Hello, I've grown a calamondin from seeds a few years ago now. At first, it grew as a long, roughly linear stem. At the beginning of winter, growing tired of this linear tree, I pinched the apical meristem to get it to branch. After two tries, it did work (with the main stem somewhat top-branching to resume growth), and a second stem grew from roughly the middle of the stem. It quickly became very long and quite vertical, with little leaves at the bottom, which in the end did not improve much the appearance as a whole. More recently the growing part of the main stem died out, which resulted in plenty new branches to appear. At first I was quite happy that the plant at last would become a bit more bushy. Yet things went wrong: after a few weeks of growth, half of those branches turned blackish and withered. Even worse, the large leaves in the upper half of the main branch started falling one by one, after making some sort of yellowish spots (no hint of scales, though, I've seen those before). It reminded me of nitrogen-lacking tomatoes, yet this one shouldn't be missing minerals. Strangely enough, the plant's been keeping its very first leaves at the bottom for a long while now. I water the plant whenever my moisture meter shows that it's almost dry. The plant has direct sunlight in the morning, and being on the kitchen table, it's away from heat sources. I've been fertilising it a few times now, so I wouldn't see why it would lack minerals. All this resulted in a plant with a healthy-looking lower half, and a long-branched, leaves-impoverished upper half, which isn't quite esthetic: The whole plant - the trouble begins where there is a V in the stem. From that angle things do not look so bad, but there used to be more than twice more large leaves at the top. The bottom part - it has even started making wood. The problematic upper part - very long stems devoid of leaves. And the main stem is also quite oddly-shaped. You can also see one of those newly-formed branches that quickly lost its leaves (I still have to cut this one) The only really interesting bit at the top - this part looks healthy. A hint of what the leaves get before falling down. This one is not that bad yet - usually the leaves get 2-3x more yellowish at the margins or the main vein before falling. I'm sorry for the quality of those pictures, my new cellphone isn't quite performant on this side. I can see three ways out of this. -Leaving it as it is, hoping it improves over time (especially by branching from those barren stem portions) -Cutting purely and simply the upper half, hoping for a more bushy appearance from the lower one -Cutting the upper part, but trying to graft the good-looking top of the second largest stem on the lower half, so as to save this part (which would otherwise be a bit sad to trash). I have never done grafting before though. Since this isn't quite a fast grower, I want to make sure to pick the right option. What do you think?
