Thank you for the contributions so far everyone!
I posted this as a general curiousity and its turning into a nice brainstorm.Kabosu is consistently reviewed as not very acidic, almost to the point of being insipid. [...]
And Hardy for a mainstream lemon is relative. A Lisbon lemon is considered hardy out west because they're comparing it to Eureka..
Good point on the relativity, that’s something to take in mind. Those darn californians and their fair weather lol
Thank you for informing me about kabosu.
Harvey lemon is able to go below 10F if grafted to Poncirus Trifoliata or Flying dragon. How cold are you looking to develop. Lemons take 9 months from small flower bud to ripe fruit. Will it have time after last frost to start flower buds and be ripe to clear first fall frost and still be in zone 8 (10F)
Good question :x
with 190 frost free days in a year for us zone 8'ers we'd be cutting it so how could I work around that
Could this also be improved for in a hybrid with fall-bearing cold hardy citrus? Maybe that ripening time is something that could be overcome by hardy citrus genetics.
Would light everbearing be a good trait in a hardy lemon for fruit set?
I googled it and saw thee 9 month estimate as well but I guess there are some lemons that mature faster
later I saw that according to FL extention lemons can ripen from "4 to 12 months depending"
https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/hs402Here is a link I found that mentions other cold-tolerant cultivars - like manfromyard said, this “hardiness” is probably relative.
It mentions Genoa, Harvey as you said and Lisbon again.
Villafranca, feminello ovale, Interdonato and rosenberger were mentioned with some praise or interesting characteristics.
https://hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/lemon.htmlThe true lemon flavor comes from the original citrus species citron. But I think a little bit of the fragrance of lemon also comes from pomelo as well. [...]
Ichang papeda has a flavor that is half similar to citron, it does not have the "orange" component. [..] Unfortunately citron has very little hardiness.
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You could of course try crossing a regular lemon with something else, but my thought was that if you began with a citron rather than a lemon, the resulting hybrid would retain a more distinctive citron/lemon flavor, since the citron ancestry has not been diluted as much
Yep, that piquant flavor alongside true sourness is what's also missing from the lemon-ish substitutes.
A direct cross between a lemon and anything else that is really lemon-like, probably is not going to be cold tolerant enough. I think at least two subsequent hybridizations will be required.
Like with citranges I’m sure I’d have duds and dud-ettes before hitting something even slightly in the ballpark. What I’m wondering is how adversely would pure citron affect hardiness in comparison to lemons? How do citrons and lemons generally compare to each other in hardiness? I’m not even sure which citron would be a good start as I know less about that species.
I thought of this but didn't mention it earlier but I wonder about rough lemons (Jambiri Citrus) as breedstock. They’re a mix of citrons and mandarins.
The descriptions on those on UCR are mostly copy/pasted which makes it hard to tell if any of them have any potential. If they ARE all as cold-sensitive as the citron parent I’d assume sensitivity runs over any mandarin’s hardier genes.