Hi All-
Thanks for the suggestions so far, this is more feedback than the greenhouse gave me ;)
To Daisyl: You're right, it's really darn dark at my latitude (just above 62 North) in the winter, and while the zone may be listed as 4b it can and has been as cold as -55F for consecutive days in my location (at the foot of the mountains in a very windy glacial valley).
Also, I wasn't entirely accurate in how I set the tree up at first...Being August I still had 17+ hours of light each day, and the tree was inside in a south facing window. I had to rotate it about every 4-5 days or it would plaster itself to the glass
The artificial light came into play in mid-October, when things are more dark than light. I also had the instructions from the greenhouse which advised me to keep it "moist" (what's that???) which is part of my confusion with the summer behavior--it's been almost buried in a peat bog-consistency soil for some time and seems to be thriving(?!). I was also told to not fertilize it except for maybe a light touch once or twice all winter, and with an almost religious fervor, to not, under *any* circumstances, re-pot it, because it needed to be rootbound and should be left in it's original pot for at a minimum the first 5 years I had it.
I misted it constantly--sprayed it twice a day until it was dripping wet, as our indoor humidities can drop as low as 5% in winter; it seemed happy with this
I watered it on a more or less regular schedule, keeping it uniformly damp, not soaked but not letting it dry out between waterings either. Temperatures diffed between about 62 at night and 70 during the day.
Like I said before, everything was just humming along until it almost literally just up and fell over (mostly) dead. After it went back outside this spring I heavily watered it and fed it well, and in about a week I noticed a few tiny shiny green patches on the remaining living wood, which within a couple weeks began to sprout. There was still the remaining blossom, which by now had an embryonic pea-sized lemon on it, which I pinched off to let the tree direct all its energy to leafing out; soon that growth became a couple branches at least 6" long and a few shorter ones, all covered in huge and very dark green leaves (like the mature color of my username's foliage). Interestingly it reached this size and stopped growing for a couple months; it's only in the last few weeks I've seen a couple very tiny new leaves starting to form at the branch tips.
So there you have it...I'm probably leaving more details out, but that's the gist of how I got this far.
Thanks for all the help thus far, I really appreciate it!
Rob
