My Lemon Tree

In September 2023, I posted this photo of my beautiful lemon tree. It was laden with fruit, and I gave a lot away and used them every day. It was so large and prolific though that I couldn’t harvest a lot of the lemons — they were too high up for me to get to, and branches full of fruit hung over the back fence onto the laneway at the rear of my house.  You can see a bit of the fence in the pic — it’s taller than me. So lemons dropped onto the ground, which made me sad. I hate waste.

Then in 2024 it became infested with gall-wasps, which leave oval swellings on the branches and suck the goodness out of the tree. Those swellings are full of eggs. They can be controlled by slicing a layer off each swelling with a potato peeler or sharp knife, which leaves the eggs exposed and they don’t hatch.

My trouble was the tree was too big for me to do that. I could get to the lower branches, but that wouldn’t stop the rest of the infestation.The tree was twice my height and branches hung over the back fence.

So I told my mower/gardener man (who is also a friend) about the gall-wasp problem and asked him to prune the tree back so I could get to the gall-wasp galls.

Then I blithely headed off to the gym, leaving him to it.

I forgot what happened when you invited a man to make free with his chain-saw.

This.

Of course I was devastated when I saw what he’d done. I was sure my poor lemon tree would never survive such a brutal attack. I said to my friend, “What part of “prune” dod you not understand?” LOL. He looked very guilty, and said he kept finding galls and so kept cutting. Apparently he hadn’t been listening when I told him my plan to attack the galls with my trusty potato peeler.

That was last October.

I’ve been checking it almost daily, and  the other day I took this photo.

My lemon tree is flourishing again. I was SO relieved.

I probably won’t  get any lemons this year, but I’m sure it’ll start fruiting the following year.

By the way, when my friend came to mow again a month or so after the chainsaw massacre, the first thing he did was hurry around the back to see whether the tree had survived.  He was very relieved to see a few new branches and leaves. <g>

But my fig tree will need pruning later on this year, and if I get him to do it, you can bet I’ll be there supervising. <g>