'Improved Meyer' Lemon Tree (YEAR 2) - Pruning Tips by IV Organic 3-in-1 Plant Guard

My name's Charles Malki, biologist and plant expert with Ivory Organics, where we grow cool plants. And today we're going to be talking about pruning your Meyer lemon tree. And I've got one here behind me, and as you can see it's still loaded with fruit. Most of it's going to come off today as we prune the tree and lighten the load, and allow the plant's energy and resources to go towards the blossoms and the next year's round of fruit. It's important to prune your plants, even though when it comes to citrus, most research will say that citrus need very little to no pruning at all. However, I'm of the belief that you should be pruning nearly all your plants by at least 5%, 10%, 20%, and some plants such as the apricot and the fig benefit tremendously by being pruned anywhere from 30 to 50% per year. So with our lemon tree, what we're going to be doing, and the reason I'm doing a specific video on the Meyer lemon is that the Meyer lemon is a very compact growing plant. This is a 2-year-old standard Meyer lemon tree, and the Meyer lemon tree was introduced by Frank Meyer in 1908. So this is a variety that has been propagated by cuttings or by grafting and cloning, which is making genetically identical plants since 1908. In between that time, there's been about a decade or a few decades where the Meyer lemon tree went out of commercial production due to a virus that was affecting these plants and made them obsolete from commercial growth and distribution. And so you'll be looking for what's called an improved Meyer lemon tree variety, which is now a virus-free strain of the Meyer lemon, and these have proven to be a lot more vigorous and healthy, longer-lasting trees. So what I also want to make a point while I've got you here is if I pick one of these lemons, a lot of you have asked the question, if we take the seeds out of it, when I cut through it, I'm going to cut it to one side to not harm the seeds that are predominantly in the middle. And you'll see here that there's these seeds. And a lot of you have asked, and I see so many videos out there where people are taking these lemon seeds and planting them and growing more lemon trees. When these actually grow, you will not be growing Meyer lemons, the reason being is just like the children of people, the children are not genetically identical to the parent plant. There are some exceptions in the plant world, such as with mangoes, and not all mangoes, but some mangoes, the seeds are true to the parent, meaning you can plant the seed of the mango and it will grow to be a genetically identical tree to the parent plant, but when it comes to lemons, the seeds are again like children, I don't want to say completely different, they could be related, they may have the characteristics of the Meyer, but there's a possibility that it also crossed with a grapefruit, which I've got behind me, an orange, a lemon of the Eureka variety or the Lisbon variety, and thereby changing the flavor and the quality and the yields and the size and all these other variations that may happen as do children, not all kids are of the same height as the parent, not all kids are of the same color, so you understand my point. So when you plant a seed from a Meyer lemon, you're not creating another Meyer lemon variety, you can name it your own family name and attach that to it just as Frank Meyer did with the Meyer lemon. Just wanted to make that point clear because I've got a lot of questions at that point. But we're going to take a look next and I'm going to show you some of the materials that I've got here. For pruning the plant, I've got these products. First I've got my Ivory Organics can over here, it is also now available as a spray bottle and it's not even available on our website yet, but our first retailer that picked this up is Harmony Farms in Northern California, so you can find that there immediately, hoping within the upcoming weeks you'll find it through all of our other retailers including Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Sears, Amazon and so forth and Arbico Organics being another. So take a look at that. We also have, let me actually show you this product while we're actually here. So this here is the spray bottle, it actually comes ready to go. So Ivory Organics 3-in-1 Plant Guard, just spray on your trunk, branches and leaves, protection against damaging sunburn and insects and rodents, ideal for newly installed plants and trees for uses on your roses, fruit, nut trees, ornamental trees and shrubs and it's a non-toxic, environmentally safe and organic product. We're going to use some of this, I'm also going to show you how we're going to use this later. Our color white is now registered material for use in organic agriculture as well and we're very proud about that as well. So the things that we've got here, I've got a couple of paint brushes and we're going to explain the importance of painting your plants, I've got my paint product, I've got my spray product, I've got some rubbing alcohol, I've got a pair of scissors and some twine, I've got my hand pruners and then this empty bowl that we're going to fill up with some fruit hopefully before the end of this video. So the first thing I want to show is the structure of the lemon tree. So if you want to come a little closer, let me show off these lemons one more time before we end up harvesting these, but you'll notice all these lemons that are hanging in between. Once upon a time, these branches were more upright. I've never allowed my branches to hang down but this is from the weight, it's actually pulled the branches down. If you follow the Meyer lemon tree trunk down, you can actually still see where it was once grafted even though it's covered with the Ivory Organics 3-in-1 Tree Guard paint, you can actually see that the graft line is right there. This here is the rootstock which controls the