My boss brought in a crate of plums from her tree(s). If I were to plant the pits from the ones I’ve eaten, would they grow? How long would they take to sprout and show themselves above ground? What is the process of planting them? (If I did it, I’d probably use a pot indoors because Winter is coming.)
I’m no gardening expert, but since plums are a tree fruit, you’re probably looking at several years before you get any fruit. 
Definitely. My dad had peach trees that grew from fallen fruit, and it took years before they bore fruit. I’m just curious about making them grow.
Plumb trees are know for growing exceptionally straight.
I shall name it Bob.
They would grow, and you should see the growth start by the next year. I don’t know exactly how long it would take to start producing, but 5 years is probably a reasonable expectation.
One problem is that the plums you get from the new tree might not have the characteristics of the original ones. As flowers are pollinated, the genes get shuffled and it’s those genes that show up in the seed.
here ya go-
Briefly, plant in the fall then expect growth next mid-summer.
Will the plumb tree produce good plums? Apple trees are not planted from seeds because the fruit will most likely be sour and generally unusable for eating.
Thanks, I’ll give that a try. I’ll use a pot under the (clear) patio roof. It does get cold enough here for ‘stratification’.
Will it produce good plums? Who can say? There’s an apple tree in the back yard that produces tiny, grainy, tasteless apples.
Unless you have room to experiment, hoping to get decent fruit from a tree grown from a fruit pit is a long-shot gamble.
Much better to get a grafted tree which should reward your nurturing with tasty fruit.
Stones from plum and other related fruits typically need to be stratifiedbefore they will germinate. Putting them in a pot filled with gritty soil and sinking it into the garden soil over winter is a good way to do this without losing track of the seeds.
If they grow, they will produce trees with fruit that are not exactly the same as the parent - most likely inferior - fruit tree breeders make careful crosses between promising varieties and may only get one useful new cultivar from tens of thousands of candidates.
Still, it’s an interesting thing to do and if there’s a patch of woodland or scrub nearby where you can plant out the young trees, they should eventually grow to produce fruit - and it will probably still be nice - even wild plums are generally good, if smaller and often sourer than their cultivated relatives.
Interesting. These plums are half the size or less of the ones one typically sees in the supermarket.
Some edible/ornamental plums are grown from seed. Even a few of the ones in the link are raised from seed selected for the best characteristics.
Another factoid: plum trees sold in nurseries are normally a good fruiting variety grafted on to a rootstock adapted to your climate (this is how you get dwarf and semi-dwarf trees as well). What you’ll get is an inferior, quite possibly unrecognizable variation on the plum you ate, on its own poorly-adapted roots.
This is true of stone-fruits, apples, pears, etc. There is a reason why there is a fruit-tree nursery stock industry.
Why is that?
I don’t understand why a seed should produce an inferior fruit; also how does grafting improve it?
Please explain??
Imagine that there are 100,000 plum trees, but only 25 or so have really superior fruit. The others are mushy or small or sour. But those 25 lack other qualities like tolerance to cold, ability to thrive in poor soils, disease resistance. So those 25 are vegetatively reproduced – a slip (essentially, a twig) from those is inserted into strong rootstocks adapted to specific climates and situations – that way the great qualities of two plum varieties are combined – one has vegetative superiority and other has fruiting superiority.
See how that works?
If you sow seeds, what you are getting is the whole rather randomly expressed genetic package of two trees (the mommy and the daddy tree). You won’t get anything predictable, believe me. And because few plums are worth cultivating, you are likely to get a plum that is inferior. Because that is the genetic inheritance. To get a predictably superior fruit, you reproduce vegetatively. Every apple, plum, pear, peach or cherry you have ever bought in a store was vegetatively reproduced from just a few varieties.
Fruit tree breeders spend their lives carefully cross-pollinating trees and growing out the offspring in the hopes of someday lucking into a variety that is superior to what’s out there right now. Doesn’t happen very often.
Thanks for that.
Does the same process work for something like wheat? I understand that farmers buy new seed every year because the crop degrades with each successive planting; if so, how does the supplier of seed maintain high quality seed?
No, it doesn’t work the same for wheat at all. Wheat is an annual grass. The crop does not degrade with planting, otherwise wheat would have died out during the thousand of years people just saved seed to plant in spring.
It’s true that wheat is now a vast global industry controlled by a few metastasized corporations, and I believe that most wheat in the US is genetically modified and there are very very few strains of wheat being used. But the basic process is much simpler – at least, you could go buy a sack of wheat at the feed store and grow yourself a patch of wheat if you wanted, and you’d get, you know, wheat. If you reaped and threshed it, that is.
<Say it fast>
Peter Piper planted a peck of pickled plum pits. If Peter Piper planted a peck of pickled plum pits, where’s the peck of pickled plum pits that Peter Piper planted?
Okay folks, it’s silly hour! The plum orchards and wheat fields are full of thistles. So you hire Theophilus Thistle to extract them for you.
Theophilus Thistle, the successful thistle sifter, while sifting a sieve full of unsifted thistles, thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb.