Texas Orange Tree on Alejandro

While we're working on building up our pepper garden we provided a little TLC to our one and only Texas Orange Tree. Yep, we planted her in the ground finally after several years living in a pot. We installed a new automatic irrigation system for our landscape and transplanted our orange tree to a much better place and fresh water to drink on a regular basis.

The picture above is our tree last fall as she produce some nice citrus in spite of our lack of consistent watering. About a half dozen nice oranges for the first time last year.

After transplanting our orange tree in the ground you can see she's much happier with a drink of water every other day for a bout a half hour. Unfortunately, now that shes in the ground she's exposed to different kinds of creepy crawlers that enjoy feeding off the leaves and leaving eggs and so forth.

I stopped by our local nursery (Turners) to inquire about something for the trunk to keep ants and bugs from climbing the orange tree. They recommended Tree Tanglewood which is an insect barrier and the banding material that goes with it. In the picture above you can see the banding guard wrapped around the trunk of tree and a plastic tie to hold it in place. Then spreading the sticky goo on the banding material. This stopped the ants in their tracks. Then I used can of compressed air we have for our computers and blew off the ants on tree. The guard band gets replaced every so often as needed. I still have a few issues with others types of bugs that I'll address later. Hope this year we produce several more oranges then last year.