I recently bought an Improved Meyer lemon tree. It is about 2.5 to 3 feet tall and has many tiny lemons on it. My gardener put it into the ground and it was doing well for a while. Last week, the tiny lemons started to turn yellow completely and dropped. The leaves have yellow tips and curled. Right now, only the larger lemons are still green and all the small ones are yellow. I live in San Jose (San Francisco Bay Area) and the plant has full sun all day. I watered it last Friday and today. Please please please help me as I am new to this and have no green thumbs.
There is really nothing wrong with your Meyer Lemon. All citrus trees, including your Meyer Lemon, retain only the amount of fruit that the tree is capable of maturing. Citrus produce many more blooms than required. Only about 1-2 percent of the tree's flowers ever produce fruit, the rest fall from the tree without ever achieving fruit production. Of the small fruitlets that a citrus tree originally sets, about 2-3 percent remain on the tree, the others are dropped. The little fruitlets that are currently being discarded by your little tree is completely normal. The older, and larger, your Meyer Lemon gets, the more fruit it will retain. However, the ratio of retained blooms and fruit will remain the same. The yellow tipped leaves, look to be from biuret toxicity, from the fertilizer you are using, or the fertilizer the nursery was using. Look at the label on your fertilizer bag, and see if the nitrogen source is mainly from Urea. Either purchase a low biuret urea fertilizer, or a fertilizer with the Nitrate nitrogen as the main source of nitrogen. You can look up "biuret" on the Internet for more complete information on the subject. - Millet (1,327-) http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/CH142 (scroll down to Biuret )
Dear Millet, Thank you soooooooooo much for your help. I was so nervous about my new tree and feel much better now. I did not use any fertilizer so it must be the ground or potting soil. In any case, at least I now know my baby is normal. =) Thank you, Sky