Cynthia,

Congrats! And welcome to the club. Will you have your tree potted? I'll assume you've been looking through this forum to get a good idea of how to take care of your new tree.

Key limes are some of the easier citrus to take care of and fruit often. Citrus are heavy feeders, so after the the tree has settled into its new spot. Think of a mild fertilizer regiment and adjust accordingly. Citrus also like to be in a medium that doesn't stay soaked after watering. Let the soil get pretty dry in between watering to prevent root rot.

This post was edited by CitrusWeekendWarrior on Fri, Jun 13, 14 at 22:01

If you want to see your tree explode in growth, rinse the old mix as as much as you can as soon as you can, and pot it up in a very porous mix in a larger container, such as the 5.1.1 mix..Feed and lot's of sunlight after you have acclimated it to the sun..

If you want to see it stay about the same size or get a bit bigger, you could use a professinal bagged mix and pot it up one size after teasing the roots up a bit to help it grow into the new mix then repot as it gets bigger through the years.
Once the roots fill the pot up or if the mix either becomes too compacted or hydrophobic, do the same process over again..

Mike

My newly planted key lime is not in a container, but it is a key lime none the less. Planted in February. Doing very well and has lots of small limes on it. Good draining soil and lots of water and fertilizer and plenty of Arizona sunshine. Love those limes!

Mike,

I'm very new to this, I'm not quite sure what you mean by rinse the old mix. And when I plant it into the new mix do I keep the old mix and plant it together or just get rid of it completely?

Cynjrana, he is advising you to completely remove the old mix as much as possible (rinsing off the old mix-- but keep the roots moist while they are in transition, if they dry out they'll die!), then pot into 5-1-1.
I haven't done it (yet), but people talk about using a chopstick to push mix in between the roots-- you don't want to have any air pockets around the roots, it'll kill them. Your tree is small enough it probably won't be hard to get mix around all the roots, though. :)

Been away ten days.returned, tree seems to have new leaves but still yellow spots on older leafs. How long will it be before the tree can hold lemons, had small buds previously, turned black and fell off. I don't have any buds now, new blossoms coming out but that's it. Will the tree make small buds that turn yellow, then black before falling off again, how often does this happen, before you get healthily lemons that stay on the tree