Beginner Gardening: Help with growing lemon tree, 1 by DurianBandit

DurianBandit wrote:
I bought a lemon plant (like 4 inches tall) a few years back at a garage sale with my gf for kicks. I brought it home thinking little of it. ~2-3 years later, it's still around, and I'm not sure how to grow it. It's now about 4 feet tall, with the exact same branches it had when I first bought it.

How do I get it to branch? It currently has ONE branch that's about a foot up from the ground, and it is just growing vertically. I have never gardened before, so I'm not really sure what I'm doing. I just put some dirt in a pot (about 20 inch diameter?) and have been watering it. It grows, but it won't branch. I've been reading on some pruning, but I haven't really encountered anything that's useful for a small potted lemon plant.

Will pruning help it branch? How should I prune it? I live in Minnesota, so it obviously can't stay outside during the winter. I don't want a huge plant, I want more of a shrub, or a hedge, not a tree. I'll take a picture of the plant as soon as I get a chance. In the meantime, it looks something like this

with leaves on the trunk and branch. The trunk itself is rather lanky, being no more than I would guess 1.5-2 inches in circumference at the bottom.