Among the many types of citrus plants grown indoors, the most popular is lemon. This is a small tree with shiny bright green foliage, which even without fruits will become a wonderful decoration of any room. Lemon blooms for a long time and abundantly, with fragrant white wax flowers. At this time, the plant becomes particularly decorative. No less spectacular is the lemon, hung with bright yellow fruits.
How to care for lemon at home, so that the plant is healthy and pleasing to the eye? To do this, you must follow the basic rules of agricultural technology.
All citrus are photophilous, including lemon. It develops better in conditions of bright scattered light, but it is put up with light shading. The next important factor is temperature. In summer, it should be room temperature, but for wintering, it is preferable to have a cool content of about 10 degrees.
Growing lemon at home often ends in failure precisely because of errors in winter maintenance. It is not always possible to provide the desired temperature in an apartment. In addition, in a cool room, when the plant goes into a dormant state, you need to be able to adjust watering. He must be very careful so that the roots of the lemon do not rot from waterlogging. In spring, at the beginning of the growing season, watering is increased, while starting to make fertilizers. Another serious point in the question of how to care for lemon at home is air humidity. All citruses suffer from its lack, which is reflected in their appearance. Therefore, a lemon tree will have to be sprayed regularly. For the same purpose, a pot with a plant is placed on a pallet with moistened moss or expanded clay.
Lemon is transplanted in the spring, as the entire earthen coma is braided with roots. The plants themselves signal the need for this procedure: the soil in the pot dries up very quickly, and roots begin to crawl out of the drainage hole. The transplant soil mix is nutritious and loose, with a slightly acidic or neutral reaction.
Knowing how to care for a lemon at home, it remains only to find out where to get this plant. There are several options - buy in a store, plant a seed or root the cuttings. The first way is the easiest - bring an adult specimen from the store, which will immediately bloom and bear fruit. But, of course, the second and third methods are more fascinating. It is always interesting to watch a plant that develops in its eyes from an unprepossessing sprout into an effective tree. Before planting a lemon, you need to understand the difference between the seed method and the cuttings. The stem preserves the quality of the mother plant, including varietal characteristics. Having turned into an adult tree, it will bloom and give full fruits. And from the seed a “wild” will grow, which will have to be grafted using a piece of the stem of the fruiting varietal lemon as a scion. If this is not done, the seed tree will bloom in any case and produce fruits, only the quality of these fruits will be unpredictable. But such plants are much more resistant to pathogens and easier to forgive mistakes in care.
In any case, independently growing lemon, it is necessary in the first years of life to prevent its single-stem development. To stimulate lateral branching, you need to pinch a growth point (the top of a seedling) from an early age. To stimulate flowering and fruiting, additional illumination is used with phytolamps, electric humidifiers and some other techniques. At home, in a subtropical climate, lemons grown by seed are blooming after the fifth year of life. Indoor everything depends on the care. To the question of how to care for lemon at home, it remains only to add that the main thing is love for the plant. If you carefully create conditions for it that are as close to natural as possible, the reward will be a spectacular tree with fragrant flowers and beautiful fragrant fruits.