After much thought, I decided I won’t be spraying chemicals on my LZ tree. Mostly because I’m lazy when it comes to spraying but also because my Lemon Zest on Lavern Manilla and other random seedling rootstock is able to hold fruit to maturity.
Several months ago, I top worked every branch on my Florida Turpentine rootstock Lemon Zest with Sweet Tart, Pineapple Pleasure, Venus, E4, M4, E4 seedling, Pina Colada Seedling, CAC and Ice Cream. Over the past 5 years, I probably harvested only 4-5 full sized Lemon Zest from this relatively large tree.
I’m fairly confident this tree would have eventually produced more fruit as it got much larger but it is in a prime location with full sun and I want more production from it sooner rather than later.
Here’s a Lemon Zest fruit that fell off in my hand today. As soon as I see a yellow blush on the Lemon Zest, I gently palm the fruit until it is parallel to the ground and if it falls off, it will be perfectly ripe after ripening a bit more on the counter. This is one of the best techniques for harvesting many varieties of mango in SoCal.
This tree produced a cluster of 5 fruit in one bunch. Each fruit is approximately 1 lbs. I brought a ripe Lemon Zest to the fruit tasting and it only had a Brix of 22% but everyone that got a piece was saying it was the one of the best mango they’ve ever eaten.
This tree is shaded by a fence and two large trees on either side. It has grown past the fence line so hopefully the additional sunlight next Summer will help it grow larger and produce more fruit.
Simon