How To Prune A Lemon Tree For More Fruit — Plus The Very Best Time To Do It

Lemon trees (Citrus limon) are among the most popular citrus trees to grow. They are highly beautiful, and offer up bounties of vibrantly yellow, sour fruit that has a wide range of culinary, medicinal, and cleaning uses. However, whether you're growing your lemon tree outside or taking care of one inside of your home, pruning your tree is one of the most important chores that will ensure that you get more fruit out of your tree.

Pruning is the act of removing branches in order to open a fruit tree up to more light and airflow, as well as redirect the plant's energy towards the healthier branches, making them stronger and producing more fruit as a result. Pruning also helps you manage the shape and size of the plant, which is especially handy if you have limited space, or are using the Espalier method of training a lemon tree along a fence.

In pruning, you always seek to remove dead, damaged, or diseased branches first, cutting them all the way down to the node on the healthy host branch. Also remove any crowding, crossing, or inward growing branches, as these affect airflow and how much light gets into the canopy. Any leggy or extra long branches can be trimmed back, as well as any sprouts or water suckers around the tree's base. These weed-like growths can easily be removed by hand.

General knowledge for tree pruning is that the best time of year to do so is in the late winter when the fear of deep freezing has passed, but the trees are still dormant. Dormancy in the trees allows them to be cut without much lasting damage being done. The same rule applies to lemon trees, only the timing is a little different depending on your growing conditions. 

Outdoors, lemons require warmer temps and plenty of sunlight. This makes them ideal for USDA hardiness zones 9 to 11. If you grow lemons in these zones, you can prune from February into early April. If you are growing indoors or in a colder climate, your time frame is more like late February into March. Whatever you do, don't prune lemon trees in the fall or summer — and never prune more than 30% of the tree's branches.  

If you prune in the fall, a warm spell can trick the trees into thinking it's time to start on new growth, which will then be killed in the cold weather. Nor should you prune your lemon trees at the height of summer, because the exposed wood can be damaged by the intense sunshine of the season. Lemon trees are also in need of more water and nutrients during the summer, so pruning then will only serve to stress them out and damage potential fruit production.