Lemonade Tree is Flowering

Greg says...
signs of buds and flowers suggest you should be picking fruit in about 9mths time

karry says...
hi again after a long recess.

My lemonade is doing fantastic now. I found out the secret. What you do is when they flower and the wee fruit begin to form you water it every day the wee fruit are present till they all start to form into slightly bigger fruits. You carefully remove a couple of the excess leaving as many as you dare so you do not over crowd the branch and just water ever few days. We feed it Kickalong for fruiting trees about 6 times a year and now we have fruit all the time, and yes ALL YEAR ROUND. A friend had a flower drop problem and we suggested the same treatment and they have fruit, and yes ALL YEAR ROUND. Its not like the other types of lemons where you have to be careful not to over water. For some reason it seems to work well here in Gosnells for us. In fact all our citrus grow well here now that we have worked out what they like and do not like. We use tansy to keep the pests away and add a little yarrow leaves from time to time and grow lettuces and strawberries, spinach and borage near by and everything is happy. The only strange fellow in our garden is an olive who gets threatened every year but it provides some shade for summer veg so we leave it there.

Michael says...
I just picked my first lemonade fruit and it taste very refreshing. I read about it on this forum and bought one a year ago without much expectations. It certainly surprises me that not many people are growing this tree.

Karry says...
our citrus are doing very well now. all the citrus have come along in just two years and we have developed a system of watering every day when the flowers form and as long as the flowers are on the trees we water, then as the fruit begins to form we put a little soluable sulphate of potash once a week for about 4 weeks and YIKES fruit like we have never had. Fabulous.

We have also found now that if we put Yarrow plants around the citrus it tends to fix a lot of the yellowing we used to have on the leaves.

Of course we feed our plants with Kickalong that we get from a local nursery, not available at bunnings for some reason.

Even our previously referred to scrappy old blood orange is fruiting without any issues.

It has taken us some time to get the watering right for each tree as some like a little more each day. I find that the Lemonade reqires the most water and sulphate of potash, whilst in the flowering stage to keep the flowers on.

My krusea lime requires the least volume of water but the most sulphate of potash. The rest of the citrus require only about a half a bucket of water and the potash for 4 weeks by which time the flowers have finished and the fruit has formed.

Then again it might be our great western australian weather.

All the best for 2011.

Karry

Pauline says...
Mmmmm funny as my lemonade tree kept dropping all the fruit and afetr much experimenting I realised that I was over watering it. It does not like it every day. Now I have loads of growing fruits and some more flowers too :D