Kaffir Lime Care – When they Fruit
by Kasma Loha-unchit
7. Let Your Babies Mature Before Letting Them Have Babies
If you purchased your kaffir lime plant as a small baby with just a few short, flimsy branches and it begins to flower and fruit profusely within a few short weeks or months in your garden without putting out any significant new branch or leaf growth, don't rejoice just yet. Such behavior might just turn out to be a distress signal. It's like orchid growers trying to force an orchid to bloom out of season or for a show. What they do is stress the plant enough to make it think that it might die. The orchid will spend whatever energy it has left to force out an especially spectacular flower spike in hopes of attracting pollinators to help produce the seeds that would carry on its life line.
Your kaffir lime plant might very well be doing just that: using all the energy it has to produce enough fruit so that there would be seeds to carry on its gene pool. Instead of letting the fruits develop, it might be better for the plant's health in the long run to pick off the flowers and young fruits, or at least thin them down to just a few. At the same time, try your best to give the plant as ideal an environment as you can, coaxing it to adjust and settle in to its new home. It takes energy to adjust to a new environment; even humans get exhausted when they move to a new town they've never visited before. You can help divert the energy your tree is expending in fruit production into adjusting to its new environment. Let your baby kaffir lime plant grow up a little before letting it have its own babies (i.e., fruits/seeds). Just as having a baby can stress you out, so can fruiting cause a lot of stress on a small kaffir lime plant. I've known some students whose joy of seeing their baby tree produce abundant fruits turned into dismay when the tree died shortly after the fruits ripened. So helping your tree practice birth control while it's still young may eventually lead it to grow into a healthier and happier adult.
Since most of you will need leaves more frequently than limes anyway, my suggestion is to let your kaffir lime tree settle in to your garden before letting it do any heavy fruiting. I would give it a good year or two to develop a healthy, bushy branch structure before letting it fruit. For a young plant, fruiting can divert energy away from growth and development. And that's not what you want.
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