These are my citrus plants. There are 3 lemons, a lime, an orange, and the large variegated one at the end is a kumquat.
I regularly get lemons. Everything else flowers and that’s good enough for me. If you grow citrus, you know that they flower sometime between January and March.
The fragrance is absolutely wonderful. It’s sweet without being overwhelming (in other words, unlike with my snake plants, I don’t have to leave the room because the scent is so over-powering).
I suspect I might be able to get fruit if I “played the bee” and tried to pollinate some of the lime or orange flowers, but really, life if complicated enough as it is for me to worry about that. Maybe someday.
What I can’t seem to stop is the leaf loss. I wonder, again, if I added grow lights, if that might solve the problem? But I would need to figure out a spot for those–that’s another “maybe someday” issue.
Besides, once they are down to basically just twigs, watering is easy. I need some easy plants in the winter.
Contrary to popular belief, citrus tree really prefer to be out in the garden. They tend to be sparsely foliated as houseplants. Just getting lemons is very impressive. the ‘Meyer’ lemon (although one of me least favorites) is perhaps the most reliable of citrus. It happens to be a weird hybrid between lemon and orange, which is why it has a richer flavor than other lemons. Is that variegated citrus really a kumquat or calamondin labeled as a Philippine kumquat?
According to the label, it’s a Centennial Variegated Kumquat. No botanical name. Since it hasn’t fruited, your guess about what it is is as good as mine. I would actually prefer a Calamondin.
Interestingly enough, the ladies who post at Savvy Gardening did a post Thursday on citrus as well. It pretty much said what I did except they sell stuff so they had a vibrating pollinator to self pollinate your citrus. Not sure I want to go there, as I said in my post!
Karla