Plant Description
Planting
Welcome to the Citrus Groves of Paradise Nursery
Bring the timeless beauty, intoxicating fragrance, and vibrant flavors of homegrown fruit directly into your Southern California landscape. At Paradise Nursery, located in Chatsworth, Los Angeles, we specialize in providing premium, climate-adapted citrus trees designed to thrive in our specific local environment. Whether you are planting a sprawling backyard orchard or cultivating an urban oasis on a sunny patio, our collection offers a diverse range of fruit profiles, tree habits, and sizes tailored to your gardening goals.
The Paradise Nursery Advantage
- Locally Acclimated Stock: Every citrus tree in our inventory is carefully grown and hardened to withstand the intense heat, direct sun, and dry seasons characteristic of Southern California.
- Certified Disease-Free: To safeguard Los Angeles’s rich agricultural heritage and protect your backyard investment, all our citrus trees are sourced from certified, disease-free stock to defend against regional pressures like Huanglongbing (HLB) and the Asian Citrus Psyllid (ACP).
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Versatile Growing Forms: We provide our trees in two primary structures to match your landscape requirements:
- Standard Trees: Featuring a single, upright clean trunk with a beautifully raised canopy above the ground—ideal for traditional garden spaces.
- Semi-Dwarf Trees: Pruned and trained early to promote low branching and a compact, bush-like canopy close to the ground—perfect for container planting, smaller urban yards, and patios.
- Flexible Container Choices: Find the exact level of maturity your project demands. We carry potted citrus available in 5-gallon, 15-gallon, 25-gallon, and 24" box containers. All options are available for convenient in-store pickup or local truck delivery across Southern California.
Explore Our Premium Citrus Varieties
Classic Lemons & Limes
Transform your kitchen and backyard with highly productive, acid-bright kitchen staples.
- Improved Meyer Lemon Tree: A backyard favorite and an exceptionally easy-to-grow hybrid. Meyer lemons are prized for their thin, smooth skins, low acidity, and a subtle hint of mandarin sweetness. Their highly fragrant white blossoms fill your garden with perfume year-round.
- Eureka Lemon Tree: The quintessential California lemon tree. It produces a heavy, reliable harvest of classic, football-shaped lemons featuring thick rinds and a bright, tangy flavor profile perfect for baking, cooking, and fresh juices.
- Persian Sweet Lemon Tree: A unique and highly sought-after Mediterranean variety. This tree yields lemons that are completely acidless, delivering an uniquely sweet, mild, and refreshing taste.
- Lime Trees (Persian & Key Limes): Highly vigorous and quick to bear, our lime selection produces dark green, thin-skinned fruits bursting with tart, juicy flesh. They boast rich essential sugars and high acidity, serving as a fundamental ingredient for coastal drinks, fresh garnishes, and culinary dishes.
- Bearss Lime Tree: A robust, cold-hardy, and completely seedless variety that yields abundant, large, juicy limes with an intensely classic tartness.
Sweet Oranges & Refreshing Grapefruits
Enjoy the luxury of sun-ripened, vitamin-packed oranges picked straight from the branch.
- Washington Navel Orange Tree: A legendary, highly adaptable backyard standard. This variety delivers large, seedless fruits that are sweet, incredibly juicy, and remarkably easy to peel.
- Late Lane Navel Orange Tree: A premier late-season powerhouse engineered to extend your backyard harvest well into the warm summer months. Biting into its sweet, nutrient-dense flesh offers a refreshing treat during hot summer days, long after other navel varieties have finished fruiting.
- Cara Cara Navel Orange Tree: Prized for its exceptional gourmet flavor profile, the Cara Cara features a low-acid sweetness and a strikingly beautiful, deep rosy-pink internal flesh.
- Moro Blood Orange Tree: A striking Mediterranean gem that infuses complex, berry-like undertones into its deeply pigmented crimson flesh. The deep green foliage creates an exquisite ornamental contrast against the dark, ripening fruits.
- Valencia Orange Tree: The ultimate global choice for fresh juicing. Known for its vibrant orange color and balanced sugar-to-acid ratio, a Valencia tree guarantees a heavy crop of juicy fruits.
- Sour Orange Tree (Naranj Shiraz): A heritage hybrid crossing pomelo and mandarin genetics. It features incredibly aromatic blossoms and tart, bitter-edged fruits favored worldwide for authentic marmalades and specialized regional marinades.
Mandarins, Kumquats & Specialty Gems
Perfect for family snacking, container gardening, and adding exotic variety to your home orchard.
- Kishu Mini Mandarin Tree: An evergreen jewel perfectly suited to the Los Angeles climate. It yields small, bite-sized, and completely seedless fruits that are candy-sweet and incredibly easy for children to peel.
- Pomelo Tree (Citrus maxima): The grandfather of citrus varieties. This majestic, sun-loving tree produces massive, thick-skinned fruits with a crisp, refreshing, and beautifully balanced sweet-tart pulp.
- Nagami Kumquat Tree: A compact, highly ornamental specimen that fits into tight garden corners or decorative patio pots. It produces dozens of small oval fruits featuring an entirely edible, sweet rind paired with a delightfully tart center.
Citrus Tree - Planting & Care in Los Angeles
To ensure your new trees establish flawlessly and bear a heavy crop year after year, follow these expert care steps optimized for our Southern California environment:
- Sunlight Exposure: Citrus trees fuel fruit sweetness and sugar production through direct solar energy. Plant your tree in a location that receives a minimum of 6 to 8 hours of full, direct sunlight daily.
- Proper Spacing: Space trees roughly 10 to 15 feet apart for high-density home orchards. While standard trees can exceed 20 feet at maturity, they can easily be pruned to a manageable height of 9 to 15 feet for easier harvesting.
- Soil and Hole Preparation: Choose a planting site with excellent drainage. Dig a hole exactly as deep as the current root system and at least twice as wide.
- Backfilling and Nutrition: Position the tree in the hole and backfill the surrounding space using a blended mixture of your native soil and a high-quality planting mix fortified with washed sand and organic fertilizer.
- Establish a Watering Basin: Sculpt a wide soil basin around the outer root drip zone to catch and hold water. Water newly planted trees deeply 1 to 2 times a week during the active spring and summer growing seasons, ensuring the moisture thoroughly saturates the soil to full field capacity.