size of the tree, this is what makes it a standard tree instead of a dwarf or a semi-dwarf, so this controls the vigor of the tree as well as offers disease resistance, drought resistance and so forth, whatever the qualities are of the rootstock and that's actually supplying the vigor to the grafted scion which is the flavor of the lemon. You can actually put anything on top of this rootstock, it could be a Eureka Lemon, a Meyer Lemon, a Lisbon Lemon, an Orange Tree, a Grapefruit Tree, you can put anything on top of it. So I just want to make that point that this is the rootstock, it's not creating the flavor, it's the grafted part and this again is a genetically identical, improved Meyer Lemon to every Meyer Lemon tree that you'll find in the world. They're all exactly genetically the same unlike the seeds that are otherwise inside of here. What we're going to do next is take a look at the structure that's in here. If you take a look, these branches are all falling down so the first thing I'm going to do is harvest these fruit. If the branches are coming down, I'm just going to prune them out. So let me try to stay where you are, I'm going to come through and remove this lemon first. Take a look at this branch over here, right here. You see how this is coming down right there? I'm just going to prune it like so. I'm coming in as close as I can to the tree trunk and cutting it and that will come out. And then here's now another branch over here pointing down right there. We're going to take that out. Notice all the branches I'm pruning are either, all the ones that are pointing down I'm removing, the ones that I'm leaving are either pointing up or to the side. And the reason behind this is all of these branches that are underneath the canopy of the tree, they all individually, consider them to be like individual plants, they too need light. And the more light that are on the leaves, the more flowers they can support and the more fruit we'll ultimately have. I'm now making the big decision to remove this entire branch right here. You see that right here? So this branch that's right in here in the center of the canopy is coming out because all of these branches are stuck in the canopy of the tree. They're never going to get sufficient light and so all of this is coming out. Even though, I want to make this point real quick, we've just lost some flowers. We're doing this at the first week of February and I'm here in Los Angeles, California, where our last chance of frost is just past last week. The last week of January is your last chance of frost. So this is a wonderful time to actually prune your plants. Even if you lose a few flowers, you might even lose a few of your baby fruit, you're going to gain so much more because you're going to watch this in just the next few weeks, this entire plant is going to bloom. It'll have more flowers and leaves and it'll produce the largest crop of fruit, which is predominantly from November through about February, March. So to have that big, huge bumper crop of lemons in the winter, you're going to need to do what I'm doing right now as early as you can, typically towards the end of January and early February. By March, this thing is going to be covered in flowers. So if there's a few right now, don't be too concerned about what I'm about to do. Let's keep on going. So now I'm coming back into the tree. I'm noticing also this is part of our patio area. So all of the branches, I've been pruning them out from growing out into the patio area. So this is another branch I'm going to take out and I want to encourage the growth to stay as much as I can within this contained area. I'm now looking back into the tree to see if there's any other branches that are getting tangled into the shade of the tree. So I'm going to remove this branch as well. This here is another weak structure I'm going to get out as well. And you can see that I'm just taking small branches at a time. Once I see the design, I might take a larger branch out, but I'm cutting it back slowly. And as you can see, the whole structure of the plant is getting bigger. It's a lot bigger this year than it was last year. So most of these lemons, again, let me draw the point. Most of these lemons you'll see is in the lower canopy of the tree. The reason that's the case is because this tree was only this small. It was just a few feet off the ground. Since we've, you know, between last year and this year, it has grown these additional few feet. And again, this is due to the vigor of being on a standard rootstock. So we've got all of these additional feet of growth. The goal is all of these are going to be covered in blossoms, which will ultimately turn into fruit. You're going to notice that there's going to be another layer of fruit. The fruit are going to come a little higher off the ground than what we've experienced this year because a lot of this lower canopy is now going to be in the shade, which was once last year, the sunny part of the tree. So we're just going to keep pulling the plant up. If your goal is to create a smaller, more compact tree, I'd be doing just the opposite. I would be cutting more off the top and trying to bring the plant down. For example, if we take a look at this branch over here, you can see that it's growing up. I could, and I'm not going to do this, but I can remove that branch down to this point and I would be encouraging these lower side branches to continue to grow and to keep the plant more compact and lower to the ground. And that's something we will be doing as this plant continues to grow. If this plant tries to get over 8 to 10 feet, then we're going to be pruning the height down so we can keep the plant within our manageable arm's length reach so we can get to all the fruit without having to use a picker. Let's continue pruning a couple more. Let me give you one more example and then I'm going to wrap this up. If you take a look in here, you'll notice that