We don’t all have the good fortune to live in Florida or Southern California.  Some of us have to get our limes, lemons, and avocados the hard way: from the grocery store.  However, there is another option for growing warm-climate fruits in not-so-warm areas.  Some smaller varieties of fruit trees do very well in containers, and even produce fruit.  Just because you live in zone 4 doesn’t mean you can’t have a little zone 10 fun.

I love avocados.  They’re extraordinarily healthy, full of all sorts of amazing good-for-you fats and nutrients and such.  But really, it comes down to the very simple fact that they’re absolutely delicious.  I love avocado on just about anything (except for cake), and I’ll rarely turn down guacamole.  The problem is that avocados are pretty expensive, and the ones you find in the store are often second-rate.  Nothing compares to fresh, home-grown avocados, and that’s why the Avocado Don Gillogly is such a great plant.  It doesn’t just survive when grown indoors, it thrives and produces amazing avocados year-round in two crops, right there in your living room.  It will produce its first crop in around a year, which is unusually quick for a fruit tree.  It’s a beautiful, easy to grow plant even without the fruit, and can be left on the patio in warmer months to liven up your garden.

Mexican Thornless Lime

Of course, you wouldn’t want to have those fresh avocados around all the time and not make some great Mexican food, and no Mexican feast can be complete without limes.  The Mexican Thornless Lime tree is another fruit tree that does fantastically indoors, is easy to grow, and produces lots of fruit.  Even better, the blossoms that precede the fruit are both beautiful and carry a lovely fragrance.  The fruit ripens from late summer to early winter, but the evergreen foliage makes this citrus tree a wonderful houseplant year round.

Lemon Meyer Improved

The Meyer Improved lemon tree is a prize as an ornamental houseplant.  A prize that just happens to produce armloads of fantastic, juicy lemons.  The lemons grow in huge clusters of six lemons, which are best thinned to three per cluster, to allow them plenty of room to get big (though those early lemons that you thin can certainly be used in your cooking, too).  Check out my friend (and Master Gardener) Anne Moore’s article for tips on growing Limon ‘Meyer Improved’.