Friday, May 21, 2010

Growing Citrus From Seeds

The citrus Trevor and I will be experimenting with are lemons, limes, oranges, mandarins, tangerines, and grapefruits.

3 weeks ago we went out to eat at a local restaurant. We ordered water and hot tea. My water came with a lemon wedge and so did Trevor's tea. Both lemons had seeds so we carefully picked them out and wrapped them up in a napkin. We got 6 usable seeds total.
A few days later we washed them and planted them in my greenhouse seed tray. Because of the sugar content of fruit, they were given a spray of fungicide every few days. We put them in a sunny window and waited. Today during our watering we noticed that one of the lemon seeds had germinated.




Sprouted Lemon seed


Today we also decided to plant our mandarin and orange seeds.
Most of the mandarins and oranges grown in my area are seedless but we were able to obtain one good mandarin seed, and 5 good orange seeds. We believe the oranges to be Valencia oranges. In the remaining 6 compartments of the greenhouse we planted the orange and mandarin seeds using the same process as the lemons.
They say it takes 1 to 4 weeks for citrus seeds to grow so we'll keep you updated.
In the mean time, we are currently collecting grapefruit and tangerine seeds. We seem to be getting a lot more of these seeds than we had with the lemon so we'll be running a few experiments to see which method grows faster.



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