I have some cherry pits and orange seeds, if I plant them, will they germinate? Will the resultant tree bear fruit?
Most fruit trees are propagated by grafting. The quality of the fruit that is produced by a tree grown from a seed is unpredictable. Worth a try, though, if you have the time.
Oranges, in particular, are likely to be very similar to the rootstock of the tree - sour orange.
We have some sour cherry trees that sprouted from seed. The cherry tree that was at the back of out lot when we move here in 1977 is long gone, but replaced with seedlings. Peach seedlings sometimes bare good fruit. I have even see apple seedlings with good fruit. Seedlings can be iffy.
I wonder if the more unusual varieties have a better chance. Sour Cherry trees may me less messed around with genetically than more common varieties. Heirloom seeds for example, tomatoes will generally sprout and produce fruit, but your supermarket rubber ball tomatoes may not.
I also wonder if I might be violating some Monsanto patent!
Yes, fruit trees will grow from seeds. However, the resulting trees might not bear desirable fruit. There’s a lot of hybridization that went into producing the cultivars we have today, and hybrids generally won’t breed true.
If you want an orchard, you’re better off to buy saplings of known varieties. If you just want a lot of trees, sure, try growing them from seed.
Even for non-hybrids, the resulting offspring will often differ from the parent. Cherries will generally produce a tree that is more like a wild cherry (smaller, harder, sourer fruit) than the parent - not because they’re ‘reverting’, but because the large, soft, sweet cherry varieties grown commercially are the result of selection at a point near to the extremity of the normal range of variation
If you think of it like rolling a die; the sweet cherry is what you get when you roll a six - on a subsequent roll, you can’t get more than six, and you’ll most likely roll less than six.
Most other tree fruits are the same - you’ll get something when you save seed, but will be unpredictable unless the variety is quite similar to the wild types anyway (medlars, quinces, crab apples).
Oranges are a bit of an oddity though - because multiple offspring arise from a single seed - and as I understand it, some of these grow not from the reproductive germ of the seed, but from part of the seed coat that is actually a clone of the parent - in this case, they should produce fruit the same as the parent, except:
–You can’t tell which, if any of the multiple seedlings are clones of the parent
–The plants don’t always thrive on their own rootstocks (they’re usually grafted onto a rootstock that is selected for vigour etc.) - so they may be feeble trees and take a very long time to develop to fruiting capability
When I was a little kid I used to see my mother throw peach pits into the vacant field next to our house. By the time I was 30 there was a little grove of about six peach trees there all producing peaches as big as a baseball and as hard as a rock. They were good for nothing.
Indeed – Monsanto’s been known to sue people just because, unbeknownst to them, some of their patented seeds accidentally blew onto their land and germinated.
The likelihood of Monsanto (or any other company) suing over seed-propagated fruit trees is approximately nonexistent. Unless, I suppose, you hit the lottery, came up with an improved variety of fruit tree and bragged about where it came from.
Typically, a fruit tree grown from seed will revert at least to some extent to the properties of its wild forebears. It might be ornamental or even produce edible fruit. The odds are heavily that the fruit won’t be as good as what was produced by the parent.
If you check out used bookstores you can probably find a copy of The After-Dinner Gardening Book by Richard Langer, which is all about raising indoor trees and other plants from seeds and pits. It’s a fun read.
You also have to realize that it’s going to be years, if not decades, before you even get a chance to evaluate whether or not you hit the genetic lottery with the seeds you planted. And that’s only if you live in an area where the climate is right. Unless you own a very large conservatory, you’re not growing oranges to fruiting maturity in Ohio or Pennsylvania.
To put this in perspectives fruit breeders start by deliberately crossing existing promising varieties - and still end up only selecting one out of thousands or tens of thousands of the progeny as a worthwhile cultivar.
Not that all the others are necessarily utterly worthless, of course.
But what’s the viability of seed from your average supermarket fruit? It seems like it must be pretty darn low, otherwise my backyard would be full of fruit trees from all the seeds that have been discarded out there over the years. Heck, I have an apple tree in my yard, and thousands of apples fall on the ground every year, and I’ve never seen a single seedling.
And even if the seed or pit is viable, it often has to be treated in a specific way to get it to germinate. I think cherry pits are generally in this category. The seed has to be scarified or something, if I recall correctly.
I retract this. Upon further research it seems I was relying on extraordinarily sloppy journalism.
My mother and grandmother used to plant orange and grapefruit seeds and had very good luck with the grapefruit seeds. No fruit, but a cheap, amusing houseplant with very fragrant foliage.
Perhaps with more sun and fertilizer, we’d have had fruit.
we have grown avocados into potted plants, and mrAru planted a date pit at his fathers house in Bloomington CA and when they moved it was about 5 feet tall, so it can be done. Actually, we also planted the top of a pineapple in a pot and grew it into fruiting which is 2 years. You should give it a try even if it is just in a pot indoors. If the cherry is a weakling, you might be able to essentially bonsai it indoors and have it be a bit more survivable than outdoors.
[hm, if you took the average bonsai and plunked it down outdoors and stopped restricting the growth would it turn into a full sized tree?]
Yep.
With the caveat that the bonsai treatment it’s received will affect its growth habit a bit, so it might not grow up to be a normal-looking specimen - for example, if it’s normally a columnar tree, but was forced to branch or fork by pruning in bonsai.
Most tree fruits in the rose family (apples, peaches, cherries, pears, plums) need the seeds to be buried and overwintered before they’ll germinate. Cherry stones that just fall on top of the ground will probably dry out and die.
The cherry seeds need a temperate climate with 6 weeks of cold weather before they will germinate.
We tossed an avocado seed into a planter, without even covering it up, and ended up with a 3 foot stalk. Our MN winters are not conducive to growing these great trees however.