Let’s see if any of you amateur naturalists can identify this bush/tree.

Key lime?

Nope…but it’s in the citrus family.

Orange

A grape or plum vine/bush.

Trifoliate orange.

The trifoliate orange, Citrus trifoliata (syn. Poncirus trifoliata), is a member of the family Rutaceae. Whether the trifoliate oranges should be considered to belong to their own genus, Poncirus, or be included in the genus Citrus is debated. The species is unusual among citrus for having deciduous, compound leaves and pubescent (downy) fruit.[2][3]

It is native to northern China and Korea, and is also known as the Japanese bitter-orange (karatachi),[4] hardy orange[5] or Chinese bitter orange.

What did I win

Lol

Looks pokey

Pretty close for a MN guy!

I did have an advantage, this is my prized key lime, brought it home from FL, it does produce limes.

I gather they make some kind of fruit, are they edible?

They make a fruit that looks like a small lemon and has a strong citrus taste - full of seeds. It is said some folks make lemonade out of them - I havent tried. They are a scourge down here in the south. I have one in my front yard my wife wanted to leave and it reaches out and scratches me every time I get near. They will make dense thickets here.

I have made lemonade from them and it was very good.

this is my prized key lime, brought it home from FL, it does produce limes.




How big or old does your plant have to be before it starts producing pies???

It is used as a rootstock for grafting other citrus if I'm not mistaken.

I think my largest harvest was 17 limes, this is a 2018 plant but it didn't take off until my exwife left in 2020, I think it was also miserable when she was around

Trifoliate orange is too thorny for me to want to have it around. I generally don't like thorny plants. I have too many thorns encysted in me, from hunting brush and cutting honey locust.

Most of the people I know of who planted it, tore it out after a few years.

If I get a decent greenhouse built, I'll grow some of the better citrus inside.

Keith

Correct, the curved thorn variety known as Flying Dragon is a dwarfing rootstock. Regular trifoliate is standard. Most all other named rootstocks such as Swingle are trifoliate hybrids. Trifoliate being cold hardy imparts a small degree of cold hardiness to the scion.

They are also bad to sucker and overtop the scion so if in warm citrus areas consider own root instead.

In the Marine Corps we called that the Pain and Terror Tree. They grew them behind rifle ranges to keep idiots from getting themselves killed by trespassing into restricted areas.