Credits: Social Media
Amateur gardener grows insanely big lemon, leaving TikTok ‘freaked-out’
A homeowner was left startled to find a very unique shaped lemon growing in her garden. The following discovery has gone viral online.
TikToker Maxine Sharf (@maxiskitchen) has gained over 4 million views on her strange fruit find. Internet users have said theyve been left scared of the strange-growing lemon fruit.
The surprising lemon looks like something most have never seen before, but there could be a plausible explanation behind it.
The wildly-sized lemon fruit
My lemon tree produced a very unique lemon, Sharf told the camera, showing an incredibly bright yet misshapen lemon fruit. The fruit was closer to the size of a lemon with overlapping growths and lumps.
Sharffilmed herself chopping the lemon on a counter in her kitchen. Woah, she said upon seeing the insides of the fruit.
When chopped open, the lemon showed various segments of lemon spread out and dotted around in a kaleidoscope shape, rather than the conventional circle.
Its cooler than expected, Sharf said.
Despite Sharf’s belief in the lemon being cool, many TikTok users werent so sold.
Im scared of that thing, reads one comment
Why did this freak me out a little, commented another TikTok viewer.
It could be citrus bud mites
As suggested by avid gardeners in the comments, it looks likely that the unique fruit could actually be something far more common in California regions.
Citrus bud mites often cause an overlapping and twisted shape like Sharf’s lemon. The mites enter inside the buds of the lemon plant and feed on them. This either kills the flower or causes a rosette-shaped growth of the fruit that grows following the feed.
It could also be a cross-pollination
In a comment on the video, Sharf shared that she believed the lemon could have been cross-pollinated with a Buddhas hand fruit.
Ive seen them at my local grocery store as Buddha’s Hands! Look just like this, agreed another user.
Admittedly, Sharf’s lemon does look incredibly like a Buddhas hand fruit. As reported by retailer The Wasabi Company, Buddha’s Hand, also called ‘Bushukan’ in Japanese, is a unique citrus fruit from Japan.
It gets its name from its unusual appearance, which looks like several yellow fingers sticking out from a central base, resembling Buddha’s hands in meditation.
Unlike a lemon, the Buddhas Hand fruit does not have a juicy flesh inside of it and instead, people enjoy it for its peel.
