I Grew Fruit Trees from Store Bought Fruits and this is what happened - Full Tutorial

When I think about all the different plants and trees that I've grown over the years, there's a few memories that really stick out as some of the coolest and most memorable moments. One of those was harvesting my very first pomegranate from a tree that I grew from a little seed and that seed came from a fruit that I bought at the store. There's something so rewarding about starting new life from a little seed that would have otherwise just been thrown away without even giving it a second thought. And you don't have to look very far in your day-to-day life to find opportunities to grow some really amazing things. Sometimes you just have to look a little bit closer. So today we're going to go over seven different plants that you can grow from seed from fruits that you buy at the store and I'm going to show you the whole process of how to do it. So let's just get started with pomegranates. So I like to open a pomegranate up by lightly cutting down the ridges of the fruit all the way around and then cutting off the top and bottom and that way you can just pull the fruit apart which keeps all the little beads or the arils intact instead of cutting through them with a knife and having juice go everywhere. So next just go through and remove the flesh of a few seeds. I just gently chew it off and try and clean it off as best as I can. For starting the seeds one way is just to put them onto a moist paper towel and fold it up and then put it into a sealed jar or a container and leave it somewhere warm for around two weeks. At this stage they should be sprouting and then you can just put them into some soil and keep it slightly moist as they adapt to living in the soil. Another way to start the seeds is just to direct sow them into some soil and leave them somewhere warm, keep them well watered and they should start to sprout after about two to three weeks. Sometimes they can take a little bit longer than that though so be patient with them and you should hopefully get some little plants coming up. In a warmer climate pomegranates will be evergreen but where I live we get a cold winter so they do go deciduous which is totally fine. These are pretty hardy plants and they will just put their growth on again in the springtime. My tree first flowered when it was four years old and I reckon these plants are worth growing even just for the flowers and the ornamental value that they have and the plants look really cool in autumn as well before they go dormant. Despite flowering for a few years prior the tree didn't produce a fruit until it was six years old and when growing pomegranates from seed they don't grow true to type so fruit quality isn't guaranteed but I was happy with how this fruit turned out. It had a nice flavour and a really great colour as well and the fruit was a bit smaller than the ones you find at the store but this could have also been because it was just its first fruit it ever produced. It's hard to say it could also be to do with climate or soil but either way I reckon these plants are so cool to grow and getting a fruit was such a rewarding feeling. Next up is goji berries and you'll often find these in different scrogan or trail mixes mixed in with other dried fruit and nuts. So they're just these little red berries here and the reason you can't buy these as a fresh fruit is because they're really perishable and so by growing them in your garden it means you can actually enjoy the fresh fruit and all their great nutritional benefits straight out of your garden and these are quite a good choice if you live in a colder climate as well. They can handle really cold winter temperatures and they're also really drought tolerant as well once the plants are established. So there's a couple of ways to get the seeds out of these. The first way is just to pull the berry open and scrape the seeds out although this does take a while because the seeds are kind of stuck in the sticky pulp and then you can clean the seeds by rubbing them against a sieve under some water. The second way is much easier you just need to soak a few berries in a glass of water for a few hours. I left mine in there overnight and the fruit will swell up and then you can just squeeze the seeds out of the fruit really easily and I'm just putting these on a paper towel so that you can see under the soil of the pot that you're growing them in and get them started that way. I'm just sprinkling the seeds onto some seed raising mix and then I'm just going to very lightly cover them and give them a bit of a spray with some water. Because I'm doing this in winter I'm placing these on a heat mat and then covering them with a clear lid just to help keep the surface of the soil moist. This should make the perfect environment for them to sprout. After only nine days this is how they looked so they actually took less than a week to start sprouting which is really fast and there didn't seem to be much of a difference between the seeds that I soaked in the fruit and the seeds that I scraped out and cleaned in the sieve. Just a really good level of germination overall and I think using the heat mat has definitely helped with those seeds sprouting. So I'll leave a link down in the description of where you can get a heat mat from if you'd like and I've definitely found them to be a really helpful tool when it comes to sprouting all sorts of different