Dwarf Meyer Lemon Buds Blooming but.........

[landm42006]

Hello and happy new year. I have a dwarf meyer lemon tree that's about 2 years old and it's about 16 inches high from the pot. I brought it in for the winter and it's very healthy. It defoliated around Christmas and it's full of lovely scented blooms right now. My dilemma and question is, the blooms are barely and I mean barely attached to the limbs. In fact, if I even slightly touch one of the blooms they come right off of the limbs. How on earth are the lemons going to stay on the limbs when they become heavy? Are these bad flowers? Is my tree not as healthy as I thought it was? Also, since my tree isn't outside and bee's can't pollinate for me, I have been trying to do it myself with a paintbrush. Is this something I even need to be doing? Please help me. I love it when I can eat something I've grown and I've been waiting so long for a lemon and I hope I don't have to wait another year. Thank you for your help.

[Green Mantis]

Actually the flowers are probably ready to fall off to start forming lemons.

You can use a Q-tip to try fertilizing the flowers. Would be smaller

and easier to get into the middle of the flowers. My Meyer Lemon is

just getting flowers now too, it put out a lot of new growth before the

flowers started coming. It's very exciting isn't it.

[landm42006]

Hello and thank you for responding to my question, but unfortunately, no lemons. My tree is still nice and green, but every single bud dropped off and not one single lemon developed. At first I thought I may have overwatered, but that wasn't the case. I guess this just wasn't the year for my tree. I even took it into my favorite garden guy at the nursery and he was dumbfounded. But thank you anyway, good luck with your lemon tree.

[landm42006]

I forgot to say that I did take a small paintbrush to each flower to exchange the pollen, but still no lemons. Oh well, maybe next year. Have a beautiful day, or night.

[Green Mantis]

Well it's been awhile, but my Meyer lemon tree bloomed, and when I transplanted it, none of the first blooms fell off.

I wiggled my finger in the flowers every so often in case that helped with getting fruit?
The flowers started to slowly fall apart, and be darned there are baby lemons on there. There are 4 on one set of flowers and two on another.

Plus there are awhole bunch of flowers left to grow more. This is getting exciting.
I have never seen baby lemons grow before.

I transplanted my calamonian dwarf orange tree the other day, and noticed flower buds coming on that as well.
Went through the transplant and the buds didn't drop. I keep them watered a bit more now.

But they are in an area where they can get lots of light from the north windows, the south windows shine through the whole area. But it's indirect on them.

I really don't give them that much attention, and they seem to "love" the abuse, lol

I can see I will be having to prop up the branches though. 4 lemons is a lot to hold up. They are about 3/4 of an inch long now.

So glad I bought these plants, have had and am having so much fun with them.

I collected seeds from the orange tree and now have 22 baby calamonian orange plants growing.

Can't wait to eventually see how many Meyer Lemon's I can eventually grow.