Hey, I recently received a baby lemon tree, and I've yet to plant it. I am not a beginner to planting but certainly a newcomer to trees as well as citrus fruits. I am looking to keep this plant an indoor tree and was wondering if anyone had any tips/links to any previous forum posts that could help me grow this plant into a strong healthy one. Thanks!
There are many threads on this subject and in fact, most of the citrus care advice can be applied to your tree with no ill effects. You are going to want to watch for several main things. The first is soil type: your lemon needs very well draining nutrient rich soil. Citrus are heavy feeders and while they will still grow with little or no soil nutrients, they do much better if they have what they need to grow well. You want an orchid or citrus mix of soil probably - although I've heard tomato type mixes work well also. If you are on a limited budget, you may want to invest in the generic dry essential minerals feed, some shale gravel (if you can find the fishtank pebble sized stuff), peat moss or CHC and sterilized potting soil (make sure it's sterilized or steralize it yourself in your oven/microwave if it comes in a bag with holes in it). Saltcedar also posted a wonderful link to dry-rooting which may give you some ideas for when your plant outgrows the pot it is in and needs to be either repotted or trimmed (probably repotted). But the most important thing regardless of what you go with is that your soil cannot compact to the point where it does not drain. The second thing you want to be sure of is that your plant is getting enough light. I lost a few seedlings to the combination of too little light and fungus gnats that wouldn't go away due to badly sealed windows while learning this the hard way. From what I've read, citrus do best with full sun and temperatures between 75-90F in the daytime (actually mine are enjoying the great outdoors and heat indexes of 100+ during the day). They do not like to get much colder that 50 and are much more sensitive to changes when small - if its roots freeze it is most likely toast. If you want to browse the citrus forum, there is a closed forum that may yet be reopened (they are putting it to a vote to see which of the older forums they are wanting to reopen - take a moment to check it out and vote for your favorites/ones that sound interesting if you want!) which has older posts on this as well as a search button which is the third from the right on the top green bar. Here are some of the lemon posts - these are certainly not all of them, but they are some of the ones that I looked at on this site when I started my eureka lemons from seed about 2? months ago (has it really been 2 months? I can't remember and I lose track of time...). http://www.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/forums/showthread.php?t=63136&highlight=lemon http://www.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/forums/showthread.php?t=62583&highlight=lemon http://www.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/forums/showthread.php?t=61928&highlight=lemon
Thank you very much, I've been browsing the forums and i'm certainly learning more than I ever thought that I would. The people here and fantastic! Thanks again for the help
You're welcome! If you need any more help don't hesitate to ask the community via a thread or private messages to some of our more experienced plant growers (I don't count yet - maybe in a few more years and much more research - but if you ask me I will still try to help). If you can't find anyone you think would know and are unsucessful in getting a response via thread posting, find one of the long standing members or admins and ask them - they may be able to help you or point you in the right direction/send you to the right person to ask or the right place to find what you were looking for yourself! Also remember...your lemon is not a fish and therefore does not like its feet in water. If you have one of those silly pots with no holes in the bottom repot as soon as you can/ take the actual clear pot inside of the decorative one out of it so it gets a chance to drain without drowning, and if it has one of those teeny tiny dishes, you want to keep excess water emptied out of it.
