Six months ago we moved into our new home in Palm Coast, FL. The landscaping included a lemon tree, 6 ft. tall with a 5ft. canopy and 4 or 5 mature lemons. We picked the lemons as need and they were excellent. About 3 months ago, the tree flowered extensively. The flowers fell and were replaced by minute lemon buds...roughly 100 of them. Everything looked perfect until, for no obvious reason, the buds started falling to the ground. We now have approximately 20 left. We sprayed the tree once with Ortho Max and fed it twice with Schultz Citrus & Tropical Plant Food, following the manufacturer's instructions. The tree is in an area which gets about 4 hours of sun daily. Can anyone tell us what the problem might be and how to solve it? Thanks...Ozzie
Ozzie, your lemon tree is very normal. A mature blooming citrus tree can produce as many as 100,000 blooms depending on the age and size of the tree. Within a few weeks of bloom 80 - 90 percent of the flowers will drop from the tree. This period is call the Post bloom Drop. Of the remaining blooms that successfully produced small fruitlets only about 2-4 percentage of the fruitlets will remain on the tree to mature and develop harvestable fruit. If every bloom produced fruit the tree would be crushed under its own weight. There was an interesting research project carried out by the University of Florida's professor Lima. Lima et. al. counted 81,062 flowers on a mature navel orange tree, of which 71,913 (88.7%) abscised during the Post Bloom period. Of the small fruitlets that developed an additional 8,411 dropped from the tree in the period call June Drop and another 120 dropped during Summer Drop. Total fruit drop eventually amounted to 80,530 or 99.35 percent. Only 532 fruit was harvested, which equals 0.65 percent (< 1%). This was from a 27 year old full size tree. It is normal for only 1-2 percentage of the spring bloom to produce mature harvested fruit. The percentages will remain approximately the same as your tree ages and increases in size, but the actual number of lemons will gradually increase . Millet
Thank you so much for the information!! I will now relax and enjoy watching whatever fruit remains mature. Ozzie