seeds. After another five weeks they're putting on some good growth so they're a nice healthy size to transplant. I'm just carefully splitting these up into their own individual pots and do my best to not damage the stems or the roots of the plants. So the goji berries did continue growing well but unfortunately during the summer my turkeys went on a rampage into my shade house and they stripped all the leaves off most of the plants they ripped them all out of the ground and unfortunately I was only able to save a couple of them so kind of gutted about that but I'll start a new batch this spring and I'll keep the ones that I've got going. They grow as like a long arching stem and so some chalice is a good idea if you're growing these and they can also be grown in containers which is pretty cool and still fruit if you grow them in containers as well and from seed they can fruit after about three years from what I've read but if you know someone that already has goji berry plants that are fruiting these grow really well from cuttings and that's a great way to get started and get fruit a little bit sooner than if you were to grow them from seed. So this right here is an awesome dragonfruit plant that I started from seed and I'm so stoked with how it's looking I reckon these are such amazing looking plants and these are a type of vining cactus they do like to climb which is why I've got this structure here for it. These can take around five to seven years to fruit if you start them from seed so quite a while unless you decide to graft your little seedling and there's some great videos here on YouTube about that if you want to learn more and then you could get fruit in as soon as like two-ish years. You can also grow these from cuttings really easily as well but I know not everyone can get their hands on cuttings. I wanted to show you how you can grow your own dragonfruits from seed and get some beautiful plants like what I've got here. So there's a few methods I use to get these started from seed but first we need to get the seeds out and if you've never had these these are just the coolest looking fruits but I just take a small bit of the flesh and push it through a sieve until you've got all the seeds separated and cleaned and you can just leave them out to dry on a paper towel or some baking paper if you like and then just lightly sprinkle the seeds onto some seed raising mix and I'm just using another pot with some soil in it and just lightly shaking it over to spread a thin layer of soil over the seeds. Now you just need to leave them somewhere warm with a good amount of light. Make sure the soil doesn't dry out while they're sprouting so it can help to cover the pot with a clear lid to keep the warmth and the moisture in. If you're someone that forgets to water your seeds the second method of sprouting dragonfruit seeds might work better for you. All you need to do is just submerge some seeds in a cup of water and leave them in a bright and warm spot like on your kitchen bench or something. You can even put them on a heat mat and as long as it's warm enough the seeds should be sprouting after one or two weeks and look something like this and then you can just pour them onto some soil and carefully plant them with a toothpick. Whichever way you choose to sprout them when they're a month old they should look something like this with just their two little cotyledons or seed leaves. At this stage they look nothing like a cactus at all but before long they grow the spiky stems from the middle and although these are a cactus they're a type of jungle cacti so they do like to be watered more frequently than many other types of cacti. When my ones were a year old this is how they looked here and ideally I wouldn't plant them this densely again because you just end up with a tangled mess and it's kind of hard to manage. So it's best to have them growing up a trellis at this stage and that way you can keep on top of trimming the side growth off the plants while they climb to the top. So what I'm going to do next is just add a branch along the top and then once I clip the tip of the cactus once it reaches the top it can then kind of branch out and hang down over the top and those branches or parts of the cactus that hang down is where the fruits and flowers are going to form. And this is the end of winter right now and I've just had it growing under the eaves of my house and although we get frost here and a lot of rain by having it under here it's protected from too much rain, too much frost and all that kind of thing. So once it starts to warm up these really take off and grow quite rapidly. The other thing to know about dragonfruits is that they don't always grow true to type which is pretty common with a lot of fruits that you start from seed. But it's not to say that the fruits that you get in the end will be worse than the one you started with. There's always a chance it could be better or it might just be different in some way. So I reckon that's all part of the fun of growing something from seed especially things like dragonfruits because they they do cross-pollinate with other varieties and you don't really know what you're going to get until you get to try the fruit. And the good thing about growing them yourself is you can actually pick the fruits when they're properly ripe. Sometimes the ones you buy at the store are picked way too early which is a common reason why the flavour's kind of a bit