Bumper Crop

The other day, I was looking over the deck railing down at our very precipitous lower 40 and, lo and behold!, my sickly lemon tree is producing again!

When My Beloved and I first moved to this house more than 10 years ago, I always had lemons. The little tree that the former owners planted seemed to be an A Type, compelled to produce! produce! produce! even though I told it often that there were only two eaters in the house. I did water it but never encouraged its obsessive nature with fertilizing.

Little by little, my policy of benign neglect defeated the poor little thing and for a couple of years in a row it has produced only sickly green leaves and one or two lemons more productive of rind than of juice.

Maybe it likes the rain we've been getting? Maybe it's responding to all the manual labor we put in last fall when we removed the stingy berry bushes and the volunteer saplings from around it? Perhaps it likes being the only prickly princess in the yard? Whatever the explanation, this month it has produced a dozen lemons of various sizes and there are even more weighing down the spindly branches.

In a year when I can't seem to satisfy my body's interest in citrus fruits, this is a welcome development. I might even break down and apply a little fertilizer!