I Grew Peach Trees From Seed and this is what happened - Full Tutorial

Hey guys it's Calum, welcome back. So I'm standing next to this peach tree here which I grew from seed around seven years ago and it's actually been fruiting for the last three years. As you can see it's got some fruit on it, it actually has heaps on it this year and it's doing awesome. It's just this colour at the moment because it is autumn so it's about to lose its leaves. So today I thought I'd bring you along and we can grow some more peaches from seeds and I'll show you how I grew this one and I'll also try some other methods as well so that we can see kind of which method works the best. The fruits on it are absolutely awesome, they're really large, they're red-fleshed peaches, really really juicy and they've turned out exactly the same as the fruit that I ended up starting with and that's the great thing about peaches is that in a lot of cases you do end up getting fruit the same as the type of seed that you planted. Sometimes there's a bit of variance but for peaches it's pretty close in general and particularly these red-fleshed peaches and they do always pretty much come true to seed. They do have a pretty fuzzy skin which isn't ideal and for those of you who know me well you're probably surprised seeing me hold this right now because I just hate the feeling of peach skin and especially biting into it. It's one of those things that just sends shivers up my spine, gives me goosebumps and I guess it's the equivalent of people who can't handle nails down a chalkboard or their toenail getting caught on a flannelette sheet. I don't know maybe that last one's just me but anyway I'm just going to go for it, bite into this and see how we go. Oh what a mess. The initial bite of the skin, not great but I have to admit it wasn't actually as bad as I was expecting but man look at that. This is the juiciest, just most beautiful coloured peach. It's such a crazy colour, so juicy, so sweet. There's a bit of kind of tang to it. Honestly these are really great peaches. This one actually has a lot of white flesh in it, you can see the colour there. So often the red will go right through closer to the middle but some of them will just be more white like this and these do originate from a white peach so it does make sense why it's like that. Anyway we'll get the seeds out and get on to growing these and for selecting your seeds I like to use locally grown heirloom varieties which you'd most likely find at places like a farmer's market. Alright so we're going to use two methods for sprouting these peach seeds and the way these seeds work and their anatomy is actually really interesting and important to know when it comes to getting the best results out of these. So of course on the outside we have this really hard peach stone or pit and this actually isn't part of the seed and if you open it up you'll find this little seed inside and it looks just like an almond because these are closely related to them. Almonds come from a similar fruit. On the actual seed you've got this brown seed coat which wraps all around the other internal parts of the seed and so within the pit as well as the seed coat and parts of the actual seed they've got these plant hormones like abscisic acid which basically prevents the seeds from sprouting and causes the seed to stay in a period of dormancy. The reason these seeds have this adaption is because peaches are usually ripe in late summer and into autumn and so if you imagine if they sprouted straight away as soon as the fruit drops then it would only have a couple of months to actually grow before suddenly the winter's here and at that stage it's still a small very vulnerable plant that then goes dormant and has to go through the really cold winter. So all those hormones prevent the premature sprouting of the seeds but they're broken down during the cold temperatures and moist conditions over the winter which then allows them to sprout during the springtime as the temperature warms up. So the process of putting the seeds through a period of winter chilling is called stratification and I'm sure some of you know that already but you can skip the stratification with stone fruit seeds but it's not something that I recommend although it is something that I've tried before with apricot seeds. So what you would do is just take off this like outer husk and then get the seed and peel the brown coating off it or the seed coat and then you're left with the little white seed and if you plant that in warm conditions it usually will sprout relatively quickly but the problem is that even within the little white seed there is still some of those plant hormones or germination inhibitors and that will usually affect the growth of your little seedling and it will usually be stunted and not sort of grow to its full potential. The other problem as well is that you know right now it's autumn and so it's just the wrong time of year to get these going. I really want them to sprout in the spring which is their natural process anyway. I'm just going to be naturally stratifying these by putting them in a pot of soil, leaving them out during the winter time and then hopefully they'll sprout in the spring. If you don't have a cold winter though you can mimic this process by just putting these in a bag of soil and putting them in the fridge for about three months and then they should sprout after that. So I'm planting these full seeds around an inch or two deep in this potting mix and I'm just going to chuck some mulch over the top too and keep