- What you should know about the propagation of fruit trees
- Bring the cherry stones to sprout
- tips and tricks
Help the development of the site, sharing the article with friends!
Every hobby gardener has probably wondered at some point whether the pit of the delicious cherry you just ate could be used to grow a cherry tree that would bear the same delicious fruit.
What you should know about the propagation of fruit trees
In principle, it is conceivable to grow a cherry tree from a cherry stone. Whether this tree will bear the same fruit, how it will respond to fungal attack, and whether an early or late variety will develop from the core is more than uncertain.
In order to avoid this risk, in practice the cherry trees are increased by grafting. Another part of the tree (called scion) is grafted onto a rooted part of the tree (called a rootstock). The scion is cut from a cherry tree whose characteristics you want to preserve.
Bring the cherry stones to sprout
In order to get the cherry stones to germinate, you have to subject them to a cold treatment - just like in nature. For this purpose, bury several seeds in the garden in late autumn and let them overwinter in the ground. Another option is to store the cherry stones in containers with moist gravel or sand in a cool but frost-free place. Both should cause the shell to soften at the end of winter so that the seeds can germinate. The seedlings are separated and planted in a seed bed.
If this method seems too tedious, you can try to open the harvested cherry stones so carefully that the inside remains intact. The seeds, freed from the hard outer shell, are placed in a little water for a few days to pre-germinate (preferably in the refrigerator) and the seedlings obtained in this way are planted outdoors in spring. However, there is no guarantee that the cherry stones will actually germinate, so take several stones to be on the safe side.
tips and tricks
Sex is always a risk, even with plants. A tree grown from a cherry stone is a child of two parents; both endow it with their genes. Due to the division of the chromosomes and the recombination, you simply never know what will come out - similar to human children.