Great, thanks for the reassurance! I am doing it with nail clippers, which seems to work well.

I cut the thorns with a nail clipper on all my garden trees and my gift trees; I lose less blood that way. Interestingly, the ivory tower experts at UC Riverside citrus collection will tell you that the Meyer is a thornless variety I have a lot of lost blood and 35,000 trees that say they are wrong.

Haha John that is funny. Kind of like when they say “seedless” meaning less than 6 seeds. They must mean that “thornless” is with less than 1 inch thorns. LOL

Citrus are thornless!? Well.... I don't remember seeing any thorns on the Kumquat. I won't say any of you are wrong about the thorn clipping, but I'd worry about allowing in some infection. Actually, if this is a safe thng to do I just might try it on the Lisbon Lemon.... but that would be a lot of clipping. Still...........

As long as the cutting tool is sterilized before cutting, it will heal fine.

I have a slightly larger than typical nail clipper (toenail?); I call it my patented Mayan Meyer lemon thorn cutter; but you would probably call it a nail clipper. BTW in 15 years and several hundred plants, I have never had any problem with infections; it may have something to do with the thorn being hard wood... There are lots of varieties of citrus that are truly thornless; but sometimes even those will have big thorns on water sprouts.

I trim thorns from most of my larger-thorned citrus. Usually in summer when the new flushes come out you can just bend the developing thorn and it will break right off. If I miss some, then I'll use a clippers. Some of my citrus, especially seedling trees, would have 3 to 4-inch thorns otherwise.

I have also clipped lots of thorns. I just use the same hand clippers I use when harvesting fruit. Thorn gets in the way, it gets clipped. Biggest thorns I have on any of my trees are on some seed-grown calamondins. HUGE thorns on the trunks. Squirrels like to climb up my grafted calamondin to hide and play but I haven't seen the first squirrel in the seed-grown calamondin :>)

John, I have such a nail clipper..... which is getting renamed.... and a new use. ;-))