“We don’t really have any nutritional guidelines for citrus because everything on citrus was written before HLB,” says Lorenzo Rossi, a root biologist at the Indian River Research and Education Center.
“So the nutrient requirements now are completely different from the nutrients that citrus required 20 years ago,” he tells Citrus Industry News.
HLB was first found in Florida in 2005, and and “quickly spread into virtually all trees in the state,” Rossi says. He and other researchers are trying to develop new guidelines for citrus fertilizers as a way of combating HLB.
“Rossi is also experimenting with mulch and compost, and has found that oak mulch changes the pH in the soil,” according to Citrus Industry News. “He says researchers are seeing that “oak mulch is increasing the nutrient availability for the plant.”
