Has anyone tried growing a lemon tree from seed? If you have, how well did it work? I am going to try to grow one and want to know how hard it is. I found a few good sites that talk about it, but none of them is from "first hand" knowledge.
Also if you have grown if you have tips I'll take those too.
Growing from seed is a crap shoot. Think of rolling thousands of dice. Each die controls one aspect of one trait. In order to get a tree as good as the original, which fruits early and heavily, makes good fruit, is disease resistant, etc., is a very rare occurance. In fact, the commercial citrus growers don't even propagate trees with all of these traits; they use scions with early, heavy, good fruit, and rootstocks with disease resistance, and vigor.
If you want to grow good trees from seed, it is a numbers game. And even then, many new developments are the result of mutations, genetic defects, and other quirks. As such, even chance seedlings are rare improvements. You will need to grow literally thousands, if not more, from seed, to get trees as good as their progenitors. And then, you will have to test scions from your seedling trees on an early maturing rootstock.
Citrus, unlike most self-fertile fruits, are notorious for not being true to seed. They are so far developed from their natural state, which produces insipid fruit, that they are more likely to revert than to make good fruit. But, they will eventually bear fruit, however infrequently that may be, and, at the very least, the fruit will be good for zest.
