Starting Seeds for a Future Orchard

Over winter, many gardeners find themselves bored with little gardening to do. It is that mentality that makes the winter seem dreadfully long here. In order to pass the time, I often found myself looking through plant catalogs and gardening books envying the selection of fruit trees and berry shrubs that are available. Browsing these I thought, "I need an orchard!"

Winter can be unkind to gardeners

When winters are bad, it is not always a terrible thing. Trees and plants need the cool weather for vernalization and some seeds need the cold for stratification. Why not use this to your advantage? What I did was select some fruits that I knew needed stratification in order to germinate. The seeds can easily be ordered from ebay cheaply, or harvested from local plants.

A cluster of winter-frozen aronia berries should have plenty of seed

I started around 70 plugs with aronia melanocarpa, and several each of apple, mountain ash, kousa dogwood, nanking cherry, and persimmon. Most of the seeds came from plants around the neighborhood or in parks, so the cost was very little. I do not think it is too important to have precise conditions because nature isn't always perfect. I planted them all in early January, watered them in so the potting mix couldn't blow away, and stuck them outside under a few shovelfuls of snow to keep the squirrels away. My methods for growing mostly aronia and other fruits from seed is not perfect, but looking at today, I would call it a success.

Aronia grown from seed

I think this is Kousa dogwood

 The plugs were mostly aronia seeds, because I really enjoyed eating the fruit in the fall. I saved some seeds, and they came up beautifully. I could not find much information about growing aronia from seed on the internet, so I am glad that this worked out so well.


The Kousa dogwood plants also came up nicely. Considering I started from a few seeds in my pocket, this is a success.

Mountain ash seedlings

 These are from mountain ash fruits that I picked last year. The seeds did not come up quite so well, but there are a few seedlings to work with.

Sadly, the persimmons and nanking cherries are nowhere to be seen, but there is a chance that they need more warmth to germinate. I do have plenty of aronia seedlings though, probably at least 50 or 60. Only 3-4 more years to go until fruits!