Perhaps there are few people who have not tried to grow a citrus tree at least once. Apparently, this exotic fruit has some kind of magic that persistently prompts us to do this, and now we are burying the seed in the first vessel that catches our eye. When tender greens are born, our joy cannot be described in words. However, then we learn that the first fruits will not be able to appear earlier than in 10 or even more years, and our enthusiasm evaporates without a trace. How so? After all, a young tree grows well, and its leaves are bright green, won't it bloom before? But I really want to see this miracle as soon as possible.
In fact, the seed that you just stuck into the pot and left to grow, even with regular feeding and watering, if it starts to bear fruit, then in about 10-15 years. However, if you have a burning desire to grow this culture and are willing to put in a little effort, then it is quite possible to get the first harvest after 4-5 years. Of course, in the subtropical conditions native to this plant, it is much easier to massively cultivate lemons, oranges or grapefruits from seeds. However, this is also possible in our climatic zone, you just need to know about some of the subtleties.
The technology described below is quite suitable for growing absolutely any citrus tree from the seed. The first step is to find a suitable planting material. The seeds must be fresh and large. It is best to plant them immediately after you have removed the seeds from the fruit. It is best to choose and plant several at once in order to be able to subsequently give preference to the strongest seedling.
First, the selected seeds must be soaked for 12 hours in a solution of a drug that promotes the formation of roots, such as heteroauxin, sodium humanate or root. It is better to plant them in separate pots, for such cases small plastic cups are perfect. Containers for planting must first be prepared: make a hole and fill in drainage, for example vermiculite. It is better to use the soil for planting sufficiently nutritious, but at the same time loose and light. The following composition may be good for this: take equal volumes of humus and turf and add peat there. However, at this stage of cultivation, alternative variants of earthen compositions are also possible.
Germination is good to carry out in a greenhouse, but you can do without it. When our seedlings stretch up to 7-10 centimeters in height, and this will happen no earlier than 3-6 months after planting, it will be possible to determine which of them is the most viable. It should have a well-developed crown and a large number of buds on the branches. It is good when it does not have short needles, and the leaves are strong and do not tend to fall off. Based on such signs, we choose the best tree, which we leave to grow. After that, we transplant the plant into a larger pot and add vermicompost to the ground.
Now we can start shaping our future tree. To do this, we pinch the top of the shoot to increase the growth of the branches from the sides. They will also need to start pinching when more than three leaves appear on them.Correct lighting is very important for such a plant, and in order to obtain a uniform crown, it must be illuminated evenly, which is not quite easy to do in an apartment. Therefore, it needs to be constantly, approximately once every 10 days and no more than a quarter of a turn, turn its new side to the sunlight. It will be more convenient if you draw a mark on the side wall with a marker and begin to navigate along it.
It will also be useful to recall that the growth of a citrus seedling occurs in waves - this means that during the year it will have about 5 growth periods, between which there will be a break of about 3 months. During the growth intervals, maximum attention should be paid to the formation of the bush. It is important to remember that young trees grown from stone, planted by cuttings or grafted cannot be pruned, therefore, their crown is formed only by pinching. All this is important because every leaf counts for a citrus plant. A well-shaped bush will form the basis of a fruiting orange, lemon or grapefruit tree. However, proper care and a special technique for growing such a crop is no less important, but that's another story.
