spidra's Australian Finger Lime

While touring Gene Lester’s citrus collection (one of the biggest in the U.S.), I was allowed to harvest some of the finger limes from his tree. They were past ripe and hard to access. I got many painful pricks and scrapes for my trouble. I managed to dig 2 out from the interior of the plant and later found quite a few on the ground in the mulch.

As usual, I didn’t get to planting these out in a timely manner. So now the finger limes have dehydrated. So I put them in water in an attempt to soften the rinds so that I could more easily get at the seeds. 2 sank to the bottom and the rest floated. Assuming that the ones that sank might be more viable, I started with those. I didn’t count how many seeds I was able to extract so that I could calculate the germination rate. I should have. Anyway, I planted something like 10 seeds in Black Gold potting mix (rather than seedling mix) and covered the mix with a bit of coarse sand. The AHS book on propagation recommended using small gravel but I didn’t have it so I used the coarse sand instead.

It’s all in a cleaned styrofoam meat tray and I’ve put it on the electric seedling mat so it can be at the recommended temperature for germination (approx. 70 F). If these germinate, they will be my first attempt at plant breeding. The Australians are very protective of their cultivars and no nursery here is importing improved finger lime cultivars. So I figured I’d try to breed my own. It’s a very long-range project given that it will probably be 7 years before any seedling citrus is ready to bear fruit. And even longer before those can be cross-pollinated to develop new improved cultivars.