Lemon taid.
There is your seed, within the seed. It's why these take so long to germinate. All that stuff has to deteriorate. Like the seed is saving itself for next year. You don't have to dig out the seed, rather, nick the outer seed all the way through to the inner seed so it gets water faster and it all breaks down more quickly and germinates.
That's how I understand this, while accepting I can be wrong about everything.
The last time these things grew up very quickly then died just as fast. I have no idea what their problem is. Maybe I'll buy them all a large glass cloche. Maybe I won't. These things grow in Arizona. So humidity shouldn't be a problem. But maybe it is.
Three seeds per pod. Like tick-tac-toe on the diagonal. Labeled, and put under a dome.
2 comments:
Planting seeds of any citrus does not guarantee that you will get fruit that matches the seed. I learned that from John McPhee’s delightful book “Oranges”. Commercial citrus trees are grown from grafted stock which breeds true.
What a f'k'n bummer!
My dad's uncle owned an orange orchard (Mt. Rose, Fla.) for his whole adult life. He told me they buy grafts every year to attach to hardier root stock. Boxes and boxes and boxes of grafts. I suppose to replace bad ones or to get the trees to be the right shape, I don't know why so many grafts every year.
Now, if I plant from one of those seeds that came from a graft then my tree trunks will probably be weak or perhaps the shape of the trees will be scraggly perhaps bush-like, I don't know, maybe just weird, criss-crossing branches all over the place, some going up, some going down. A bonsai artist would be freaking out removing branches growing odd ways and bending them into place with wires.
My brother had a lemon tree in his back yard in Concord Ca. It is a strange tree. Unattractive, actually. Overgrown. Thorns all over the place. Extremely irregular. More like a Dr. Seuss tree except a lot tighter.
This great uncle lost a finger in a moment of farming machine carelessness . To demonstrate that it doesn't hurt he smashed his finger straight into the tabletop, "Here, see," bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, "can't feel a thing."
"Wow. That's impressive."
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