The promise of fruit

Between our drought conditions and plague of white fly, the poor Lisbon lemon tree is really undergoing a lot of stress. I have been feeding the tree with organic citrus food once a month and diluted seaweed/fish extract every three weeks. We treated the tree several times, for the white fly attack, with the homemade concoction I described in earlier posts.

The concoction seemed to work, but the white fly invasion persists. Last week we wiped white fly off each affected leaf individually, except for the leaves way up on top of the tree, and that seems to help a lot.

We had not been watering the tree much, but after learning that trees are not as resilient as shrubs in drought conditions, we have started to water the tree for 5 minutes every other week or every week, depending on how dry the soil is around the tree.

Interesting enough, throughout the summer, in spite of the challenging conditions, this tree is producing a lot of frui, especially now. I'm always observing honey bees feeding on the nectar of the lemon blossoms and, in turn, pollinating them.