Last week when I finished off the delicious peach I was eating I noticed the pit was split. When I pried it open there was a seed a little bigger then an almond inside. My question is…can I plant that seed and grow a little peach tree? I’ve had it under a wet paper towel for a week with no progress. Any ideas?
Maybe, maybe not.
Most fruit trees are produced by grafting, because the fruits grown from seed do not necesarily produce something of comparable quality to the fruit that originally encased it.
My father in law in Connecticut has a large peach tree growing completely unintendedly in his compost pile, producing edible peaches. It started with a peach pit thrown into the pile.
Ironically, the peach trees he purposely planted decades before are stunted and have never borne fruit.
The compost pile has also accidntally spawned pumpkins, squash, and other plants.
Fruit trees from seed are often reluctant to bear fruit or if they do it may be quite unlike the parent and possibly not very palatable; most apple seedlings will produce small, sour fruits, apricots will usually take longer to fruit from seed than a grafted plant of the same age; citrus trees from seed show great reluctance to fruit at all.
Of course these are genera rules and you might get lucky; this is, after all, how new varieties are raised, but - to put things in perspective - commercial growers will typically raise tens of thousands of seedling plants (which themselves are often the offspring of a carefully selected cross-polination) from which maybe a handful will have potential as new varieties, or will have useful traits that are worth trying to bring out in another generation.
If you want to grow the peach stone, it will probably need a period of stratification(chilling); your best bet is to put it in a pot of soil and put it outdoors, perhaps even burying the pot up to it’s rim in the earth in the garden, alternatively you could put the pot into a plastic bag and keep it in the coldest part of your fridge (but not the ice-making compartment) for a month or so, then put it on a windowsill.
When we were kids, my brother planted a peach pit which grew into a prodigous producer of huge fruit. The branches were so heavy with grapefruit-sized peaches, they would break if not supported. We could never eat all the peaches it produced, and there are always dozens rotting on the ground every summer. They were a freestone variety with yellow flesh, very sweet and very big.
As I understand it, the reason for grafting is roots. The grower takes the bottom of an older variety with great roots, but puny fruit. She grafts on the top part of a modern variety with wonderful fruit. For some reason, the modern varieties often produce wimpy roots that won’t support the adult tree. There are exceptions, of course, as Fear Itself and Rubicon have shown.
–Nott
My impression of seeds is that they have to dry before you can plant them. I haven’t been able to get any green ones to sprout.
My dad was given a peach sapling that grew from a peach that had fallen from another tree. It soon grew to maturity and bore so many peaches that I thought its limbs would break. They were delicious. Since there were so many peaches on the tree, inevitably some fell from the tree to rest amongst the strawberries. Some of these sprouted and there was room to plant five more trees, all of which bear tasty fruit.
The ground where they grew had lots of fertilizer in it, although we never put more fertilizer in after the planter was built. We never did anything to help the trees grow (or the strawberries, for that matter) except water them and pull weeds.
Not true with most fruit trees; especially those in the Rose family (apples cherries, peaches, apricots, plums etc); the seeds need to be planted straight away and usually need a period of chilling over the winter.
It may be that peaches, although they won’t come true from seed, are likely too produce good fruit then; I’m not familiar with the wild form of Prunus Persica; maybe there’s not too much difference and therefore any ‘reversion’ to wild types would not be such a big change.
Wow. And I thought I was neglectful of turning my compost pile!