First of all...I just discovered this site and it is awesome. I am a huge citrus fan and have 4 citrus trees myself. I live in San Diego, near the coast which is not great for heat loving citrus such as grapefruit and key limes.

I do have a 40 gallon key lime (or Mexican lime) in a container. The tree went through a period of drought, completely my fault, and started to lose leaves. The fruit were immature and dry when they fell off.

After realizing what the problem was, I upped the amount of water the tree was receiving and the leaves stopped falling from the tree. What happened next was that the tree when berserk with flowers. The tree was completely covered in flowers and pea sized fruit. The issue that I am wondering about is when I can expect new foliage on the tree? The tree currently looks horrible with a lack of foliage and a ton of immature fruit and flowers. I also had some dieback of some lower limbs which I trimmed off.

Will it leaf out again? That's the big question of the day. Thanks for any help on this. By the way, here is a picture of what I'm referring to.

You just did one trick of inducing citruses to bloom. The trick is to stress them out (but not so much that they die) using water stress or cold stress then restore back to normal and they bloom like crazy.

Just have patience, your tree will restore back leaves if you apply water normally. You can also thin out the canopy by removing some of the whole limbs that come off from the main branches. Remove about a 25% of the limbs, this should help the tree recover quickly.

Thanks Joe. I appreciate the response. I like the symmetry of the tree the way it looks right now so I am hesitant to cut back any big live branches. It's good to know that, with patience, this tree will leaf out again.

Keep watering it as you should, fertilize it lightly, and be patient. As soon as the blossom flush has finished it will start putting out new leaves.

My Key lime trees are not as big as yours but when I was first coming to terms with the things I inadverdently did the same thing you did. The leaves will come and the tree will naturally drop fruit until it gets down a number that it can support to maturity.

Once the new leaves are out you can increase the fertilizer to the normal amount when the next appropriate time rolls around.

.....Alan.

I have a Eureka lemon that was planted in the fall. It was below average winter and it lost ALL its leaves come the howling winds of late winter. Then in spring it was all flowers. I removed all the flowers, and the first leaves came about only in September. One more year after that it grew into a nice beautiful tree. It is now the base of my multi-grafted lemon tree. It currently as 5 kinds of limes, and 7 kinds of lemons, that is if you count Bergamot and Sudachi as lemons.

Have patience, your lime is luckier than my lemon because it still have intact leaves. Mine have none but has recovered. It may take a long while though.

Thanks again for the input folks. The tree is rather large so taking off all the fruit would take, oh, about a month or so. Best to let nature take its course, I guess.