When to Pick Lemons: Ripeness, Cutting and Why It Takes Six Months

Six to nine months on the tree

A lemon is slow. From the petals dropping to a fruit worth picking is typically six to nine months, and in a cool summer or an indoor winter it stretches past nine. The fruit you are watching in autumn set in spring, and the flowers opening beside it are next year's crop.

That overlap is normal and is why a lemon can look like it is doing three things at once. Do not remove flowers because there is already fruit on the tree, and do not panic when the tree carries green fruit through a whole winter. It is also why hard pruning at the wrong moment costs a whole year: you remove fruit that has already invested six months.

A tree grown indoors through winter finishes its fruit more slowly still, because ripening depends on light and warmth. Fruit that stalls in a dim room often finishes within weeks of going back outside in spring.

How to tell a ripe lemon

Color alone is unreliable. A lemon can go fully yellow while the flesh is still hard and sharp, and in a warm climate a fully ripe fruit may stay slightly green. Judge by weight and by give, and confirm with color.

Cup the fruit and take its weight. A ripe lemon feels noticeably heavier than it looks, because the juice sacs have filled. Then squeeze gently: a ripe fruit yields very slightly under the skin, where an unripe one is rock hard and an over-mature one feels spongy. Skin texture is the third check; it smooths out and the oil glands become less pronounced as the fruit ripens.

1. Weigh it in your hand Compare two fruit of the same size. The heavier one is the riper one. This is the most reliable single test and it takes a second.
2. Press with your thumb Slight give under gentle pressure means ready. No give at all means leave it another few weeks. Soft and yielding means you have left it too long.
3. Look at the skin, not just the color A ripe skin looks smooth and slightly glossy. Deeply pitted, coarse skin usually means a fruit that has been on the tree too long and will be thick pithed.
4. Pick one and cut it With a first crop, sacrifice one fruit. Cutting it tells you more than any amount of squeezing, and it calibrates your hand for the rest of the tree.

Lemons do not ripen after picking. They soften and lose acid, but they do not gain sugar or juice. If in doubt, leave it on the tree, which is the best storage there is.

Cut, do not pull

Pulling a lemon off tears the button of skin around the stalk, and that wound is where mold starts. A fruit picked by pulling keeps for days; a fruit cut cleanly keeps for weeks. Use pruners and cut the stalk flush with the top of the fruit so no stub can pierce a neighboring fruit in the bowl.

Pick in the morning when the fruit is cool and firm. Handle it as you would an egg, because the oil glands in the skin bruise easily and a bruised gland turns brown within a day. Watch the thorns; reaching in fast for a fruit is how most people mark both hands and the fruit.

Storing and keeping the record

The tree is the best store, and fruit holds in good condition on it for a couple of months past ripeness before the pith thickens. Once picked, lemons keep about a week at room temperature and three to four weeks in the fridge in an open bag. Do not seal them airtight; the trapped moisture rots them at the stalk.

Zest first if you are going to zest at all. Peel keeps in the freezer for months while the whole fruit does not. Juice freezes well in an ice cube tray.

Record the date each flower cluster opened and the date you picked from it, along with the number of fruit and total weight. After two seasons you know your own tree's flower-to-harvest interval to within a fortnight, which is what tells you whether a fruit sitting there in early spring is late or simply not finished.