It is distressing to find that my beautiful lemon tree is beset with a nasty disease – in fact, it is afflicted with both the diseases shown on the page above. I have been occasionally dealing with the sooty mould, but the verrucosis discovery is a shock.

The fully laden tree was so weighted down with fruit that it was dragging on the ground. I was keeping an eye on the lower lemons to make sure they didn’t rot and had begun to pick them over the last couple of weeks. Yesterday, a sharp smell alerted me that all was not well and closer inspection revealed many lemons with what I thought was brown rot. I set about removing the affected lemons and pruned the tree.

What a relief to read in the NZ Gardener booklet that you can still use the juice – just not the zest. It was a busy day in the kitchen today.

The discarded skins cannot go in the compost. There are so many of them that the compost would be overwhelmed anyway.

There’ll be lemon ice cube making over the next few days until all the lemons are used.