there's two branches coming out of the same zone and typically I would keep one or the other, but in this situation, I'm going to remove both of them. So I'm just going to come through like so, hopefully you can see this, and I'm trying to come as close as I can to the bark and we're just going to prune it like so. You may have noticed one other thing. I brought with me this alcohol and you may have noticed that some people that go to prune their plants will typically take a little bit of rubbing alcohol, put it on your wash cloth and wipe the ends off. This is a good practice, especially when pruning between trees and it's ever more important if you know that your plant has a disease. If you know there's a disease between the plants, pruning that diseased plant and then going off to the next plant will actually increase the risk of those diseases being transmitted among all of your citrus. So it's a practice worth considering. It's not typically my practice, but again, if it's something I know is a diseased plant, I would absolutely be doing this practice. Anyways, I'm going to wrap this up and I'm going to show you the finished results. Check this out. So I'm here on the opposite side of the same tree and I love how my plant is growing over the fence and it's such a wonderful show for people entering, coming and entering the garden to see all of these lemons. So I'm leaving these branches over here, which I pruned just a couple of weeks ago to hopefully create a new flush of growth and it will be happening with more flowers and it'll create next year's fruit. I want to continue that pattern, but I want to share with you a couple of points. First one being, and again, the Meyer lemon and we're going to see another variety of lemon, being the Eureka lemon is going to be the next example we're going to do here. But for the Meyer lemon, the leaves are so compact, there's so many branches coming out of such a small area of space. What I'm going to do again is I got to treat each branch as if they're individual plants, all seeking its own amount of sunlight. And so it can support its own fruit, flowers and just be completely healthy. In addition, another important purpose is you want the air to flow through the plant. If there's too many leaves compacting one another, this is actually an ideal situation for rot and mildew and disease and pests and all these other things to hide in it. But if we can open it up and air it out, it'll actually be a much healthier and happier plant. So we're going to go in here and actually start thinning some of these branches out. And you can see in here, for example, there's one branch, two branches, three branches. I can actually remove all of them like so. And then we're going to continue. This branch over here is pointing down. I'm going to remove that. And this branch, I want to keep it because, again, the goal is to create as many more flowers and branches over the fence. So I'm just going to put in that like so. And then I've got this branch. And if you take a look closely, you may be able to see some of the growth that's already starting to come out in between these leaves. Hopefully you can see in those nodes some growth. This will actually produce the next generation of leaves and flowers and fruit. So we're going to leave that there like so. This one here is, again, pointing down. So I'm going to find the highest point and prune that out like so. All of these extra lemons. The great part about harvesting all these lemons is instead of a plant putting all of its resources, and we're talking about whatever nutrients that are in the soil, plus all the energy that the plant is putting into what would otherwise go into the growth and the flowers and the fruit for next year, it's wasting it on all of these fruit. We're going to use what we can as a family, whatever is extra. We're going to freeze, first squeeze, put them into ice cube trays, and save those. And another helpful tip I heard from one of you is to also zest the lemons. And you can actually freeze the zest and use that in your cooking and salads as well. So another important consideration, and thanks for that. And let's continue harvesting these. I can prune that like so right here. So what I'm doing, again, with this group of lemons, I could prune it down here and take a look. The goal is I'm leaving these leaves, which will then make, you know, the new growth will come off of that. I'm doing the same thing over here. And this is going to be just fine. Let me get this branch through the fence. There we go. This is looking good so far. One last thing I want to share with you on this side are these two branches over here. And take a look. And again, the importance is we want every branch to get its own amount of light. Take a look at these two branches, how they're running parallel, crisscrossing. And then this branch is running down over here and then supporting all of these fruit. So again, the fruit is twisting and changing the shape of the plant. But this branch over here is coming out. I'm going to leave the space between these two branches. I could keep part of this branch and then this stem that's pointing up. I'm hoping you can capture that. I can keep this part going up by pruning it here. And I'll actually start by doing that so you can see the difference. So if I did that, now we've got all of these extra lemons, which we'll set down over here. But these two branches are still too close to one another. And it's not an ideal situation. Imagine in the next one, two, three, four, five years, these two branches are going to grow so large next to one another, they're ultimately going to end up grafting into one another. You're going to become one super branch. It sounds great, but it's not an ideal situation. Instead, what we're going to do is prune that out like so. And you can see how nice and clean we got to it. So as the tree continues to expand, that's going to heal right over that