Hello! first time poster so my apologies if I miss something but I’m really hoping someone with more experience can guide me. this summer I impulse bought a Meyer lemon/key lime fruit cocktail tree intended for growing in a pot. Im in Langley with a great south facing deck. It stayed in the deck until about a month ago when I brought it in. We fought spider mites and survived but I’ve started researching. I read the tree would be grafted and to prune anything below the graft site. But when I look closely I actually have two trunks in my pot. I posted on another forum asking if the smaller one was a sucker that should be pruned, and only had one response. They thought I had been sold something that wasn’t as advertised and that I actually had a pot with two separate trees in it, one for each fruit. His advice is to separate and hope for the best. They are growing super close together and I’m worried they wouldn’t survive. I was hoping for a second decision before I tried (I’m just getting blossoms too!). Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated!
It is fairly common to sell two separate trees in one pot. I know costco was doing this some years ago and I bought a couple (honey tangerine+meyer lemon and hamlin orange+ray ruby grapefruit). There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having multiple trees in one pot. I don't personally like the practice much but they can certainly grow well together and mine from costco are still thriving after 5 years together. I would definitely not try to separate them, just prune them in such a way that one does not dominate the other. Lemons and limes are quite often sold ungrafted. In this case there will be no graft mark. There is nothing wrong with this and in some cases can be advantageous, but they should have been cloned from mature wood. Hopefully they were made from mature wood as otherwise they can take many years (7-10) to mature and flower.
Thank you for your response! And this gives me great hope. I feel like the tree and I have already bonded lol! So it sounds like I’m safe to keep caring for the tree as is. I’m thrilled as I have three buds on the larger trunk (all the same branch strangely!) and the smaller trunk looks like it might be starting to form some buds. Thank you so much!
