Written by Adina Dosan and published on https://davesgarden.com/
When I grow old I want to spend my days walking through acre upon acre of fully-established, mature food forest, picking fruit from trees I planted 40 years ago, watching branches slowly swaying in the gentle breeze, and listening to birdsong.
For my dream to become a reality, I will need huge amounts of trees – and not just any generic cultivar, which will last me only 20 years or so. I will need trees with the genetics that will allow them to thrive on my site without me begging and pleading them to flourish.
However, to start, I will need to perform my test runs and find the strongest trees suited for my soil, climate, pests, and diseases. To achieve this, I am going to have to grow many of my own trees from seeds.
This romantic idea of growing my own trees is a simple concept in itself, but requires some basic understanding of seed biology and the environmental conditions that tiny seeds need in order to become huge majestic trees…
You Can Grow A Tree from Seed
Growing any tree from seed is amazing, but an apricot tree started from a pit is really unbelievable!
My mom taught me to grow trees from a seed or a pit
I was a little girl when I saw my mom growing date palms from the dates’ pits and lemon trees from lemon pits. My mom would bury any fruit pits into a pot, to see what happened! When she saw the first date palm and lemon seedling, she was so excited that she continued with more. The more seedlings popped out from those pits, the more pits my mom would bury into the ground. This went on and on, every two-three years, until mom got sick and couldn’t take care of her plants anymore. One day, she gave me all of her date palms, which together with the other dozen date palms she gave me during the years, made my home a more cheerful place. Since I already knew how to bury pits into the ground, I’ve started to do it myself and this is how I started lots of lemons, mandarins and even grapefruit trees. I tried with thuja too and now I have lots of thujas in my garden, all grown from seeds. The huge mimosa tree growing in my garden is also grown from seeds. Why am I doing that, instead of buying already grown trees? First, I think it’s the seed my mom had sown inside me, which is called curiosity and love for plants. Second, as unbelievable as may seem to many of you, it was about money. I couldn’t afford to buy as many trees as I would have needed for my garden, so I decided to grow them myself. I wasn’t in a hurry and furthermore, the experience of seeing a tree growing from seed was so tempting!
Some trees can accidentally grow from seed
I am a gardener, therefore I’ve always embraced organic gardening methods. One of these is about using organic fertilizer, made from all of the vegetable peels, that I faithfully save, after cooking. I don’t have a special box or a hole where to throw all the vegetable waste. I just keep them for a few days in plastic bags and when I have more (usually, at the end of the week) I bury their contents into the soil, next to one of my vegetables or plants, so they can feed. This is how I got myself two apple seedlings, which popped out from the apple seeds I buried next to my tomatoes. There were more, but only two were strong enough to thrive.
Many such pleasant “accidents” have occurred in my garden, especially since my fruit trees have grown. I spotted two sweet cherries, one sour cherry and two apricot seedlings, each growing next to a rose bush, that I water daily during the summer. This was probably the reason that those seedlings started to grow and thrive.
Grow apricot trees from pits
There was an apricot tree in my garden and I loved that old apricot, as I love all apricots, whatsoever! And I suffered enormously after she died. With her huge, round and bushy crown, full of white flowers in the spring and of huge, round and orange fruits in the summer, so juicy and perfumed. And of healthy round leaves, from spring to fall,my apricot tree would have been any gardener’s pride!
The first new apricot seedling I saw, popped out about two years after the old tree died of moniliosis. However not before fruiting a lot that last summer. Many of the fruits were moldy and fell from the tree, on the ground. I thought I had picked up all the moldy fruits, but somehow I must have missed a few of them. However, the pits were healthy enough to germinate. How they survived all that time is a mystery! I always dig around the roses, in the fall, but somehow I managed to dig around those seedlings and save them, before I even saw them. I started to take care of the apricot seedling and soon, it grew into a beautiful tree. It bloomed and fruited after 4 years. My main worry was that this new apricot wouldn’t have the same characteristics of the mother-apricot. But all my worries were blown away after I saw what big apricots my tree had grown, moreover, after eating the first one. It was the same juicy and scented fruit!
Later, I discovered a new apricot seedling under another rose bush and moved it in a sunny spot, but that happened much later after discovering the first one. I wonder if they popped out in the same time – my guess is yes, they did. Now I know for sure that this is another dividing method for the apricot trees. It takes longer, but the result is worth it.
You should try yourself and have this experience. It’s amazing to see a tree growing from seed!
Original post here https://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/you-can-grow-a-tree-from-seed/.
