For the Love of Limes

Community Contributed

By Joe Kennedy

Limes can be easily propagated through a technique called air layering. Limes can also help prevent cancer. If you want to look at it another way, your garden is a combination pharmaceutical drugstore and neighborhood produce market, even with just a few plants involved.

Let’s just look at one issue, cancer. Science now tells us, in regard to the ongoing vast study of super foods, that there are all kinds of fruits, veggies and herbs that help the body heal itself and prevent disease. There are three main foods that help prevent cancer — limes, Concord grapes and arugula.

Because buying new lime trees can be expensive, you can propagate your own trees by air layering, a process that allows you to grow roots from branches while still attached to the parent tree. First, select a branch on the tree that is about one inch thick. Then remove a one-inch section of bark around the branch — or girdle it — which should be about a 1.5 feet away from the edge of the branch. Be sure to get the slimy stuff under the bark removed.

Then get a large hand full seaweed, dry grass clippings, or small leaves and moisten it. Pack it around the part of the branch where you just removed the bark and cover this with a plastic bag or non-absorbent paper. Tie both ends fairly tightly against the branch so it will keep the moisture inside, and you’re done.

Check it after two or three weeks. Open it up and spray a little water in, then close it again. By the end of the fourth week there should be roots at the top of the girdle part. Cut the branch at about three quarters below where the roots come out. Then plant it.

Aloha everyone. God be with you. Please pray, do more mulching, collect water, and pick up plastic rubbish.