lemon trees from seeds

I didn't make this and eat it, I drank it.

I've been making the most delicious iced tea lately. It verges on lemonade.

* two random Celestial Seasonings tea bags

* three watchyamacall it regular tea bags. Oh, what is it, Luzianne, this time but it could just as well be Lipton's

* 1/2 cup sugar

* 1 whole lemon

I heat a small pot of water nearly to boil, add the sugar to dissolve. Put in the tea bags. That's half of it.

The entire lemon squeezed into the 2 quart pitcher. When the tea darkens, I squeeze out the bags and dump the sweetened tea into the pitcher then fill it with filtered water. Done. It cools to room temperature, goes into the refrigerator.

Usually I drink the entire two quarts in one day. Rarely does it last longer than that, as the one that I have now has.

So that's a lot of lemons.

They're purchased by the bag-full from different sources. Some have a lot of pips. Oh, those annoying pips. Seeds to Americans. Discarding the seeds causes me some kind of nearly undetectable unease. I cannot quite put my finger on it. I allow my mind to free associate. I'm transported briefly to a period between kindergarden and first grade. With clarity I recall my father turning over to me dozens of tiny clay pots. They're positively delightful little toys, the way they stack so perfectly. I'm intrigued by their red bisque coarse perfection. I stack them different ways. Smash a few, of course, com'on, I'm a boy, we have to see how things break. Wonder why they each have a perfect little hole on the bottom. Wouldn't they be better without a hole? Why do they want the contents to fall out? This didn't make sense. I don't like that hole. I fill them all with dirt, and sure enough, some of the dirt falls out the holes. This is going to be a mess. I plant every seed that I encounter. Apple seeds. Orange seeds, mostly, but also grapefruit seeds, watermelon seeds, peach seeds, plum seeds, grape seeds, everything good that I like except vegetables because who in the heck wants vegetables?

Our house had an oriel window with a bench facing onto the front street. It was akin to a greenhouse extension. My parents, bless them, tolerated me lining the whole thing with my little clay pots. There were dozens of them. I think, nearly fifty. Can you imagine having a child such as myself with continuously multiple on-running experiments constantly interfering with your own sense of interior design? I can not imagine that myself and that's why I love my parents. They were true parents to me in every single encouraging sense and without exception.

But we moved frequently, and that overturned a lot of experimentation by fiat. I was always being undermined by the fait accompli of relocation. In this case, the plants survived one relocation but then we moved overseas so I turned over my best specimens, by then transplanted to larger pots, to my grandmother whose careless neglect I found hard to forgive. She killed my orange and grapefruit trees by leaving them outside in the Pennsylvania cold. I never looked at her the same since.

I'm back.

Well then. I see it now. Plant the lemon seeds. Bang. There they go directly into the dirt. So too the next lemon. And the next lemon. And the next lemon. And the next lemon. And so on until no more seeds will reasonably fit in the pot.

Weeks elapse. Nothing happens.

Why are not my seeds germinating? Yo no lo comprendo. Je ne le comprends pas. Could it be the seeds are two-year germinating seed, they type designed by evolution to delay, to spread out and deflect the threat of ecological hazard? Like passion flowers do? Should I nick the seeds or abrade them to allow water to access their innermost inside interiors? Huh?

Reads internet. Readie, read, read, humity hum, readie, read read. Sure enough. That's the trick. Peel the seed, carefully with an x-acto knife, like a banana, and get to the seed which is really underneath that harder outside coating, known commonly to crossword solvers everywhere as the "aril." That's what I'll do -- remove the aril. Or at least damage it.

I'm all set for phase II of the lemon tree from seed experiment. I wrap the seeds in wet paper towel, place in a sandwich bag and transport them to the warm sunny window next to the first experiment. Wait. What's that? Green I see? Whu? No. Yes. You di'int. You did. Oh, you tricky little bastards. You waited until I lost patience and found a shortcut, and then you show yourselves!

I am going to love you like a precious thing.

Update: The stripped seeds from a second lemon showed me I probably wasn't going far enough. By accident I ripped off the brownish under-outer-shell to reveal the ultimate naked innermost inside interior penetralia that feeds the embryo of the seed and that is easily broken in half, which happened to one of them. Oops. I believe this is the portion to aim for.

This is a little trickier to get at. I learned that by making careful slash through the length of the seed then using my fingernails to strip off the shell, like a banana, except how a monkey peels a banana, not how a human peels a banana, that is, straight through a center break like the alien bursting through a victims chest. This is where fingernails take over, and ah got no fingernails, see?

So if I can do it with those pathetic shortened things, you should be able to do it with whatever talons you got.