Is it possible to start seedlings from apple or orange seeds, in the fruit one gets from the grocery store? What about date seeds? I don’t have any hopes of actually growing trees, you understand, but thought it would be intriguing to see if I could sprout seeds.
Can one use potting soil? How much water is good? I could keep them warm inside, with light. Have any Dopers ever tried this?
You can do it from lemons and oranges. I did it a few times as a kid. I used a small clay pot and standard potting soil. Avoiding cold temperatues and plenty of sunlight seemed to be they key.
Thanks, I’m going to give it a try. I have all the stuff, the pots and soil and so on. How long did it take, when you did it, Shagnasty?
WhyKid and I sprout seeds as experiments all the time. Most of them will indeed sprout, although what exactly you end up with is often a mystery. Lots of bought produce are hybrids, so some of their seeds give you one variety and some another. You can end up with two or even more varieties of plants from the seeds of one fruit. Others are grafts of one plant on another, which mean some seeds will give you fruit and some won’t.
Pineapples are really fun, though, and actually do give you little bitty pineapples. To grow one, cut off the top of a pineapple straight across, about an inch or two below the green leaves, and stick it in potting soil. It will grow more leaves and then a stalk, from which a bitty baby pineapple forms! I’ve never gotten one to grow big enough to eat, but they’re awfully cute.
Try to replicate their native enviroments as best you can. Citrus and tropicals tend to like lots of water and heat. Apples are happier a room temperature or even a little cold. Dates, I believe are desert-y trees, so I would guess periods of water interspersed with periods of drought, like an orchid, but I’m sure if you Google, it will come.
Thank you too WhyNot. I never thought about pineapples, as I don’t buy them myself. But at the cafe I work at my boss orders fresh pineapples for fruitcups, so I could get a pineapple top like you said. That sounds like fun.
As has been noted, citrus fruit seeds are quite easy to sprout. You may even find some fruits, usually late in their season, with already-sprouted seeds[happens frequently with grapefruits] Dates on the other hand can be a bit of a problem. I believe most dates are steamed to kill off certain bacteria/fungi, this prevents the seed from sprouting. Dates from a health food/organic food store may not be treated the same way. Anyhoo, just place the seed on the surface of the soil in a small pot. Keep the soil moist, and eventually a white root will split the seedcoat and bury itself in the soil. A stem and leaves will follow in a few weeks. Avocadoes can be sprouted similarly, just push the pit into the soil, enough to anchor it[approximately one-third of its height. The pit will crack, and the stem and leaves will then appear[the root will have done its geotropic thing invisibly under the soil] Ginger, though not a fruit, can be done the same way. The rare banana seed you may come across would be a waste of time, as i believe they are sterile. Stone fruits[peaches, plums, etc.] are easy too. Seeded grapes might be worth a try, but I have no experience with them. Mango seeds are huge, and you might get a whole orchard’s worth of trees out of one papaya. Apple and pear seeds may need a rest period in the refrigerator. Pot them up, seal them in a plastic bag, and chill for several weeks. Bring them out into the warmth, they should eventually sprout.If you try any of these, do more than one so your chances for success are greater.
I have a grapefruit tree, about 9 years old now, growing in my kitchen. I sprouted it from a seed. The tree is something of a bonsai - not by intent, but by circumstance I guess. We don’t get enough sun here in the pacific northwest to really foster the growth of citrus trees. Well, I’ve trimmed this down to keep it from getting too tall, but it has required repotting only twice in 9 years (I have it checked at a local nursery). It has never flowered.
I had a bunch of Granny Smith apples that had seeds inside them already sprouting, this fall. I tried planting them. They all died though. 
It is actually possible to get a citrus seed to sprout and grow into a plant genetically identical to the parent; citrus seeds are polyembryonic (so you often get more than one seedling sprouting out of the same seed), but they also produce growths from a layer of the seed coat that look like seedlings but are in fact more like little cuttings or clones of the parent. There’s no easy way to tell which are which though. They have a reputation for being hard to bring into flower/fruit when grown from seed, but they can be attractive houseplants just on the basis of their glossy dark green foliage.
If you’re preparing a pineapple top for growing, trim off as much of the fruit pulp as you can (leaving half an inch or so of core), place the whole thing on a dry windowsill (but not in full sunshine) and let it dry out for a day or two; the cut surfaces will scab over and will be less likely to rot when you pot it up.
Avacados are fun to grow. Suspend the stone by toothpicks (3, lightly impaled) over a glass of water. Don’t change the water too often but keep it topped up so the water is no more then 5 mm’s up from the bottom of the stone.
I have several as pot plants now and several others in the roots-sprouting stage. I’m not convinced they will ever grow fruit but it’s fun to sprout them.
Yes I know they are not fruit but carrots grow as pineapples do, just slice off the top and pop in a saucer of water.
I have grown poppies from poppy seeds. Just sprinkled them in the garden and forgot about them…voila, opium poppies with gorgeous flowers.
