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| I have several citrus trees - key lime, grapefruit, red navel orange, persian lime, and lemon trees - in the ground in my backyard. Last year I got a nice crop of fruit from them.
THIS year they flowered very nicely, but the lemon and grapefruit failed to produce many that are developing into fruits. Looks like my lemon (which gave me about 20 last year) is only going to give me 3 this year, and my grapefruit has a cluster of 10 on the end of one branch, but the tree is otherwise devoid of developing fruit. The orange, however, looks like it's going to come apart under the weight of it's fruit. Key lime's flowers did not produce ANY developing fruit. I fertilized the same as last year. I have noticed that the flowers are crawling with tiny ants, but since it was that way last year too (and I thought they might actually help with pollination) I didn't worry about it. But now I'm wondering if the ants did the flowers in, and if that's the case - why is the orange tree covered in developing fruit in spite of ant overload? Any ideas? |
Follow-Up Postings:
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| The ants won't hurt your flowers. They are just gathering nectar. I have them swarming on the watermelon blossoms and they set just fine. My citrus sets fine with no pollination and the fruit are seedless. |
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| Ants to hurt raspberryes flowers. Learned this hurd way. They just eating out inside the wlower sticks with a pollen and there are no berryes at all after it. Never had problem with my citrus collection though. You may want to check if plants are invaded with aphids. Ant love to milk them for sweet juice.   |
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