How to plant lemon at home: videos and recommendations

Wait when on seed-grown lemon ovaries will appear, for a very long time, and the fruit-bearing trees sold are capricious and difficult to acclimatize. A video telling how to plant a lemon at home is a good help for indoor plant lovers who do not like to wait and want to enjoy the fruits from their windowsill in the near future.

Benefits of grafting lemon tree

Not everyone decides on such a difficult procedure as it seems to inexperienced citrus growers, like inoculation. Indeed, one should not start such work without some experience and careful preparation of the inoculation material and tool.

But if all the rules are followed, a well-done inoculation of the estuary gives a lot of advantages:

1. It helps to bring the first harvest of homemade lemon much closer.
2. On the branches of a house tree, high-quality varietal fruits with known properties are tied and ripen, which is especially important because of the large number of hybrid plants that do not transmit their properties to descendants grown from seeds.
3. You can plant a lemon on a cultivated orange tree or other citrus plant.

Lemon grafting methods at home

How to plant a lemon so that it bears fruit? At home, there are two effective and easy-to-use methods available:

1. Lemon can be grafted by copulation using a cutting from a fruiting tree.
2. Only a single bud is grafted onto the stock. This method is called budding and is also applicable to home citrus crops.

As a scion, take a bud or stalk from a ripe one-year-old or two-year-old shoot of a fruiting lemon tree.

The grafting material is cut off immediately before the procedure, requires an extremely careful attitude and is covered with a damp cloth and film until the moment of inoculation.

The stock is healthy, strong lemon or orange trees, starting from one year of age. It is important that the stem, or branch, if a lemon is grafted onto an adult plant, should not be thinner than 5–7 mm.

Perfect rootstocks - self-grown seedlings of lemons and oranges. They are initially acclimatized to the conditions of detention, as a rule, have a developed root system and are quite hardy.

Lemon inoculation tools and timing

Before planting a lemon at home, prepare everything you need for the procedure:

• a sharp eyepiece or small scalpel;
• garden bandage or duct tape;
• garden var.

In order for the grafting to go smoothly, and a bud or twig alien to the lemon tree, take root, the procedure is carried out from April to May, when all vital processes are activated. During this time, the bark easily lags behind the wood, which makes the task easier. The second time when you can plant lemon at home is the end of summer.

All instrumentation must be clean. Before planting a lemon, the shoots in the places of future cuts are carefully wiped with a damp cloth.

How to inoculate a lemon with a bud or an "eye"?

Vaccination is considered the less traumatic and most reliable way to administer the vaccine.

Before planting a lemon at home, a fully formed bud is cut off from a branch of a fruiting tree so that about 15 mm each remain above and below the future shoot.Two longitudinal cuts at a short distance from the bud outline the boundaries of the resulting scion.

The cut is made semicircular, capturing not only the bark, but also a very thin layer of wood. This will allow the scion to settle easily and protect the kidney from possible damage. The finished shield with an “eye” remains on the knife after separation from the branch. It should not be touched with fingers, otherwise the success rate of the lemon vaccination drops sharply. You can hold the grafting material by the leaf petiole remaining under the bud. The very same sheet plate is removed.

If a young lemon tree is used as a rootstock, then at a distance of 5–7 cm from the surface of the soil, a neat “T” -shaped bark incision is made on the stem so that the prepared scion freely fits under the allotted corners of the bark. The length of the transverse notch in this case is approximately one and a half centimeters, and the longitudinal incision should be one centimeter larger.

When a piece of wood in the bud is in its place, it is covered with the previously bent edges of the bark, pressed and tightly bandaged in the direction "from bottom to top", leaving the peephole itself and the leaf stalk near it in the air.

In a similar way, you can inoculate a lemon, but not on the trunk, but on a large shoot of an adult tree of another species, for example, an orange. In this case, if the bud takes root, lemons and oranges are harvested from one plant.

For better survival, it is useful to put a small tree in a greenhouse or cover with a bag. This measure:

• increase air humidity;
• exclude sharp temperature fluctuations;
• will prevent the negative effects of drafts.

The video on how to plant a lemon at home reveals all the secrets of this interesting and not so laborious procedure as it seems. You can find out about the result of the work done in a couple of weeks. If the leaf stalk under the bud has withered and is about to fall off, everything is done correctly, and soon you can observe the growth of a new shoot. In this case, after a couple of weeks, the bandage at the place where the lemon was inoculated is weakened, and when the plant gradually gets used to the room air, it is completely removed.

A month and a half after the lemon is planted, the rootstock shoot, on which the bud is implanted, is cut off. The cut is made diagonal, slightly above the grafting site, and then this place is treated with garden varnish.

A new shoot coming from the bud completely replaced the rootstock trunk. Therefore, all the shoots formed below the grafting must be removed, and a vertical support must be made for the young trunk.

Lemon grafting with cuttings

As in the previous case, the grafting is done at a height of 5 to 10 cm from the surface of the soil, but only this time the stem of the lemon tree is not cut, but completely removed. From a horizontal even cut down the bark, an incision is made up to one and a half centimeters long.

This is the place for engraftment of the scion cuttings - the apical part of the shoot with 2-3 nodes and fully formed strong buds. The stalk is cut obliquely so that the length of the cut is equal to the length of the bark notch on the stock. Before planting a lemon, remove all the leaves from the cuttings, leaving their cuttings. Then the bark on the stock is taken away from the place of the vertical cut and the scion is put into it, tightly and evenly pressing it to the wood. The bark is returned to its place, the rootstock stump is smeared with garden varnish, and the place where the lemon is grafted is tightly bandaged.

As in the previous case, after grafting, the plant is placed in a greenhouse environment until the result of the work performed becomes obvious. All the nuances of copulating are discussed in the video on how to plant a lemon at home.

The advantage of this method of grafting a lemon can be considered a greater number of buds, which, after successful engraftment, will grow. If the citrus grower fails, the entire rootstock can be lost.

Drying cuttings right on the stem indicates failure, but if they turn yellow and fall off, you can expect quick acclimatization and growth of the scion.

Video master class on grafting lemon