If you have a tree that makes tasty fruit, especially if it’s an unusual species or variety, I highly recommend saving as many seeds as you can so you can swap them with other people, either in your community or online.
This goes double if you live in a warm zone (say, zone 6 or above) and are growing fruit trees that are only hardy to your zone and above. Somebody who’s trying to adapt that species to grow a zone or two colder would be greatly helped out by being given a whole bunch of seeds.
For myself, for instance, I would love banana, kumquat, loquat, and sugarcane seeds. I live in zone 7, which is maybe just barely marginal for those species. I bet there are people in zone 2 who would love seeds from fruit trees that are usually only able to survive to zone 3.
So if you have tasty fruits that you’re harvesting now . . . save those seeds! A lot of other people would probably love to try planting them.
Ill be making sure to save lots of them this season, and will post here in the GTS community when they are available. For sure I will have:
Plums (2-3 varieties, all very tasty)
Cherries (4-5 varieties, also incredibly delicious)
Apple (Maybe a half dozen varieties from my parents garden). Ive already collected hundreds of seeds from the local winter storage varieties we’ve been eating, which include Melrose, Champion, Golden Delicious, Jona Gold, and quite a few mystery varieties that were enjoyable to eat. I have also ordered lots of the SkillCult OP seeds, and am putting in an order for about a dozen different scions as we speak. Frankentree project on the horizon. Id love to exchange scions in the future.
Peaches (2 varieties, I think)
Currants ( Red, Black, and White)
Gooseberry (Green and Red)
Blueberry and Bilberry
Raspberry
Grapes (Half a dozen varieties I think)
These are coming from zone 7 West Pomerania. Let me know if any of you all are interested in anything specific.
Which varieties of gooseberries and currants do you have? There can be a fair amount of variability in flavor, and there’s definitely a lot of variability in thorniness with gooseberries, so it’s a question I think a lot of people will be interested in.
If you’re interested in feijoa cuttings, you can get some from her this month!
It looks like she has exactly one jujube cutting left, too.
I ordered some things from her in fall, and they arrived nicely packaged and in excellent condition. A lot of the things I ordered were feijoa cuttings. I stuck them in soil with some willow water, and I’m hoping they’ll root. I don’t know whether they will; I’m just hoping!
If you’re interested in banana true seeds, I highly recommend this Ebay seller:
I bought some of those seeds from that listing last year, and I got some germination! (Tragically, I took those little sprouts outside too early, and they all died.) I’m trying to germinate the rest of the ones I bought from them right now.
Now is the ideal time to sow banana seeds outside, since banana seeds are hard to germinate unless temperatures are fluctuating between chilly and warm. In other words, early spring in most climates.
Oh, wait, I forgot you’re in the EU . . . blast, those sellers won’t be able to send cuttings to you! You could contact them and ask if they’d be willing to send seeds to you, though.
Great what you do with fruit!
if some do not know it I prefer to talk about it here for the success of the projects of all.
Many fruit trees in the temperate zone (where there is a winter) need a stratification. Seeds must undergo a period of wet cold to germinate in the spring. Do not store peach seeds, plum, apricot, cherry, apple, pear…etc in a dry container in a heated place.
The simplest is to enshrine them in a pot filled with soil and sand in the fall and leave outside in the shade. The faster it freezes, the faster the dormancy will be lifted.
Also be patient some hard seeds can take 2/3 years before rising so do not throw everything in the first spring.
On some rare maples that I multiply, it takes even 4 years and the resulting only 5% success. Working with trees is entering another temporal dimension.
Im not sure. This is coming from mom and dads garden, and they did not keep labels for anything. When they do develop into fruits/berries ill be taking photos before saving any seeds and making them available to share for anybody interested. I do recall these having thorns, but they were yummy!
Regarding Feijoa I prefer to grow from seed in order to have trees with better root development, but I would definitely accept cuttings if somebody was willing to share. Fresh fruits to extract seeds from would be the top choice hehe. I did order a small bag of seeds to test out. I know these can also be quite variable in quality and flavor. With the ones ive eaten from Hawaii some have been just ok, and some have been amazing.
Thanks for sharing the link. Ill check out that seller and see what their offerings are.
I have been looking around for the different cultivars, and have narrowed down the potential varieties that Ill want to invest for seeds to about a half dozen. For now I do already have two small tropical climate bananas staying alive in a bucket on the window sill, but these won’t likely be producing any fruit until I can get them into a better environment such as a RMH heated greenhouse, or brought indoors next to some larger windows for overwintering. That would require some big pots haha. The main goal is keeping them alive, and ill more than likely just take the smaller pups at the end of each season and continue overwintering those the same way im doing now.
The banana seeds im on the lookout for are the more cold tolerant varieties. These include:
M. basjoo
M. velutina
M. helens
M. chini champa
M. sikkimensis
“Blue Java”
“Dhursay”
This is very encouraging! When i do get mine ill be starting them indoors until the the risk of frost has passed, which in my area is around mid April. Once they get bigger they will be strategically placed in an area where I can create a better microclimate, and easily bring in lots of mulch to cover the bases to prevent freezing of the ground.
I wish I could take credit for these fruits, but this is not my work. This is coming from mom and dads garden. Im just fortunate enough to be able to enjoy what they created. I do intend to save all the seeds this year for purpose of planting out on my own land, and sharing the extras with the new friends that have been made here in GTS.
I appreciate your guidance. It sounds like you’ve got some experience doing this already. I did order some Maple seeds (A. sacharrum). Ill make sure to be very very patient with them haha.
yes, I have been planting trees for more than 20 years out of passion.
saccharum is part of the rapids and simple, normally if the stratification is well done in the cold you should have the germinations from the first spring.
with climate change and lack of winter cold, natural stratifications are increasingly difficult to achieve here. So that on very rare tree seeds I make artificial stratification in the fridge.
Um, all of these, please. We’re actively recruiting fruit trees for our new food forest.
We got some apple seeds from Skillcult and are stratifying them in an airbed outside. We also collected a couple pounds of apples from a tree in a nearby town that still had apples hanging in Decemberish/January? The one we tasted was good enough for some random tree apple. I plan to collect all sorts of apple seeds from around the area since it’s kind of a big deal around here, and I’d be willing to try to send some to you at the end of the season if you’d like. I’m not sure what the shipping restrictions are between the US and Poland, but I’d be willing to try.
We got a bunch of paw paw seeds to try to grow out this year. As they fruit (in a couple years?) I’ll make those seeds available to GTS.
If you’re into Passionfruit, look into Maypops. In zone 7 you could probably pretty easily do regular Passionfruit, but if you need something a bit more cold hardy, you can try the Maypops. I got some seeds from EFN. If I get fruit this year, I’ll offer the seeds up.
I was able to harvest tiny apples from a tree while I was in town today. They’re about the size of a cherry. They remind me of what Ben Falk calls “turkey apples” - small apples that stay on the trees all winter and provide food for his local turkeys.
I tasted one of them - it didn’t taste tart or bitter like I thought it might. Though it was old and a bit mushy and mealy. It still had a little sweetness to it.
I thought most crab apples are larger, maybe 2 to 3 times that big?
We’re actively recruiting fruit trees for our new food forest.
