How to take care and maintain Lemons?

Hi Guys! It’s good to meet you all once again. Especially the ones who are growing lemons. BTW thanks for the awesome response for the last post on how to grow lemons organically. In that I mentioned that I will be posting a post on the maintenance tips in growing them and here we are.

Let’s dig directly into it come on.

Watering:

We have seen about this already in the previous post. But I thought of reminding it again as it is very important. Not only for lemons, for almost all the fruit-bearing trees this can be applied. Water them only after the soil is complete dry.

But make sure you don’t starve it of water. This keeps the plants away from fungal diseases.

Surrounding:

These don’t do well in very cold climates. So better plant them where it receives very good sunlight.

Mulching:

While speaking about watering and water management how can we not mention about mulching. Lemons need good and steady supply of water. So much its surrounding.

For those who are new to mulching. Use some dried leaves twigs and straws to cover the soil around the plant.

This helps in water conservation as it slows down the evapouration. Along with that, mulching also helps us by making it difficult for weeds to grow. Not only that these compost and become nutrition to the plant as well. Thus saving us work and money.

Fertilizing:

The most common thing we do is, we plant the tree and water and consider that our side of work is all over. We expect the tree to give continuously provide us with fruits after only watering them. Just think about it! How can those feeble things can produce continuously despite of being starved and malnutritioned? So please take fertilizing seriously.

It is very important to give them enough nutrition at the needed time intervals. But the questions that remains are what to give them? and when to give them?

What they need?

Nitrogen:

This is the most important macro nutrient in any citrus plant’s life. Nitrogen has the greatest effect on citrus growth and appearance; it is the element used most to produce leaves, flowers and fruit.

You can give composts, Cattle dungs, Vermicompost, even dried leaves and twigs.

Phosphorus:

Phosphorus is the second most important nutrition in lemons life. Phosphorus, particularly concentrated in younger tissue, helps the citrus store and use energy and take in nutrients; it also is essential for cell division and growth. This can be provided by giving phospho-bacteria powder.

Apart from these two, magnesium, manganese, calcium, zinc, iron, potassium are some of the other important nutrients that lemons require.

What to give?

 As we saw above we can use cattle dung, chicken excretes, home made compost, vermi compost, neem/groundnut cakes, panchagavya and whatever you consider organic plant food.

When to give?

Fertilize your trees once a month. If that is too much to handle then at least fertilize them once in three months. But make sure you fertilize.

Special Drink:

• Apart from all these there is a special drink that lemon trees will love. This is very easy to prepare and provide also. It just the heavily fermented buttermilk diluted in water.
• Spray this above and around the plant.
• Lemon plants require acidic soil and will love you for giving buttermilk. This will drench its thirst for acidity. Which obviously results in better and good yield.

Pests and diseases:

• You can use Neem oil mixed with any organic soap(Khadhi) and water for all insect attacks.
• Be sure not to leave any branches or leaves touching the soil. This will result in fungal infection and will produce a disease what is known as Fungal rot. The rot will spread to the entire tree, so just be careful.
• For many of us the common issue we might face is the curling of leaves. This may happen due to a variety of reasons like irregular watering, fungal infections, leaf miners etc
• If you see the leaves having little pale green roads then this is due to the larvae of leaf miners. Just cut those branches and burn them to prevent the entire plant from infestation
• Yellowing of leaves is yet another common problem. This might be due to deficiency in iron, magnesium and nitrogen. So just make sure that the tree gets them enough.

Flowering:

Another great and common problem in growing lemon is the absence of flowers. You can solve this issue by using Themor Karaisal.

We have seen the uses and preparation of Themor Karaisal already. Its pretty simple to prepare and is cent percent efficient. You can check about it out here.

Fruit formation:

Now that we have solved the flowering problem let us move on to the fruiting issue. For some of us these trees might flower us abundantly with their sweet fragrance and beautiful blossoms but fail to give us the final product. The  lemons.

I received this question from a friend and that was the trigger for the lemon posts. We have to know the botany behind these plants befoe getting frustrated. Lemons are not self-pollinating, meaning they require some cute and hardworking bees to do this job for them.

Unfortunately we have grown a dislike to these amazing creatures and have made our lives complicated yet again. (Speak about comfort). So you have to take their job on to your hands now. You have to help them pollinate.

We have spoken about hand pollination or what I call artificial pollination in the post about custard apples. You can see it here.

Let us see the steps on how to do hand pollination:

• First you have to know the male and female parts of the flower
• When you look into a lemon flower you can find a single tall structure in the middle of it. This is female part. The long tube is known as the pistil and the knob on the top is called the stigma
• The small filaments surrounding the pistil are the male parts known as the stamens. This is the part that is going to supply us the pollens for this operation
• Take a paint brush and gently dust off the pollens from the stamen and dust them on to the stigma. Voila
• The only catch is we cannot be sure whether the pollen collected are matured ones. And there is no sure way of know it. Again it is better to encourage the survival of the bees

Pruning:

This is yet another important step for the health and productivity of the tree.

• Select the branches and twigs that have produced fruits last season and prune them after the fruiting season.
• Also select the diseases and unwanted branches and prune them off
• This encourages the tree to produce new branches thus new fruits and also to concentrate its energy on useful branches.

That is all folks! These are the common and the most important care tips in growing lemons. Do you think I have left out something? Please do let everybody know it in comments. Your comment might help someone struggling with their plants.

Do you have another great tip to add? Mention them below in the comments. Have questions? You can contact me through contact page or by clicking the WhatsApp Icon that is on the left side of the screen.

Hope this post is useful to you. If you find this interesting share it with your circle lets spread some Organic Love!

Thanks for all the love guys. And did I tell you? You are aweesomeeeeee! Without you this blog would be nothing.

Let us plant together and grow together!

This is a bilingual post. இதனை தமிழில் படிக்க இங்கே கிளிக் செய்யவும்.