Hello fellow gardeners! I bought a sapling lemon tree at the airport in Ft. Myers about ten or so years ago. It looks marvelous now, IMO, but has never once flowered and therefore, has never produced fruit. I'm wondering if it's a non-fruiting type of lemon tree, or if it wasn't grafted at all (I only know about grafting from what I learned from googling "unfruiting lemon trees") or grafted properly. I live in Chicago, and put it outside for the summer, back inside winter, which it seems to tolerate well (minimal leaf drop) I've watered, fertilized, etc. I even tried scoring the trunk as per a gardening site suggestion. Any other ideas? Or am I just stuck with a pretty, but forever fruitless, tree? TIA
I have not heard of a non-fruiting type of lemon tree. If it was grown from seed then it can certainly take 7-10 or more years to flower and fruit the first time. However, once the citrus starts flowering and fruiting reproduction via grafting is not necessary, they will fruit readily when made from cuttings or air layers of a mature citrus for example. If it has not started fruiting yet due to not reaching maturity then I don't know of any way to induce it, and you cannot really tell if it is mature unless it has flowered before. Once it is mature then certain stresses certainly help induce flowering. One method is the scoring that you mention. Another method is to allow it to dry quite thoroughly, although that runs the risk of having it drop all its leaves. Also, allowing it to get some cool weather can induce flowering in some citrus. My guess is it was grown from seed and is not yet mature enough. My suggestion is to make sure it has lots of sunlight and nutrients, then wait until it matures sufficiently.
I'm reminded of the following thread from many years ago: Lemon tree I.D.. I hope you don't have a Volkameriana lemon. Such a tree was also purchased at an airport by the OP in the following thread (in an external forum): Update and Mystery Solved on my 'airport' lemon tree!!!. The tree was also purchased at Ft. Meyers airport: Airport lemon trees.
Thank you. Helpful reading! The Volkameriana lemons sound weird, but I guess after all this time, I'd take some weird fruit after no fruit at all!
Volkamer is a rootstock variety and is not really going to produce fruits that you'll want to eat. Whoever was selling those lemon trees at the airport may either have been uninformed or unscrupulous. If a lemon tree (or almost any other fruit tree) is not grafted onto a different rootstock, it will take many more years until it begins producing fruit. This is not something most ordinary people realize. The slight degree of incompatibility from being grafted on a different rootstock slows down growth and diverts the tree's energy towards beginning fruit production earlier on, while the tree is still smaller. Almost all fruit trees sold at a standard commercial nursery are grafted onto different rootstock. A tree grown from seed is obviously not going to be grown on different rootstock, unless it was later grafted, which it typically isn't. (If they were going to do grafting, why bother growing from seed at all?)
It sounds like Volkamer makes a decent rootstock but would produce poor quality fruit eventually... So why not try your hand at grafting? You can get budwood from the CCPP and make a citrus cocktail plant that will give you several different kinds of citrus. The fruitmentor website has some nice info on all this: Patch Budding Citrus Trees - Bud Grafting a Fruit Cocktail Tree When life gives you lemons...
Thank you! Looking at the base of the tree, it seems it may have been grafted (the bark changes color slightly), but I don't have an expert eye. What do you think? Am I just wishful thinking?
Hey, that sounds like a fun project! And, you win the Internet today with your line about life giving you lemons, ;-)
