Pruning a Lime Tree and Feeding Citrus Organically

Yesterday I posted a video on pruning a lime tree:

I enjoy pruning fruit trees. You can see the pruning before and after in the video – it’s night and day.

With citrus I generally don’t cut too much unless the tree is really a mess. I took about 1/4 of this tree without messing up the structure.

What I do is look for crossing branches that are jamming through the middle, then take those out. I also remove any sick or dead branches. Fruit is usually produced on branches that get the sun. Getting rid of the unproductive crossing branches and the lower shoots redirects the tree’s effort to growing what you want: fruit!

As for feeding citrus organically, it’s not that easy. Citrus are actually a bit picky and the commercial guys feed them heavily with lots and lots of chemical fertilizer, as I outline in this post. Compost and compost tea work, but they take time. They also seem to like chop-and-drop, though some people warn against mulching citrus trees.

In the video, I throw down seaweed, water hyacinth and water lettuce. I got the latter two plants from the retention pond and the seaweed from the beach about two hundred feet from where I filmed the video.

If this doesn’t do it, we’ll look at supplemental feeding. The location has no compost at this point so I’m starting from zero.

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