Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Growing Lemon Trees From Seed

I'm growing lemon trees! It's wicked easy so far, even from seed. I pretty much followed the instructions from this site except I tossed the seeds into a cup of water instead of keeping them in my mouth before planting. Plus I left them in the water for about two days before I planted them, so it's good to know that that's ok. But basically, this is what you do.

Fill a pot with wet potting soil.
Take a lemon (apparently organic ones have the least chance of being sterile) and take out the seeds. I strongly suggest you use the juice for something like souvlaki, but I'm definitely biased.
Do not let the seeds dry out, they don't like that.
Plant them about half an inch deep in the pot.
Keep the soil moist until the seeds sprout. You can cover the pot with plastic to help this, I just watered it when it started looking dry.
Once they sprout make sure they have ~8 hours of direct sunlight or use a grow lamp. They will enjoy up to 15 hours of light I'm told, I'll do another post about all that when I know more.

But look:
Sprouts! In less than 2 weeks, none the less. I'm going to let as many shoots come up as want to and then pull them together with the goal of having one tree with multiple trunks. I'm not going to bonsai it though, I want it to get big and give me many lemons. Further updates as events warrant.