Hang in there, little tree!

A lemon tree having a shower. (What, you think you can take a better photo of a shower?)

I'm horrified by what's been happening to my lemons, especially Hope, pictured here. The last photos were taken on their birthday, October 2, at which time Hope looked like this:


Over the winter, they started shedding leaves. Faith dropped a few; Hope, always the diva, dropped a lot. It wasn't too much water. It wasn't too little water. I googled a few times and all I could find was "stress."

Stress? How does one relieve "stress" in lemon trees?

For lack of a better solution, I started praying over them. I'm not gonna repeat the rationale behind praying for plants; it's somewhere in my archive if you're interested.

Strangely, when I started praying over my lemons daily, the leaf drop slowed considerably.

Hmmmmmm...

After a while, for some reasons, I stopped praying out loud and over the lemon trees, and prayed in my head in bed for a while.

Faith didn't care. Hope started dropping leaves again.

What in the world????

Fine. I started praying over Hope again. And the leaf drop slowed again.

This is spooky.

Notwithstanding the efficacy of prayer in horticulture, I fertilized both trees with tomato fertilizer on 8 February. Why? Because the stores here don't carry citrus fertilizer, for obvious reasons, so all I have is tomato or all-purpose. The next day, Faith put out new leaves on every branch.

Hope didn't.

By 10 February, Hope was down to nine leaves, when I finally googled something helpful. Having stumbled upon the term "twig dieback" shortly before, I googled that, and came up with "sodium poisoning". But I have limited googling time, so I didn't have time to pursue that lead at the time. Finally today, I had a chance to do more googling on the topic, and finally turned up some documents from various extension services showing the symptoms of various deficiencies and toxicities in trees. Wherein it appears that my tree probably suffers from chloride toxicity, not sodium, and possibly copper deficiency.

Fine. The remedy for this is to rinse out the soil, assuming however that the source of the chloride isn't the water. Since Hope and Faith have always had the exact same watering schedule, I don't find it likely that the water would be killing one and not the other. (Technically, they've also always had almost the same fertilizing schedule, which is the other possible source of poisoning, but I did give Hope some extras from time to time because it's always been weaker. So maybe that's the problem.)

But of course this is a 35 L planter, so rinsing out the soil won't be that easy. I lugged it to the bathroom, in which process it lost its last two leaves. Then I turned the shower on, at a nice lukewarm temperature, and left it for about half an hour. Because of the design of that planter, water does drain out the bottom, but not fast, so I think most of it just ran out the top instead of going through and out the bottom, but oh well. As long as water is getting into the soil, it's diluting the poisonous ions. Unless it's sodium, of course, which you first have to bind with gypsum or something.

Well, I hope this will do it. The one branch is still green, therefore still alive, therefore the tree is still alive, and as the French say, where there's life, there's hope. And it would be rather absurd to lose "hope" for Hope, even if it's a really lame pun.

Keep calm and carry on...