Surrey Lemons (home-grown lemon tree)

How they started
I was at university, in my College Room (N19) in Selwyn, Cambridge and pushed a lemon pip into a plant pot which I had on the desk. I was surprised that it grew pretty quickly - in about a week or so the first shoot had appeared. The plant itself was attractive, with shiny green leaves that smelt of lemon when rubbed. Well, that was some years ago! That original plant has gone to the compost heap in the sky but the thought stuck and when I moved to Surrey I started again, and gave the plant more care.

In about 2000 I planted several pips from various citrus fruits: lemons, tangerines and clementines. Of these, the lemons grew the fastest. I haven't devoted much space to them on this website as they're readily available in plant centres anyway so not terribly exotic. My long term aim has always been to get a real lemon from my pip-grown trees, which would be a bit of an achievement as the plants which you can buy are specially grafted onto species rootstock so that they produce fruit: growing from pips is guaranteed to produce a plant but fruit is much harder. I've read various reports which say that pip-trees have to be between 10 and 20 years old before they will fruit.

Nick's cultivation method
Well, my lemon trees have been very vigorous and massive pruning is required each winter in order to get them indoors. In fact, for the past few years I've simply left them out until the frost gets them, and then cut off the frosted parts before bringing them in. In this way they spend about three quarters of the year outside, being brought in in January and being shoved back out at the end of March. I have one which has never been indoors. I keep it very close to the house during winter, tucked into a corner, and it seems to survive. It is a clementine, not a lemon.
For feeding I use a mixture of things: proprietary citrus fertilizer, bog standard all purpose fertilizer, and used coffee grinds. I always use rainwater, but don't know if it really matters now that the plants are so big (the biggest are six feet tall).

Flowers
So, at last one of the trees this year decided to flower. I don't know if I will get any fruit, but here's the story so far:

I first noticed these buds in June (5th). Completely unexpected! The lemon tree is 8 years old and has been repotted twice. Its now in a big rectangular pot. The buds were quite small. 20080605

A few days later ... 20080610

... and a few more. One bud took off ahead of the others. 20080620

On June 24 (one of the few warm days we've had this summer) the first bud opened by 10 in the morning. The smell was as exquisite as all the text books say it should be! I attempted to pollinate using a flower cutting from a friend's mini-orange citrus plant, at about 15:00. 20080624

Another poor summer
That was it for a while. All three flowers opened and then fell off (the hand-pollination obviously didn't work). The weather was not terribly good in the following period. July saw a lot of rain and cool conditions, and although not as wet as 2007 it was definitely "out of the same mould". There were a scattering of warm days but nothing above 25C. (Remember the hot days of 2003, with several above 30C!) August began with more cool cloudy days, and by the second week of the month had already seen about as much rain as normally falls in the whole month. Nevertheless, a forth flower appeared...

I managed to grab this shot on a Saturday in between the rain - notice the water on the leaves. A terrible day: wet, windy and cold. With the camera set to ISO400 (film equivalent) this shot attempts to show the August flower as it goes over, and what might be a fruit setting. This flower was larger than the first ones were. 20080809

August - or was it October?
August has been dismal. Day after day turned into week after week of boring, breezy cool days, with heavy cloud - worse by far than 2007. Some days reached 20C; wow! some only managed 14C, but most were in between. As the end of the month approached (27th, BBC news) the sunshine totals were of record breaking amounts, but in the wrong direction! The evenings drawing in, coupled with the endless cloud, made it feel like mid-Autumn. The poor little `lemon' (it has not fallen off, so far) has hardly grown. The date palms have hardly grown. Its not the sort of weather for exotic plants. In spite of this, a fifth flower has appeared. I tried to find a nice day to take the pictures - it wasn't easy.

On a rare sunny morning, the wee lemon enjoys a snatch of proper summer. 20080823
Flower number 5! 20080823

The demise of the lemon
Summer 2008 merged into autumn fairly seamlessly - a continuation of dull wet weather but colder. The final flower fell off as the weather became too inclement. There were no further flowers in 2008. The tiny lemon persisted and after I brought the tree indoors it even began to grow: see pictures below.
The lemon was brought to an untimely end by a caterpillar which nibbled into the base where the stalk joins on. This happened overnight, with no hope of saving it. Caterpillars find citrus tasty, unfortunately! Perhaps 2009 will bring more flowers.

Looks like a real lemon now. 20081204
Caterpillars can be a problem on citrus. The nibbled fruit was carefully removed and photographed for posterity. Here, it is about 1.5cm long. 20081216

Update: Winter 2008/9
Winter started off fairly normal but January and early February were colder than they have been in recent years -- too cold for citrus. The ones I could not accommodate indoors were severely damaged by over a week of sub-zero temperatures (down to minus 8 at night and barely above freezing during the day) in spite of three layers of fleece. To top it all off a week or so later, February saw the heaviest snowfall in Surrey for 18 years. As yet (February 20) I can't tell if the plants have survived - the roots may have been killed which will take time to show.

Nearly 1 foot of snow fell overnight - exceptional for Surrey. 20090202

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