How to care for a Meyer lemon
We
love our dwarf Meyer lemon. We got it as a tiny tree two years
ago and ate
our first four lemons last February. We just got three
more lemons that turned into the most delicious lemon meringue pie, and
the tree still has four half-grown lemons and an explosion of flowers
on its branches.We've now met four other people who have dwarf Meyer lemons, and the reports are varied. Our neighbor has a several year old tree that had 91 lemons on it last year:
On the other hand, my
father's lemon tree is a year old with no sign of blooms or
fruits. Another friend's lemon tree looks even more puny.
What's going on?
I'm far from an expert
on dwarf Meyer lemons, but I'm starting to think that the trees require
heavy feeding and big pots. Our lemon tree is in a five gallon
pot that I filled with stump dirt, topped off later with worm castings,
and now fertilize regularly with compost tea from the worm bin.
My neighbor's amazing lemon tree is in an even bigger pot and he feeds
it Miracle Grow. On the other hand, the less happy trees I've
seen have all been in smaller pots. Remember, creating lemons
takes a lot of energy, so your tree needs plenty of nitrogen.
My advice, for what it's
worth --- transplant your lemon into a big pot and feed it, feed it,
feed it! Under the right conditions, dwarf Meyer lemons are a
great source of citrus for those in cold climates who want to grow
their own as a houseplant.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Well, the soil in my pots keeps getting lower and lower and I keep having to top it off, so I guess some of it does get used up by the plant. I can see what you mean about toxic levels of different things building up, but I assume what I've been feeding my plant has been taken up in relatively equal amounts.
Though now that I'm reading this really cool book about soil ecology, I'm starting to wonder if what has made my tree happy hasn't been so much the fertilizing as the beneficial bacteria and fungi in the compost tea and worm castings I feed it.