prune that we just did. Let me finish up the last details and I'll show you the final results. Check in just a minute. We've got one last prune I want to share with you. If you can zoom in a little closer over here, you'll notice that this branch over here, and even the person that's recording said, get this branch out of the way. As you can see, it's a little bit different than what's happening so far within the tree. But we're going to back up in a second. You're going to see what I've done. But take a look here. I'm going to remove this leaf so you can see what's happening. You can see that this branch is way too close to this branch. You can see they're like kind of crisscrossing. And the way that it's growing, I don't know if you can see the way that it's coming out of the tree, and then it zigzags right into it. And again, it doesn't have a nice flow. When it comes to pruning your trees in your garden, you're the artist and you got to make the decisions and watch how your plant reacts and do what's in the best interest of the tree. But I know that this branch is not an ideal branch for supporting fruit and flowers and having a long, healthy life within this tree. So I'm actually going to prune this out as well. I'm going to carefully cut this as close as I can to the tree trunk again. Hopefully you can come in a little closer so you can see this. And that's coming out. And then there we go, a nice smooth flow between that. And let's back up now and see what we've just accomplished. Check this out. So we've just harvested all of the lemons off the Meyer lemon tree. These are all the lemons I was able to get off from behind. Take a look at all of these branches that we've got and lemons that are on the ground here. And as we said at the beginning, some research says citrus need very little to no pruning. I'm of the belief that 10 or 20% a year is great. This may be a little bit more than 20% or I might be right at it. But the goal is take a look at the structure now and see what I've done. Fortunately, I still have a few little lemons in here. The flowers, I don't... Actually, there are some blossoms in here. Check this out over here. So you can see we still got some blossoms as well. We've got some flowers up in this area over here and some more. And like I said, within the next few weeks, this entire plant will be covered in blossoms. And I'm actually doing a special video on that where we're going to be discussing feeding your plants. As in the winter, I don't recommend fertilizing your plants at all, especially your citrus. One thing you can do is a citrus nutritional spray. I'll put the links to those that we did in the winter. But take a look at the structure. Let's back up. And the points I want to make out to you is you'll notice that the branches are now more vertical and horizontal, but none of them are pointing downwards. We're not growing this as a weeping lemon tree. Even though that's a possibility, you can see that the whole structure of the plant is a lot more vigorous. The plant's going to have a lot more energy now. Imagine that root is now supporting a lot less tree. So it's going to put that much more energy towards more growth, more leaves, more flowers, more fruit. And we're just going to have a much healthier plant as a result of what we just accomplished. The next step here is we've got to now protect the plant from sunburn. Citrus are especially prone to sunburn. And I'm going to share an example with you in a video that we did earlier where it talks about third degree burns to an orange tree after just a few months after being pruned. This individual pruned a branch allowing too much sunlight into the lower canopy of the tree. And check out what happens to the bark. Check this out. And let me show you why. Take a look underneath what happened here. And right here was the branch that was pruned. And you can see how large it was. It was at least 20, possibly 30 years old right here. And this went up and out in the direction of the swimming pool. And that was probably the reason it was pruned. And then take a look at what happened underneath. Look at the bark, how it's peeling. All of this is dead, dead skin. If this was your body, this would be your skin coming off. And it goes all the way down, all the way down. All of that damage. Take a look at those cracks. These are third degree burns on a plant. And I don't know if anyone has ever described this as third degree burns, but this is a third degree plant burn. The epidermis, the dermis, and it's damaged all the way to where the wood is. So this is now a perfect entryway for termites and wood-boring beetles to get into the tree and start hollowing out the center of the plant. The other thing I want to point out here is the sun, and it'll be out here in about the next hour, is shining on this side of the plant. If you were to go around back, I don't know if you can work your way around with the camera, you'll notice that this entire backside of the plant is not damaged. And this is the side that's actually now bringing the sugars and the juices and all the life-giving support is coming from the backside. The shaded part of the plant. What we're going to do here today is actually coat and protect this part of the plant. And actually, for cosmetic, we'll actually even paint the backside as well, so it all looks uniform. But we're going to cover this with a product called Ivory Organics. The dissolved. I want to show you one other orange tree that's to my left here. So here we are under another orange tree. And this here is a very successful orange tree as indicated by it's got an amazing canopy. It's loaded with fruit and a lot of young fruit as well. And there's probably several hundred fruit up above my head. And what impresses me so much about this plant is you can actually see the tree trunk here is actually in excellent condition. And again, that's only because it's in the shade. You want to make sure