How to grow Persimmons from seed

Hey everyone, so in today's video I wanted to show you guys my persimmons that I grew from seed and talk to you about how I grew them and then you guys can give it a go yourself. But before I move in closely and show you my seedlings, I just wanted to talk a little bit about actually getting your seed from the fruit. Because what I've found is that all of the fruits that I buy from the store which are commercially grown, they actually have no seeds in them. Well you may find some that have some very tiny black seeds but you know they're undeveloped and they're nowhere near the size of a persimmon seed that you want to look for and basically they're not going to germinate for you. So what I did is went to our local market and someone was selling some persimmons that they grew on their own tree which was grown locally and what I found is that all of those fruits actually had decent seeds in them and I managed to get them to germinate. So if you guys want to get some persimmon seeds see if you can find like a private grower of persimmons or you know a friend that has a persimmon tree and in winter when they come into season see if you can get some fruits and hopefully some seeds inside them. Anyway now that I've covered that let's move in closely and check out my persimmon. So these are my persimmons that I grew from seed and they're looking pretty cool. They have a quite interesting way of growing, how the seed coating gets shoved out of the soil and then eventually the leaves will push that open and come out like this one has here. Now I tried two methods to grow these. The first method was using the paper towel method. So I put the seeds inside a paper towel and then into a ziploc bag. Now I put four seeds in here and these are the three here that germinated. There was one that did not germinate and it was a bit smaller than the other seeds so it could just be to do with you know that the seed wasn't fully developed. I'm not too sure but you know three out of four is pretty good I reckon so that method was quite effective. Now two of the seeds only took about two weeks to germinate and I'll add a photo of what they look like after a couple of weeks of being in the ziploc bag. So on the day I took that photo I transplanted them into these pots and after only a couple of days I could already see the seed coat pushing its way out of the soil and at first I thought it was a bit weird and I thought oh maybe I buried it too shallow but turns out it was just it shoving its way out of the soil and doing what it's supposed to do. Now this little guy over here took a further two weeks to actually germinate so he took about a month to start sprouting roots in the ziploc bag. So what you want to do is be patient with it and don't give up too soon because you know they can take longer than each other to germinate so I'm guessing it's all just a matter of seed strength or you know something like that. So that's that method. Now the second method I use to germinate these is this one here I planted directly into the soil and it's doing a really good job. I believe this one here is about a week and a half to two weeks older than these ones so I planted it beforehand and all I did was just shove it into the soil give it a water and keep it in a warm spot and you know it's doing a great job. It's pushed open the seed coating and it's still attached onto this leaf and I'm just leaving it there because I reckon it looks kind of cool. But what I've found is that if you plant your persimmons into a pot make sure you use quite a deep pot. This one here is so shallow and already the roots are coming out the bottom and you know that's not good for the plant. That root there is now well it looks to me to be dead so what I'll do today is transplant this into a larger pot so he can get some decent roots growing. Okay so let's check out the roots of this guy. So check that out. It basically just has one tap root with a few little side shoots on it but yeah that just proves that you do want to put it in a nice deep pot when you plant it because they do have quite deep tap roots so you know you want that to be able to have a good area of room to grow well. But I think that's going to shoot out a heap more roots when I plant it into here so you should do a good job. Now I'm using the same mix of soil in this pot that I used for in here plus I've just mixed in the original soil so it shouldn't be too worried about the transplant. So put that in like so and just cover him up with a little bit more soil. So there we go and he's got a heap of room in there to grow. He looks a little bit dwarf in there growing in a massive pot but he's going to take off this spring I reckon and you know there's lots of nutrients in there for him to grow. So of course the last thing I'll do is just give him a bit of a water. And there we have it one transplanted. So probably within the next week or so I'll transplant these three as well and then hopefully they'll have a chance to catch up to this one. Anyway before I go little mini tigers come to say hello. Hey puss. Say hello Sparky. Okay I'll see you guys next time. Bye.