Saving seeds from shop brought fruit.

[Hayley]

It is possible to grow plants from seeds taken out of shop brought fruit i.e. Apples and cherries? If so how would you go about preparing the seed/stone from fruit to planting stage?

I know its much easier and cheaper to buy the plant but i just thought it would be fun to watch them grow right from the start.

[darcyvuqua]

I did this with my children maybe 10 weeks ago here's how it went

Kids ate there apples picked the pips out popped them in compost and now there around 6-7 inches tall

By the way they will never be the same variety as the apple you actually ate more likely to be a crab apple but I'm not bothered just something to think about if you want to harvest fruit from them

[veggiechicken]

I'm growing cranberries, kiwiberries and a couple of citrus plants from supermarket fruit.
Both the cranberries and the kiwiberries stayed in the fridge for months before I got round to taking the pips out - because I forgot!! They were very small pips and needed separating from the pulp.
The citrus were just picked out as I ate the fruit, lay around in the kitchen for weeks and eventually were sown. I sowed about 8 pips but only 2 germinated.
I like the challenge of growing odd things so have a go, Hayley, see what you can grow

[FB.]

Pips usually need a winter chill (a couple of months in a fridge in a piece of damp tissue paper). However, shop-bought fruit has often been in cold storage for months, so may have already had its chill requirement and germinate a few weeks after sowing.

In my experience, seedlings from shop-bought fruit are not particularly healthy. The fruit produced from them will not be the same as the variety they were from, although most offspring show some characteristics of both parents. Commercial apples are often pollinated by crab apples, so you may find your seedlings eventually mature to produce something in-between a crab apple and a domestic apple.

The best seedlings are those from trees in someone's back garden, where the tree is probably more disease-resistant than commercial apples and may well have been pollinated by another domesticated apple rather than a crab.

Plants grown from seed tend to be of the greatest mature size, and longest time to start cropping. Seedling cherry trees are very fast-growing and become very big trees quite quickly. Seedling apples are more manageable - mostly being around MM111 vigour - but still capable of making a substantial sized tree when mature.

Seedling trees of all kinds can be slow to start fruiting - especially if nutrients and water are plentiful as it will cause the tree to put all energy into growing. A happy tree is one which grows and doesn't fruit. An unhappy tree is one which blossoms profusely.

[Mr Bones]

I've successfully grown long sweet peppers with seed saved from shop bought ones.

[orangepippin]

As FB says, in the case of apples and other orchard fruits you will probably get better results if using apples from garden apple trees or from trees in specialist collections - because they are more likely to have been pollinated by another interesting variety rather than the crab-apples often used in commercial orchards. With regard to the required cold storage - search on "stratification" for more details.

However if you are stuck with supermarket varieties, I've had good results with Red Delicious, which has good natural disease-resistance.

[The Masons]

We have tried it with Lemons but nothing come through yet.

Give it a try, can only go one of two ways

[FB.]

......I've had good results with Red Delicious <seedlings>, which has good natural disease-resistance.

Yes, the different gene pool from which it is drawn probably helps because it's like bringing fresh blood into a family line, with a whole new batch of disease-resistance mechanisms which the native British fungi have never encountered, let alone had the chance to try to overcome.
It's basically going back to what we've discussed before that the less common a variety, the less chance fungi will have had to overcome its disease resistance, so the healthier the tree will be. Obviously there's also an element of luck as to how quickly diseases can mutate to attack it, and an element of luck as to what resistance genes - how strong and how many - the variety inherited from its parents.

Even susceptible varieties have resistance genes - it's just that the diseases are able to get past the resistance. But take a "susceptible" variety and grow it in a country where nobody else does, and it may prove to be surprisingly disease-resistant.
To that end, I've been trialling the supposedly-sickly triploid Gravenstein, which is widely grown in Europe and the USA but not much grown in the UK. I'm finding that it's highly disease-resistant to the UK strains of fungi and is growing well despite the cool, dull weather of the last couple of years.

One of the healthiest Cox offspring that I've tried is Jupiter, whose other parent was a strain of the Red Delicious you mention; Jupiter is triploid which tends to give a better chance (but no guarantee) of being disease-resistant.

[Hayley]

Thanks for the fantastic and informative replies

[Polytastic]

I have grown sturdy (though small) tomatoes from seeds out of my sandwich - The ones I saved earlier in the year got placed on tissue paper and when I potted these I cut the tissue up and put some in each pot - I got amazing amounts of little sturdy plants out of toms I was eating anyway I also took peppers and managed to get loads of plants from the seeds. Right now I have about 15 tall and sturdy pepper plants in the polytunnel with flowers all over them. One assumes if all of the flowers turn into bell peppers then I am going to be kept in ratatouille indefinitely lol (I freeze almost everything and make an awesome tomato soup and ketchup too)
Save the seeds off anything you fancy growing and plant out on windowsill - where's the harm and if you think it needs more specific treatment (like a cold spell zap) to go forth and prosper then check how first.
Good luck

[Scarlet]

(I freeze almost everything and make an awesome tomato soup and ketchup too)

I've had several goes at making tomato ketchup and the kids have hated it!

Could you post your recipe up please? If my toms ever ripen this year I can then give your recipe a whirl!

[Polytastic]

The ketchup I sort of created myself and wrote the recipe down - will dig it out if I can remember where I put it (moved house since I made it.) However my main sauce (sorry) for inspiration came from the Heinz Ketchup bottle (I used the ingredients and kept going till mine tasted similar to the one I was buying. It may sound a little sad doing it that way, but I was waiting to do something major and it killed time for me - and kept me busy until my excitement was containable!

There are some good recipes out there but I am not keen on the creamy taste of some if you add too much milk or cream or whatever so these worked for me and I have used both over time - although I invariably switch it up with something like added coarse seasoning or even chillies
BBC - Food - Recipes : Tomato soup

This one is my particular fave Tomato soup | BBC Good Food

I'm one of those cooks who work to taste and so I don't stop till I get it right. I don't use garlic because my lot wouldn't appreciate it so much but instead use larger onions. I use the last link as a base and work with what I have in the fridge. This soup is a really good way of using up the limp celery dying in the back of the fridge. >

It freezes really well too and kept the gang tided over with tasty meals over this winter, after a particularly good crop of toms last year.