bland and not that nice. So hopefully when you grow at home if you let it fully ripen will still be really nice. So the next one we're looking at is peanuts and these are obviously not a fruit and they're not a nut either they're a type of legume and they're a lot of fun to grow. They're really fascinating plants so I thought we'd cover this one today. So what you want to do is pick up some natural raw peanuts. You can either get the ones in the peanut shells or just use ones like what I've got here. Just make sure they're not salted or roasted. I've had success sprouting them in two different ways. The first way is by direct sowing into some potting soil and these do need fairly warm temperatures to sprout. The seeds can rot if you keep them too wet so it's best to use a soil that drains quite well. You should start seeing them sprout within a couple of weeks and this is how mine were looking at a month old, though the speed that they grow will kind of depend on how warm it is. I've also had success sprouting these on a moist paper towel but do make sure that you squeeze out most of the water. You only really need it to be very slightly moist. Too much moisture in the paper towel will cause them to grow mould so also don't soak the peanuts first or anything, just put them in as they are and then fold them up and place them into a sealed container. After five days they should have started to grow and sprouted some decent roots and then you can just plant them into some soil and water them in. And after another 10 days, so two weeks total, you should have yourself some little peanut plants. Peanuts grow well in fairly loose sandy soils that are rich in organic matter and they need quite a long season of warm weather to grow and mature, usually around five months of warm weather and you can also grow these in a nice wide container too if you like. If you've never seen how the actual peanuts grow this might blow your mind a little bit, I know it did for me. So first they produce these little yellow flowers which can actually pollinate themselves completely independently without needing insects or wind and once the flower's fertilized the stem of the flower with the ovary on the tip elongates to become a peg which then dives headfirst into the soil and then grows and forms into a peanut. Really fascinating stuff. Once these are ready to pick you can pull the whole plant out and hang it up and allow the peanuts to dry and my plants ended up getting kind of shaded out and neglected in the end so they didn't really thrive but it was still cool being able to harvest a few handfuls of my own peanuts. Tamarillos or tree tomatoes are a fruit native to South America and they grow on a really fast growing tree. They can fruit from seed in about one and a half to two years and these are a little bit harder to find in stores at times they are usually only available seasonally so do keep an eye out for these. If you've never seen on the inside we'll cut one open and you can see how incredible these look. For growing tamarillo I just put a bit of the seeds through a sieve to clean them off as best as I can. It doesn't really clean them off very well but that's totally fine and then I just dry the seeds off on a paper towel or baking paper. Now I'm just taking the seeds and sprinkling them onto some moist soil, lightly covering them and then placing them somewhere warm and again I'm just covering these with a plastic lid to keep the moisture and warmth in. After five weeks they're looking nice and healthy and we seem to have had a good germination rate as well which is awesome so now's a good time to transplant these into their own pots and it's a bit like tomatoes where it's best to handle them from their leaves as opposed to holding the really fragile stem. At three and a half months old these have developed some good root systems so I decided to upsize the pots again and I'm just using a good quality potting mix and putting a bit of mulch on the top to protect the surface roots because these are quite drought sensitive plants. Unfortunately these trees have been getting damaged from pests like caterpillars which I've since picked off and I've also blasted the leaves with water because they had quite a lot of white flies on them which seemed to be attracted to these plants and now I'm just spraying the leaves with neem oil to try and get rid of them fully and I find this usually works pretty well after doing it a couple of times. Tamarillo trees do best in a subtropical climate and one that's protected from frost and wind because even like a light frost will cause the leaves to turn black and fall off. As long as you can keep the trunk green though and alive for the winter they should re-sprout the leaves in the spring but yeah frost is definitely not ideal for these plants. The other thing is wind so keep them somewhere protected. They don't mind a bit of shade so you can like plant some trees around them to give them a bit more protection but yeah if you can do all that then you should be able to get some fruits off these and yeah enjoy your own homegrown tamarillos. So here I've got a Fijian red papaya and these are pretty easy to get going from seed. This one looks like it's not fully ripe unfortunately but let's take some of the seeds out anyway and we'll clean these off. So they sort of have like this capsule of jelly around the seeds that stops them from sprouting within the fruit so I'm just rubbing