lemon pips

[hawthorns]

has anyone tried growing lemons from their pips?

[stigoftheplot]

Not lemons, though I'm sure my dad has at some point- he cant help himself. I have got a little orange tree on my patio in a pot. That came from a pip years ago. Never flowered or anything but the foilage is pretty. My dad has a pear tree thats a few years old but doing nothing, and my fig tree is from a seed but it's still a baby so I wont know for some time whether it'll produce. I've also tried advacado a few times but it gets 6"to a foot then dies every time.

[Nicos]

Many moons ago I grew either a lemon or a clementine from seed ( can't remember now) and it grew to about 9ins, got red spidermite and scale and died.
I'm not too good with houseplants- (other than orchids)

[Llamas]

My favorite art teacher once gave me a pair of lemon trees he had grown from pips in return for braving/cleaning his cat infested studio. They were about a foot tall and looked pretty darn healthy. Sadely I had to leave them with a friend when I moved to the U.K. but since then I've been trying to grow replacements. I've currently managed to keep two alive, and with spring sprung, they're defying my usual attempts to kill them and putting out new leaves.

[Capsid]

If you want to get lemons from a pip grown tree then you may have to wait 10 years and then the fruit will be disappointing. It's better to buy a fruiting tree from a garden centre which are usually grafted on to a rootstock to maintain fruiting vigour. But that's a lot less fun!

[starloc]

The best thing, grow lemon/citrus pips, keep them going till there a couple of years old and graft/bud some wood from a fruiting age tree onto them, then you have loads of fruiting lemon/citrus trees, even better grow some japanese bitter orange or seville orange and graft onto them

[Capsid]

The best thing, grow lemon/citrus pips, keep them going till there a couple of years old and graft/bud some wood from a fruiting age tree onto them, then you have loads of fruiting lemon/citrus trees, even better grow some japanese bitter orange or seville orange and graft onto them

That sounds fun, so you graft the fruiting tree onto the pip grown tree? I thought it would be the other way round?

[starloc]

Most fruiting age trees have ootstocks a cople of years old, most times they are on japanese bitter orange (hardy orange tree in the UK) , other rootstocks are not so good in the uk, once you get the seeds growing to about 3/16 inch wide stem at the bottom, you can bud graft onto them , you can do it at much smaller sizes but its hard, most people use rootstocks about 1 to 2 years old, lemon trees can be used as a rootstock with no real problems they just dont use it comercialy

The age of the tree is remembered by the wood of the tree, so if you take a bit of fruiting age wood from a fruiting tree and graft it onto any citrus rootstock it will grow fine, giving fruit quite quickly as soon as its grown a bit.

A trick i have done is to get the seed grown tree going, then air layer the trunk of the young tree, when the roots have grown half way up the young tree, i cut the top off and plant it, i then bud onto the lower tree, after a few months of growing i bud onto what was the top half of the tree, getting 2 trees from the one seedling using one cutting from one of my older trees to make both fruiting wood parts