I have a lemon tree I planted 3 years ago in my yard and it's always given me plenty of fruit, but this 2026 it barely has any flowers and practically no lemons at all. I water it every 2 days, it gets direct sun all day long and the soil looks fine. I have no idea what's going on.
Lemon trees sometimes struggle to fruit when they're stressed, and three years is right around when they start getting more demanding. It's probably either too much nitrogen in the soil (watering every two days could be leaching nutrients or building up salts) or because it needs a bit of heavier pruning to stimulate fruiting - I've seen that happen with my own trees when I let them grow wild. I'd recommend spacing out your waterings a bit more so the soil can dry out some, giving it a balanced fertilizer with more phosphorus and potassium (not so much nitrogen), and if it's really leafy, prune back the weaker branches at the end of winter so it puts its energy into actually producing fruit.
I had the same problem with a lemon tree I have at home, and what happened to me was that I was watering too much - watering every two days in summer is plenty, especially if it rains too. Citrus trees need the soil to dry out a bit between waterings or they end up with root problems and stop flowering properly. Another thing that helped me was giving it some potassium (fruit tree fertilizer) after spring, because excess nitrogen makes the plant spend all its energy on new leaves instead of fruit. What's the soil moisture actually like? Sometimes it looks fine but it's waterlogged underneath.
Watering every two days is probably the culprit, but not so much because of excess water in general, but because July gets hot and lemons don't need that frequent watering during that time if the soil retains moisture well (meaning between waterings the soil dries out a bit on the surface but stays moist deeper down). What I'd do is space out the waterings to every 3 or 4 days and watch how the plant responds over the next few weeks, because even though it sounds contradictory, a tree that gets constant, heavy watering channels all that energy into leaves and flowers but doesn't set fruit. Moderate water stress is what sometimes triggers fruiting in citrus trees, so give your watering schedule a break and you'll probably see a difference in the next growing cycle.
Look, sometimes citrus trees go through weird cycles and just don't produce one year, but what nobody's mentioned is that if it's been in the same spot for three years it could be depleted soil - lemons use up a ton of nutrients, especially potassium and magnesium which directly affect flowering. The watering every two days is probably part of the problem like others said, but if I were you I'd get a soil analysis done or at least throw some citrus-specific fertilizer at it with more potassium and less nitrogen to see if things change by next year. Sometimes it's also worth checking if the plant has pests or fungal diseases that aren't visible to the naked eye, because that stresses it out and kills the yield too.
Citrus trees go into alternating cycles after a certain age, especially when they transition from the juvenile phase to the productive one, and your tree is already at that critical point. What's happening to you is probably a combination of things, but the most likely is that you're watering too much. Two days between waterings is pretty frequent for an already established tree, even more so in July when it's hot but the tree needs less moisture to focus on fruiting. Citrus has a peculiarity: they need a period of moderate drought stress to trigger flowering and fruit set. If the soil is always wet, the tree keeps growing vegetatively instead of reproducing.
Here's a trick that few people mention: instead of watering every two days, try going to watering every 4 or 5 days and check the soil before you do it. Stick your finger in about 4 inches; if it still feels moist, wait. With July temperatures, the soil holds water longer than you think. Plus, even if the soil looks good, after three years it can have excess nitrogen buildup (especially if you ever fertilized frequently), which favors leaves but not fruit. It might be worth doing a quick soil test or just cutting back on nitrogen fertilizer until next winter and focusing on phosphorus and potassium to stimulate fruiting.
It's not that your tree is sick, it's that you're giving it too much of what it doesn't need right now. Back off on the watering, keep the sun exposure it already has, and in a couple of months you should see changes. If you still don't have fruit by year's end, only then would I consider other causes.
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