the seeds on a paper towel to remove the jelly sack from around the seeds. Next I'm just placing these seeds onto some moist potting soil and I'm just doing four seeds per pot because they are fresh seeds so they should sprout pretty reliably. If you want though you can put way more seeds in and then just thin them out later by cutting them off at the base. So now that I've covered the seeds over and watered them I'm placing these on a heat mat as well to speed up the germination and I'm also placing a plastic container over the top to act as a mini greenhouse. These took about two weeks to start sprouting so this is them at three weeks old and three out of the four of the seeds have sprouted in each pot and these are just their little seed leaves so next they'll start sprouting their true leaves and those look really cool so I'll definitely show you once those have come up. So seven weeks after planting the seeds this is how they look and all of the seeds we planted have sprouted now. Really happy with that and I'm now just going to transplant them into their own pots. From what I've heard these don't like a lot of root disturbance so I'm just taking a bit of soil with each plant and doing my best not to damage the roots. I'm planning just to keep these in pots for now because of course papaya are tropical plants so they can't handle the frost and cold temperatures that we get here so I'll just have to bring these inside during the winter to keep them protected. So this is how the papaya trees are looking now and they're still growing fairly slowly for their age. In a tropical climate which is not what we have here these will grow extremely fast and can fruit from seed in less than a year which is pretty awesome. They just need lots of warmth, lots of sun, really good free draining soil and lots of water as well. But here I've just had these sheltered inside during the winter obviously they haven't had a huge amount of sun so that's totally cool you know if you don't live somewhere tropical then there's nothing stopping you growing these as a beautiful little indoor tree or you could potentially grow them to maturity in a greenhouse and see how you go with that. If you want to grow these actually for the fruit do just make sure you grow multiple plants though because you get male plants and female plants and you need at least one of each in order for cross-pollination. Sometimes you will get a hermaphrodite which will have both male and female flowers on the same plant but yeah it's just a good idea to grow multiple plants so that you can make sure you get that cross-pollination therefore creating a beautiful tasting papaya. Kiwifruit vines are pretty easy to get started from seed and from what I've read they take at least three to five years to start producing fruit. I'm going to be growing these red fleshed kiwifruit which look really cool and they have a slight berry flavor to them. Just like many of the other fruits we started we're just extracting the seeds in a sieve and then getting a pot of moist soil and scattering the seeds on the surface and after lightly covering them with some soil I'm just giving them a spray with some water to avoid displacing the seeds too much. I'm putting these in a nice warm spot to germinate and just covering these with a lid as well just to help keep that surface soil nice and moist. After five weeks these should be sprouting and I find these seeds to sprout really reliably so you don't need to sow as many seeds as I did here but if you do have this many you can always thin them out to reduce the competition. I've found these don't do too well if you transplant them at this size so it'd be best to just thin them out a bit and wait till they get their first true leaves before you then transplant them. I accidentally killed my first batch of tiny seedlings by leaving them in the cold but these ones here are a new batch that I started and at this stage they're seven months old and looking really nice. You do need to grow quite a few of these plants to get fruit because each plant is either male or female so you need at least one of each in order to get fruit. In winter these lose their leaves and become dormant and at that stage they can handle quite cold winter frosts but they do need some protection from frost in the spring and the autumn. Kiwifruit are quite a large vining plant so they do need something to grow up and they need a decent amount of space and as well as that they need good protection from wind and they do best in well-drained fertile soils with good amounts of moisture year-round particularly in the summer when it's a bit drier. They don't grow true to type so the fruit you get might be a bit different to the one you started with although you should still get a nice tasting fruit and otherwise if you do have access to a particular variety you can always graft that variety onto your seedlings to get the variety that you want. For me growing fruits from seed has been more than just the end result of getting a cool plant or tasting its fruit you know from doing this I've learned so much more about plants and you know different ways you can start seeds, different growing requirements for each plant and I've also learned how to graft fruit trees now which is really cool and my passion for growing plants and growing my own food really did just start from a tiny little seed and the curiosity I had about it. So what are you going to grow today?