The UC Davis Good Life Garden blog has moved!
You should be automatically redirected in 5 seconds. If not, visit
http://goodlifegarden.ucdavis.edu/blog
and update your bookmarks.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Lemon Tree UPDATE!

Remember last week when I told you about our poor, little lemon tree? (If not, here is the link.) Well, unbeknown to me, the problem of our weak and unhealthy tree had already been solved by garden supervisor Ed Nordstrom! (That's what happens when I don't run blog entries by him first!)

Last year sometime this lemon tree was transplanted from a different location in the garden. Transplanting is always tricky, because what ends up happening usually is that a lot of the root mass gets left behind which makes it difficult for the tree to support its former self. That's what happened here.


The way you can combat this difficulty is to prune it back HARD after transplanting! That way the tree doesn't have to support the size that it once was. Makes sense, right? Well, since we didn't prune it hard right of the bat, and the tree was obviously struggling, Ed decided to make one last ditch effort to save the tree. This last February he pruned it back HARD! (See how much smaller the tree is?)


The good news is that the pruning seems to have done the job! Doesn't our eureka lemon tree look so much happier now? It's pushing out dark green leaves and I bet the little guy gives us more than one lemon this year!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The hard trim did this tree justice. It looks very healthy! My lemon tree is in the same shape right now as the sad tree. Is it too late to trim it back? When would be the right time?

Kathy