How do I get a lemon tree like that?

Morena!

On my way to and from work every day I see this lemon tree. It is huge. It is covered in lemons. It is at least 50-70m away from me. Even my daughter was impressed, and she doesn’t impress easily.

I am yet to take a photo of it so please imagine an impressive lemon tree.

One thing that I am quite impressed with here, is that it isn’t the only lemon tree on this street that is going tremendously (although it is by far the best). So I thought I would keep a bit of a mental log of its conditions.

• East facing- currently getting a bit of midday sun. Definitely no morning sun.

• Clung to the side of a steep hill

• Completely protected from wind

• Damp spot

Hmmmm… not what you’d expect. I think this guy has gotten maybe at best an hours sun a day all Winter. I think it’s the protection from wind, to be honest.

What I am obsessed with this week

We had some enormous cabbage trees delivered to one of our jobs this week, and I had a “top of cabbage tree” fixation, which meant that the tops looked the best out of the lot, but the trunks were a bit wonky. The client has rejected these $4k cabbage trees (which are already planted and unrefundable) because they are not dead straight in the trunk, one of which has a big kink in the middle, a bit of a zig zag.

Not these ones. Source

This has led to my current fixation- would I be able to force a mature cabbage tree into a different shape? I think so.

Cabbage trees are ‘monocots’ (they have a monocotyledon), which for a basic explanation means… more basic than dicotyledon plants. Here is a stem of a monocot compared to the stem of a dicot-

Thanks, Texas higher Education Operating Board

The little purple things on the monocot stem (which are two greens and a purple on the dicot stem), the vascular bundles, are hectic on a monocot. They’re all over the show, and that’s where the growth and cell building occurs. On a dicot they are much more formal.

Leading us to a dicot tree trunk-

All you need to know, really, is that growth and new cell division occurs in the blue/green and red parts.

All of the red/green parts are the parts which cannot have interruptions or damage anywhere up the trunk, because it is a key part of the circulatory system… And the browny part, the middle rings where you see tree rings, that part will be the hardest wood.

But a monocot rarely develops this much. Monocots are really fibrous and don’t often have hard wood. They are more like a big package of straws held together by a rubber band, not a pencil like a dicot.

All this to say, in my undergraduate level of knowledge in this area… I am pretty sure that a cabbage tree trunk is made up of what is basically long fibre instead of anything particularly hard, and because of the layout of the vascular bundles, I am pretty sure that they are a lot more tolerant of me bending the bejeesus out of them.

So I am going to get a whole lot of 50x50cm posts- like, 9 maybe- and line them all up around the trunk of the tree, and get some huge straps which I can tighten mechanically, and try to force the entire trunk into straightness by tightening multiple straps the whole way up through the bend.

The client has asked for me to not do this, but I must PERSIST.

I have no reason to compare myself to anyone, because no one else is pulling this level of crap at work.

Some tasks for this weekend

I am racing around trying to get the last of my pruning done.

You can safely start some vege seeds indoors, if you have a warm spot and can back it up with a sunny spot in a few weeks!

I have been rummaging through the flower sections in the shops, to find some cute little seedlings to whack in anywhere that there is space, and putting a little bit more mulch down.

I have also been emptying out compost bins onto anywhere that there is a fruit tree, a need of a bit more soil or a vege bed.

But I am feeling pretty organised! Yay for some sunnier afternoons, eh! I hope you are too!

Have a great week, everyone!