[deleted] wrote on March 18, 2020 at 9:07 PM

existential1 wrote on March 18, 2020 at 9:30 PM

I'm getting so much done that I wouldn't have if I were stuck in the office. I started ~ 200 seeds on Thursday. Already have quite a few sprouting. Biggest win so far has been cherry seeds from a native cherry tree about a mile from my house.

An_Old_Big_Tree wrote on March 18, 2020 at 9:32 PM

cherry

That's so cool. I don't think cherries grow much around here.

existential1 wrote on March 18, 2020 at 9:59 PM

Yeah. I like to experiment with local fruit seeds. I'm sure there are things where you're at I couldn't grow too.

The best thing about trying fruit seeds is using different techniques. This time, I cracked the seed hulls and soaked the seeds for like 6 hrs, then planted them in 16oz plastic containers with dirt/compost from my yard (with tape around the bottom half of the container to block-out light), put em in the windowsill, and voila.

People always say you can't grow fruit trees from seed (so use grafts) or that you need to stick em in the freezer/fridge for x-amount of months for this or that process...but people are full of shit. lol.

An_Old_Big_Tree wrote on March 20, 2020 at 3:55 PM

People always say you can't grow fruit trees from seed (so use grafts) or that you need to stick em in the freezer/fridge for x-amount of months for this or that process...but people are full of shit. lol.

I thought that this was because it will grow the wild version rather than the cultivar of the fruit in many cases. Like apples.

existential1 wrote on March 25, 2020 at 10:02 PM

It does grow a new version of the plant. I am fairly strongly against the practice of cloning food or food-producing organisms for more than just scientific reasons, so I don't profess to be neutral on the subject. That being said, I find the idea that we don't allow organisms to evolve with the systems around them and instead try to change the environment to match a decades-old clone instead to be unconscionable.

So the trees I have produce really good fruit, but they aren't gigantic like what you find in the store. But neither were the fruits for thousands or hundreds of thousands of years before "domestication". I dont see plant domestication very different than human colonization. One type of theing trying to dominate another for its own betterment at the cost of the well being of the oppressed.

If someone has the perspective that they want exactly some type cultivar of some type of tree, I feel that it is one of the most insidious types of selfishness humans propagate on a day-to-day basis. So it is true that u need a graft to make a clone, but a lot of people really believe you don't get palatable food from "wild" trees and never question why it is they believe that to be the case.

Again, I'm very bias in this domain. Lol.

JayGrym wrote on March 19, 2020 at 7:33 AM

My wife (not much of the gardening type normally) just started wild onions indoors. They're already growing sprouts, only been a few days. I think she wants to do more so we are probably going to buy large planters soon. I've been trying to get her interested in this stuff for awhile. If the pandemics done anything positive at all, its been the change of perspective people have adopted