these watered during the winter. So the second method we're using today is cracking off the outer shell of the seed and I've had really high germination rates in the past doing this and this is how I grew my tree that I showed you at the start. Once you hear it make a different sound it means the seed's cracked and you can then carefully pry it open so you don't hit it too many times and break the seed. There is obviously better ways to do this, you could use a vice or maybe a nutcracker or something and if you are using a hammer and you're worried about your fingers just put it in between some wood and then give it a hit. So we'll place these little almond looking seeds in some moist soil as well and we'll leave them outside over the winter in the same conditions as the other seeds. Alright guys so we're only four days into spring and we have our first little peach tree seedling coming up and this is from a seed that we cracked out of the pit and it's the only one out of both batches of seeds to sprout so far. Alright so check this out we now have a bunch of little peach seedlings so these are the ones that we cracked the seeds out of the pits and turns out we have a hundred percent germination rate from these so eight trees all up which is awesome to see. As for the seeds that we planted without cracking the outer pit so far only two out of the ten seeds have sprouted and I'm actually surprised that only two have sprouted I thought there would be at least a few more but it is really interesting how much of a different result we've ended up with and personally I always have had a really high germination rate from seeds where I've removed the pit so that's probably the way that I'll grow these again in the future. So today we're finally planting one of these trees in the ground and it's only a few days away from summer and the ground here is already really dry and this particular area has only around 10 centimeters of topsoil before hitting clay so I've dug down to the clay level and I'm going to plant the tree on a mound just to give it more depth to grow in and this is just a mixture of topsoil and compost. I'm also just shaping the mound so it has kind of a crater in the middle so that when I water the tree it can actually soak in. Last thing to do is add a thick layer of mulch to help keep the soil moist and cool during our hot and dry summer and we'll check in again at the end of summer and see how much it's grown by then. Alright guys so before I show you the tree that we planted in the ground these are all the peach trees that are still in their pots they're looking really nice and green and lush I'm stoked with how they're doing and it was only around six weeks ago that these were looking kind of tatty and a bit terrible and they had basically just stopped growing and so I planted them into some larger pots and since then they're doing a lot better they've put on a bunch more growth and they're just looking a lot happier. And looking at the differences between the two types that we started these are the two that were still in the peach stone and these are all the ones we grew that we removed the seed from the pit and they're all the same height the only difference is that this batch we got a lot more seedlings. Okay so this is the tree we planted in the ground earlier and as you can see it's gotten a lot bigger than the trees that are still in their pots so you know of course the sooner you can get your trees into the ground the faster they're going to grow. So for this tree long term I plan to prune it into an open vase shape which is kind of a typical way that a lot of stone fruit trees are pruned it just allows you know good ventilation in the tree as well as the sunlight to get down into the tree and onto the fruit. This peach tree here was sprouted from a seed just under two and a half years ago and so when it was two it actually produced its first flowers and it did produce a fruit as well. It's just fallen to the ground today so I quickly grabbed my camera to film this segment. It only produced just this one fruit the rest of the flowers didn't end up taking and it's probably just because it's such a young tree so I didn't even really expect it to come to anything. It's not the largest peach by any means it may just be because our summer here has been so incredibly dry we've had very small amounts of rain. Oh goosebumps. Mmm that is insanely sweet that's a really good peach. It's quite a white coloured flesh really interesting looking but super juicy super sweet really really delicious except for the skin. So it does show that these can fruit from seed in as little as around two and a half years and I would say more typically though for peaches to wait around three years before you expect fruit from them but even that is a pretty short amount of time to wait to get your first peaches from a tree that you grew from seed and then year on year after that you should expect more and more peaches from your tree as the tree gets bigger and more mature so I think it's a worthy investment to do especially knowing that these usually grow relatively true to type and you're going to get a decent peach out of your tree. All right well we're back where we started almost a year later this is the original tree now covered in a bunch more peaches which is great to see. Hey rookie, rookie come over here say hello you rookie boy. Anyway guys thanks for watching if you want to see me grow some other fruits from seed check out this video over here. Hope you have a great rest of your day I'll see you in the next one.