you grow your trees where they are actually shading and protecting the branches in the tree trunk. And you'll notice over here on this branch that I'm touching, that there's actually damage over here. Even though we're in the shade of the tree, there was a time once upon a time that there was. And you can see there's like a little bit of light here in this part right now. But there must have been a hole in the canopy that allowed too much light to hit this branch. And the branch actually cracked. So if you're in your garden, take a look at these signs. And before it gets this severe, this will actually take probably a decade to heal. So if you actually caught these issues, and if you take a look a little lower, I'll find another thing that's less severe. You'll actually see over here, there's like some cracking in the bark. Over here, it looks like there's a wound with some sap that's coming out of it. But this is a wound that later on, we're actually gonna open it up to remove all the deadwood. And you can see it's already starting to callus right around there. And so rather than keeping this deadwood, which would be again, food for the termites and the beetles and wood destroying organisms that might start here. And they'll work their way into this wood and then work their way into the heart of the tree. We're gonna remove that. And then we're just gonna brush some ivory organics over this wound as well. So that we basically repel any insects from getting into the heart of the tree. To prevent burns like that from happening to your plants. And I know there's also an avocado farmer in Miami that's using our ivory organics as well to protect his avocados when he prunes them in the summer. So he doesn't even do his pruning in the winter. He prunes his avocados in the summer. What he does is he then protects them with a sunblock. And he's been using historically more paint product based products. This here is again, an organic formula, time released with seven natural oils that protect the plant from also insects. So with all of these exposed surfaces, if you come in a little closer, I wanna share with you the importance. You can see, for example, this here is one prune branch over here. Let me share another. If you can come into the canopy, you can see that this here is another prune branch. And what we're gonna do is just take the ivory organic spray. And by simply spraying the plant like so, we're creating a block and a barrier and we're keeping it sealed. And I'm just gonna spray the entire underlying bark, all the exposed surfaces. And you can see that even some of the leaves, and this is like coated from several months ago, still have the ivory organics on there. And this was applied most likely during our last heat wave that we had when we had temperatures that were exceeding 100 degrees. A lot of the plant leaves were burning and this helped keep the plant cool and getting them through those hottest days of summer. So I'm just gonna continue to spray. The preferred thing to do is to actually apply a more thicker coat of product, especially on the prune branches and along the tree trunk and even those underlying branches that are most exposed to the sun by applying, again, the product ivory organic. There's three color options. It doesn't necessarily have to be white. There's the white formula. There's also a green formula and then there's a brown formula that can be used. And what we're gonna do right now is I'm gonna use the white formula and show you how this product comes and how we can prepare it. Let me show you the lid as well. It shows it protects newly installed plants and trees. The goal with this is if you're installing a new plant, you can create a foliar spray and keep your plants nice and cool. It also shields pruned and damaged surfaces and we did obviously a lot of pruning so we're gonna coat those with this Ivory Organics product. So it comes with your organic paint powder and then we've got our oil vial over here that's bubble wrapped. And this oil vial has seven oils including, and let's take a look here at the label. It shows it's got organic castor oil, cinnamon oil, clove oil, cedarwood oil, garlic oil, peppermint oil and rosemary oil. So you've got all of these essential oils that are going into here and we'll simply put the paint powder in the can and then the instructions say to add the water first, fill it up about halfway, stir it and then add your oil vial. Continue stirring and then you can fill up the entire can with water. And now you've got a pint of paint and it's supposed to be dilute as you can see here. It's not as thick as paint. It's about half the consistency of paint and it also doesn't have any of the preservatives such as the fungicides and the algicides and all of these things that can otherwise harm the plant tissues. And here we go. So we can just take one of our paint brushes. I'll take this here and we're gonna start coating some of those exposed surfaces and then recoating the tree trunk as we can see over here. Check this out. So if you take a look over here, you can see that this was painted last almost six to eight months ago and you can see that the bark has since expanded and that's the reason it kind of looks like snake skin. But what we're gonna do here is we're just going to recoat it like so and now the bark is safe from sunburn especially now that we've opened the canopy. There's gonna be a lot more light under here than there otherwise was before we did the pruning. The other important thing to cover are our pruned surfaces. Check this out over here. I'm just gonna coat that now and we're just gonna continue coating the lower branches with the tree trunk. So I'm just gonna finish the rest of this on my own time. If you found this video informative, be sure to like it. Most importantly, by subscribing below, you'll be connected to all of our other educational gardening videos. Thanks again for watching and happy gardening.