Citrus thin themselves. You don't need to do anything. It will drop most of the fruitlets.

Lisa

My experience with Meyer Lemon has been that it can overproduce. I have one that is 8 years old and has produced abundant crops every year without fail and one that I bought this year in a 5 gallon container. I have had to tie the fruit up on the new one to keep it from breaking the limbs because they were sagging so much. I would say for the health of a smaller tree you may want to remove some of the fruit if they do not fall off by themselves. Citrus also goes through June drop but once they start to get some size to them they usually stay on until mature. At least my Meyer Lemons do. If they are in clusters and lemons will often set fruit this way, you could thin them some. Otherwise, I would tie the fruit up to help reduce the stress on a young tree. Keep in mind that trees that produce heavy crops often will not have enough reserve carbohydrates to flower and produce well the next year. This growth habit encourages trees to become alternate bearing.

I'm no expert, but my 2-3 year old tree (rec'd in May) had 14 new fruits from its first major blossum. All but four fell off so far. I think I read somewhere that 98% of fruit tree blossums don't result in mature fruit, so that might make you feel a little better when stuff starts dropping. One of the little lemons is HUGE by comparison, so I'm hoping that one sticks around.

The first batch of blossums occured on four branches. Now it's sending out new blossums on nine or ten branches, so I'm hoping a few lemons will stick around and grow now that I've moved it indoors for the winter!

Citrus_X:
WHen you say trees that are heavy bearers can become alternate bearing, does manual thinning of the fruits prevent this? In other words can one 'train' a citrus tree to bear fruit each year by thinning the fruit(all other conditions being optimal of course)