water up in the top you're going to notice that it's going to flow right through the pot there and if you have like a catch plate you're going to notice the water filling the catch plate that is a very good signing of very well draining soil if you can just water and water and water and water and nothing comes out your soil is too absorbent and it's going to hold on water too close to the roots and that's going to cause root rot and that is the very first sign that you're over watering i've noticed a lot of times when you begin to water too often your leaves will begin to show signs that we would normally think of as an iron deficiency and that is basically like this leaf here i watered it a little bit too much a week ago and it's kicking my butt for it but basically the leaves will turn yellow on the vein and it will look like leaf chlorosis basically an iron deficiency and the leaf will be green but uh but yellower on the veins that is the very first sign you've watered it too much so what you do is just stop watering it just stop watering it put it in a sunny window with some good air air circulation and that's going to dry things out and then just let the plant reset it will lose some leaves undoubtedly yes but it will not be as bad as you say well man maybe i'm not watering enough maybe i'm not giving it enough nutrients trust me just cut the watering first because that is the first reason now another thing is that when we water in the winter time sometimes we tend to water the same schedule that we water in the summer when i move my plants out to the patio i basically water once a week because you have the sun and you have the wind that are kind of attacking the pot at all angles really contributing to a lot of evaporation so you'll find that the pot dries out a lot however when you bring it indoors there's not those those conditions the sun is lower in the sky because it's winter time and you don't have the wind because of the fact that it's indoors so the pot takes a long long time to dry out i typically only water my citrus once every two weeks and believe it or not that is all it takes to keep the citrus thriving and just going like crazy and so that is the that is a quick tip for you all for watering your citruses this can apply to limes lemons oranges grapefruits kumquats doesn't matter the type of citrus if it is a citrus it will apply to this episode and so hopefully you enjoyed another quick oh another quick tip that i just wanted to mention though is a lot of times people don't know how to test if their soil is dry or not and there is that there is that test of sticking your finger in the soil and popping it down to your your second knuckle and if it's dry give it some water this method is a little more foolproof for citruses and i find that when your soil is dry in the um in the pot the soil will actually shrink and it will create a little gap between the edge of the pot and the soil line if you're starting to see that gap you know that it's time to water if you don't see that gap yet don't water it's totally fine because what happens is when the soil shrinks it will create that gap and the only time it can shrink is if it's dry enough about three inches down after that obviously that's a tall tail sign to give it some water so hopefully that helps hopefully you are going to not over water your citruses and hopefully you can keep them alive through the winter they are so much fun to grow i would definitely encourage you trying them so hopefully you all enjoyed hopefully you all are growing big or going home and i'll talk to you all later bye you