Courtyard Gardener’s Conservatory : Lemons #courtyardgarden #gardening #houseplants #lemontrees

Last autumn I splashed out on a tiny lemon tree in B&Q. Just a tiny tree creaking under the weight of 4 lemons!

Those lemons came in very handy for Christmas cooking (and the odd G&T) and i was rather pleased with it.

But…

I have grown lemon from pips before but never had them flower of bear fruit. I assume they were a different variety from the one I had bought because I made the rooky error of keeping it inside and in january it lost half its leaves!

Reading up up them it seems that whilst they don’t survive frosts lemons  like to be cooler than you’d imagine and don’t like central heating! So my little tree went out into our small (unheated) conservatory.

I also bought some citrus feed and the combined treatments seem to have done the trick because about 6 weeks ago it started to produce flowers – and then tiny fruits!

There have already been far too many fruits setting on it for such a small tree, and so I have been picking off the clusters to two of the best looking fruitlets and may have to take a few more if they continue to set at the rate they have!

 

Closer examination also showed  that there were roots poking out of the bottom on that yellow pot and so I potted it on to a better sized ceramic pot. (These pics are slightly misleading. The blue pot is around 25% larger than the yellow one 🙂 )

The leaves are still not as dark and glossy as they were when I first bought it so I shall be feeding it once a fortnight as per instruction on the tub of ‘citrus feed’ crystals.

With any luck we shall have more lemons for our 2020 Christmas G&Ts!