Plant · P-412

Lemon

Citrus limon

Lemon is grown for a juice and rind used in drinks, baking, preserves and flavoring, carrying enough vitamin C per fruit that sailors once carried it as the standard scurvy remedy. It flowers and sets fruit almost year-round rather than in a single spring flush, making it an unusually long nectar season for a fruit tree. It fails outdoors wherever winter lows drop below about 20 F, so outside a warm winter range it is grown in a large container and wheeled under cover for the cold months - though a potted tree never grows or fruits as well as one rooted in open ground.