The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #172568 Message #4209555
Posted By: Thompson
10-Oct-24 - 04:38 AM
Thread Name: BS: How does your garden grow?
Subject: RE: BS: How does your garden grow?
It's coming up to the time of year to collect seeds from crab apples if you'd like to grow trees. Find your favoured tree - I have my eye on a friend's, which has bright red apples from around August, and those apples are absitively delicious. Open some apples till you find nice-looking seeds, fat and brown. Take out the seeds (with clean hands) and put them on a clean damp tissue sprinkled with powdered cinnamon. Mould hates cinnamon. Fold the tissue over and put it in a clean plastic sandwich bag, and put it in the fridge for a few weeks. Maybe put it in a jar so it doesn't get jars and things put on top of it by mistake by Certain Parties who also use that fridge. Last year I forgot about the seeds till spring, when they had nice long sprouts. I put these in a sandy compost mix (about 2/3 compost and 1/3 horticultural sand - don't use builder's sand, it's salty and kills plants) and three of the 15 or so sprouting seeds I had grew on into little trees, which are now around 40cm tall. With luck they'll produce crab apples four years from now. There's something so life-affirming about growing a tree from seed.