In visiting my parents in Mexico I have become introduced to a number of things that I never really thought about before. Even though I spent a lot of my time living in rural environments in Thailand primarily, I never really cultivated anything, I just bought stuff at the market like a good little consumer and then had a nice yard that I mowed. I never really grew anything.
I had noticed through the years that even though a lot of fruits were expensive, especially out of season, limes were always dirt cheap. I mean they were so cheap that they were nearly free and no matter what time of year it was this never changed.
I had my first encounter with a lime/lemon tree (I don't know the difference) over the past couple of days and well, now I understand why this fruit is always so cheap, at least in countries that don't have brutal winters anyway.
This is the one and only lemon (i'm just gonna call it that from now on even though it produces both green and yellow fruitas) tree that my parents have in their yard. I don't know if they planted it or inherited it from the previous owner of the land but here it is. You can tell by the lack of pruning that they don't take this tree very seriously.
Just look at how many lemons there are on that thing! There were so many of them that when me and my Dad got up there to pick some fruit to ease the strain on the branches, that we quickly filled up a 5 gallon bucket and were not even close to finishing the job.
We gave up because there was no reason to pull any more off.
I don't know what I was expecting when I thought about lemon trees, but it wasn't this. I expected there to be some fruit, but not an amount in the hundreds where it looks like the branches could break at any moment.
To nail the point home, this tree receives zero special treatment. It gets no pesticides or special fertilizer and mostly the lemons that fall to the ground are just thrown on a composting pile with the rest of the yard waste.
We pulled down this 5 gallon bucket and barely made a dent in the amount of fruit that was on the tree. We made a ton of lemon concentrate and then froze it. Then we started looking at what we were putting in the freezer and realized that there was very little chance that we were ever going to use all of that so instead we put the lemons in bags and went around and offered it to the neighbors. You could kind of see on their faces that they didn't really want it and I wouldn't be surprised if those just ended up in the trash. There isn't really a whole lot of use for lemons aside from using a very tiny amount of it to accentuate something else, right?
In the end we left a few of them for my brother who was going to come by later and I don't think he really wants them either. He'll likely take them just like the neighbors did and then probably throw them out later.
All of my life I just kind of presumed that lemons were some sort of difficult-to-find novelty but that was because I grew up in a place that had harsh winters that would almost certainly kill a lemon tree (I don't really know how that works). As it turns out even a neglected lemon tree can grow an astronomical amount of fruit so I can only imagine what a professional farm's trees look like.
I also discovered that lemons are surprisingly resilient compared to other fruits. It's either that or the insects are simply not interested in them at all. The other fruits they have in their yard get attacked by birds and insects but the lemons are mostly left undisturbed, even on the ground. It must be the acidity or something.
SO I guess if you have space in your yard and are not really all the green-thumb oriented I would suggest planting a lemon tree. They appear to be basically impossible to kill and even without paying any attention to it you are going to get a metric ton of lemons annually.