Another Lemon Tree Update!

Our struggling lemon tree is producing up a storm!  Last April we let you know we pruned our Meyer lemon tree back HARD in order for it to adjust from its recent relocation/transplant.  See the blog post:  Lemon Tree UPDATE! for a quick review and some disheartening 'before' photos. 

The little guy must be happy now...just look at all the lemons we have to look forward to come winter!  Patience is truly a virtue when it comes to creating happy environments for your edibles.  If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!

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!

Struggling Lemon Tree

Sometimes it takes time for fruit trees to establish themselves. I know that most of our fruit trees look much healthier and happier this spring than last spring. The ground that they were planted in had been severely compacted for the construction of the surrounding Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science. It would be struggle for anything to establish itself in that type of of soil despite our best attempts to amend and break up the earth. Not to mention we had some really cold days and nights this winter which didn't help the cause.


Our Eureka Lemon tree continues to fight a good fight and actually produced a lemon this season! (Looks kinda funny, right?) Garden Supervisor Ed Nordstrom let me know that they would be amending the soil with iron to help this tree along and explained that that deficiency, among other things, is one of the causes of this tree's yellow leaves.