Fruit Seems to Fall Far From the Tree

Life has been giving Bill Malone lemons recently. Big lemons. No, really big lemons.

But the Sylmar retiree isn’t soured by his luck. In fact, he couldn’t be more pleased.

For the past three years, the lemon tree in the backyard of Malone’s trailer home at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains has been producing some incredible fruit. This year has been the best ever, with one monster lemon measuring 26 1/2 inches around and tipping the scales at more than 7 pounds.

Although those might not be world records, Malone’s prize lemon is undeniably one serious piece of fruit.

“Isn’t that something?” asked Stan Gilberts, Malone’s friend and neighbor at the Oakridge Mobile Home Park. “He put them out here yesterday and I thought they were watermelons.”

Gilberts may have been exaggerating, but only slightly. Malone’s biggest lemons are actually closer to the size of cantaloupes.

Malone, 81, has placed the lemons on the concrete wall of his neat garden for display. The avid gardener admits to using a little Miracle Gro, but said that he has no idea why his modest-sized tree produces such large fruit.

“I’ve been in this park since 1989 and everything was normal with this tree until about three years ago when all of a sudden I started to get extra large fruit from it,” he said, adding that the larger lemons are sweeter than the smaller ones.

Horticulturist Stephen Kocsis, who owns the Gardenland Wholesale Nursery in Sylmar, said he had never seen anything like Malone’s lemons in more than 50 years of studying citrus fruit.

“It’s really exciting because on the same tree that you have regular lemons you also have these really big ones. It’s very unusual,” Kocsis said.

Scientific study, he said, would be necessary to determine whether environmental or genetic factors were responsible for the size of Malone’s lemons.

Malone isn’t too concerned about the reasons, but he hopes that the big lemons keep coming.

“It’s fun. People can’t believe it when they see them,” he said.