Kiwi fruit seeds are quite easy to germinate; they grow into an attractive climbing plant with densely bristly stems and large, crinkly leaves. Not the ideal houseplant though, as they are deciduous, but plant a few* of them against a sunny wall in your garden and you could be picking your own kiwi fruits, with a fair deal of patience (they take a few years to come into fruit).
*They are often dioecious - having male and female flowers on separate plants; it would be a great shame to nurture your kiwi plants for years, only to learn that they were all males - planting half a dozen should more or less guarantee a mix of some kind.
Again, I really appreciate all the advice and ideas I have been getting. Dopers are the best!
About 10 years ago an apple core was tossed into a small garden area in my front yard. Last fall I dug up the apple tree that had sprouted and had no problems giving it away.
As others have said, yes you can.
Most of the stone fruits and things like apples and pears need a period of stratification (cold treatment) to get them to break dormancy. Simply put them in a bag with some damp paper towel, or sphagnum moss or even potting soil for several weeks in the refrigerator, if you have room or a few months. After the period of cold treatment, plant into soil in a warm place. They should start growing.
Date seeds are incredibly easy to grow. This happened once with my garden, I had eaten dates on the porch one day and spat the seeds into the garden. Months later I came back to find date seedlings popping up everywhere. If you live in a cold climate, just put the cleaned seeds (if you leave fruit flesh on, you’ll invite mold)into pots and keep in a warm sunny place. In several months they should germinate (in fact, I’m trying this right now).
The only problem with dates is you need hot warm, non-humid weather for proper flowering and fruiting, and the fact that dates are either male or female, so you never know until they flower which is which. Ten to one you won’t even get a tree with suitable fruit, which is why date growers buy and sell off the suckers from the base of the palms (the palms you see in date cultivation are kept trimmed of their basal suckers. If they weren’t trimmed, you’d get a big grove of date palms)
Another easy fruit to grow is Chayote - simply take the whole fruit, and bury it partially in a pot of soil. They’ll even sprout without being in soil if left out too long. I’ve got a monster vine from a Chayote I planted in the backyard a year and a half ago. You CAN take the seed out, but it’s just easier to plant the entire fruit! They don’t have pretty flowers (which are small and inconspicuous), but they do have wonderful, big leaves and are quick growers. The leaves are like a smaller version of pumpkin leaves (no surprise as both are in the squash family).
About citrus:
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
They have a reputation for being hard to bring into flower/fruit when grown from seed, but they can be attractive houseplants just on the basis of their glossy dark green foliage.
Except for Key/Mexican limes. They’re the little (1-1 1/4") limes you use for drinks and Key lime pies. They easily come from seed and will flower/fruit in about 2 years.
Is it true that lemon and orange plants grown from seed have lemon- and orange-scented flowers? I tried growing a lemon plant once; it sprouted and lived for about a year, but was never healthy, and finally it died. It never bloomed, although the foliage itself was very attractive. I’d give it another try if I thought I’d get some citrusy blooms from it.
M.
Citrus flowers are highly-scented, but not exactly of orange or lemon. By all accounts, you’ll have to work hard (or be very lucky) to get a seed-grown plant to produce flowers; Citrus plants grown in plant nurseries for their flowers and fruit are grafted onto rootstocks that promote early blooming.
If you do manage to get one to flower though, it is (in my personal opinion) one of the very finest and most delicious flower scents in the world; I can’t grow citrus outside in my local climate, but whenever I go abroad to somewhere warmer (or visit Kew gardens for that matter), I can be found standing with my nose buried in a lemon or orange flower for quite extended periods.
Oops; didn’t spot this comment here; I’ll have to look out for some of those (I’ve not seen a lot of choices in the limes on offer in my locality (UK)).
Ask a bartender.
Lemons on their own roots rarely do well. Commercial lemons are usually grafted to something called “rough lemon”, or one of the trifoliate orange/citrus hybrids.
Mangetout - Key lime trees stay small. Mine are less than 1 1/2 feet tall. They’re doing ok in 8 inch pots. They are also wickedly thorny.
The Granny Smith variety that Chotii mentioned above allegedly appeared the same way; look here. Since apples don’t breed true from seed, you may have missed your chance to have a new variety named after you! All apples of a particular kind are really from the same tree, just propagated by taking cuttings and rooting them directly or grafting onto another rootstock. Since they generally don’t self-fertilize, to get fruit you need to have two or more kinds flowering about the same time.
A lot of spices besides poppy seeds will sprout, unless they’ve been treated to kill pests. Black pepper is particularly nice.
Another fun experiment I learned back in maybe grade three is to try your own nut trees. Hard-shelled ones germinate better if you file away at the shell to make it easier for water to get in and the seedling to get out. (Don’t go right through the shell, just take off the polish and weaken it a bit.)
I’ve also grown caragana bushes from seed. (They’re windbreak shrubs, originally from Siberia, that the Canadian government gave to the Prairie settlers.) Those need to be frozen for weeks or months before they’ll sprout.