Growing Organic Fruit: Growing Dwarf Lemons

Latest Update 21st February 2015.

Dwarf Lemon

Nutrition.

This food is low in Saturated Fat, and very low in Cholesterol and Sodium. It is also a good source of Thiamin, Riboflavin, Pantothenic Acid, Iron and Magnesium, and a very good source of Dietary Fiber, Vitamin C, Vitamin B6, Calcium, Potassium and Copper. More from nutrition data.self.com.

Notes.

I built 2 much larger Fruit Tree Ecobeds this winter to accommodate my dwarf Meyer Lemon tree and my dwarf Hamlin orange tree which had outgrown their previous homes.
The new beds are 900 x 900 x 600mm and are equipped with the integrated overflow system now installed in all my Ecobins and Ecobeds.
Because of its rough life in the previous Ecobed (it was nearly drowned when an earlier overflow design failed). My Meyer lemon looked very sick at first, but I am delighted to say, that it has recovered and they are both growing very well in their new Ecobeds.

Growing Conditions:

Feed the Soil.

Remove mulch, dead leaves and fallen branches from the previous year in September and dispose of it in your compost heap.
Drench the soil with aerated compost extract and apply a top dressing of home made compost at a rate of 60 litres /M2.
Cover with straw mulch, but keep it clear of the tree's trunk to prevent collar rot.
Spray the foliage with aerated compost tea.
Apply a second foliar spray using aerated compost tea in November.
Maintain the soil's worm population by feeding the worm farm every 2-3 days.

Growing Instructions

Propagate lemons by taking soft wood cuttings and grafting them onto a suitable root stock.
To ensure you get good sized lemons, thin them once they get to about 10mm in diameter. Depending on cluster size, I thin them to 1-3 lemons per cluster. Choose the strongest fruit and remove the rest with sharp, disinfected secateurs.
Prune lightly in late spring to maintain the shape of the canopy and remove diseased, dead, weak or old growth. If needed, remove crossed over branches and open up the tree canopy to improve light and air penetration.

Harvesting and Storage

Meyer lemons flower and fruit all year, but the plant covers itself in blossom in spring.
You can harvest the lemons when they are a deep golden yellow with no remnant green colour in the rind.
Use clean secateurs to remove the fruit when harvesting.
Lemons will not ripen once harvested, and ripe ones will begin to dry out after a couple of weeks.
You can delay this deterioration by storing them in a zip re-sealable bag in your fridges crisper.
If you have too many to use right away, extract the juice and store it in re-sealable bags in your freezer.

Organic Pest Control.

Citrus scab is a soil borne disease and can be avoided by keeping lower branches trimmed so they do not come into contact with the soil.

After mating the female gall wasp implants her eggs in the soft tissue of a young branch. As the larvae grows it causes the tree to react by producing galls or large lumps in the branch of the tree where the larvae is feeding. These become noticable in Summer and as soon as you find them, cut them out and place them in your rubbish bin in a sealed plastic bag.

Lettuce needs protection against slugs and snails, so use self adhesive copper tape around the Ecobed to keep them out.

Aerated compost tea foliar spray toughens foliage against whitefly damage.
Control any serious infestations by spray your crop thoroughly with organic horticultural oil as early in their life cycle as possible. Spray again in a few days to ensure second generation whitefly do not survive.

Regular applications of aerated compost tea boost the natural defences of lemons by colonising the leaf surfaces with beneficial microbes. They defend the plant against airborne pests and diseases.

Similarly, proper soil preparation including regular applications of home made compost boosts the community of beneficial microbes, which defend the tree's roots against plant pathogens.

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