George Nellas

Hello Kostas
1. About wild plums we are at 300 - 350 meters above sea level and our village is full of this tree. They can sprout and grow but mostly near or around irrigation ditches or inside stream banks, in the wild. I'm using irrigation on my own field. Next year I will have more evidence about them growing and surviving on their own.
2. I've had some good success with wild pear (pyrus amygdaloformis - greek "gortsia"). I planted last autumn 2 seeds and they sprouted and survived the summer without watering, even though it's a very slow growing tree. You don't have to take my word on this, just watch what trees in your area propagate all by themselves in the wild, without any care. For example, in my area we have large forests of wild oaks, as a top canopy of the forest. Inside them we find interspersed, wild pistachio, wild pears, Judas' tree (Ceris siliquastrum, greek "koutsoupia"), Quercus coccifera, wild asparagus and others. Near or inside water ditches or streams or rivers we have Platanus, wild figs, Populus, wild plums, wild roses, wild (edible) blackberries, grapes, and many, many others. All these are propagated by the birds or small animals, and live happily withour our care. We also have large fields of olives and some almonds, without any irrigation. So my answer is you have to observe and experiment.
3. You are right about cultivated and wild trees, they are all part or the ecosystem, so both deserve our help.
4. My area is too cold for the edible fruit cactus (prickly pear), allthough we absolutely love the fruit. Tried twice to plant the leaves, only to find them destroyed by the extreme cold of the winter. These need a more mild winter. I know there are some other more cold tollerant varieties, but i'm not sure about the taste of the fruit they produce. They worth a try for reforestation purposes in south facing places.
5. One of the methods I used is at the beginning of winter, to take plastic bags, fill them with compost, and put inside the tree seeds. Then I water them and leave them outside half open, to get the winter chill. I monitor them regularly in order to make sure the compost is damp and to watch for sprouting. In the spring, as soon as I see them having sprouted, (lets say 5-8 cm of taproot) I take them out and plant them directrly in the ground. This way they grow out and get established before the mice have a chance to eat them. Timing is of the essence here because you want to plant them just the right time, just when they start to grow their upward seedling shoot. The seedling shoots very fast, as well as the taproot, the seed becomes root, so it is not touched by the mice.
6. One other problem you'll have to deal with, is wild or domestical animals eating the seedlings. Don't underestimate that one!
It is my belief that all this is a worthwile effort. If we observe and experiment like this we can regreen large areas with very little effort.
George

Hello Kostas
The mice seem to prefer mostly the chestnuts, almonds, wallnuts and hazelnuts. (no wander!) Not much for apricots or peaches or plum. I had to devise a couple of speciall methods to come around this problem, in order to be able to seed trees on the spot, but -I think- they are a bit too much time and energy intensive for this reforestation project topic. After all I'm building (or trying to build) a food forest up there. But my advice is to do it over and over again. Repeat the cycle during the same year, and if unsuccessfull, repeat it next year. And put 2 or 3 almonds on each spot. Of all, almonds and plums (greek "koromila") have the best survival rates in my area and are very dry tollerant.
One other good idea is to go around in your area and find what (wild) trees grow naturally on rainfall alone. Chances are that you can find (for some of them), their counterpart cultivated varieties (bearing fruits) that you could seed successfully. You can even graft them later on. Otherwise, if you're not looking for food trees, use wild seeds from around your area. But again, almonds are a very good candidate for reforestation and could be used as a food crop too.

Hello. This is another avid "almond seeder" from Greece.
I've sown almond stones in the wild, as a test, and had pretty good success in the past.
I have a small hillside field in western Fthiodida, at 320m elevation, south facing. Very hot during summer, without any rain, but with lots of rain in the winter. Last October I started putting all kinds of seeds in to the ground, after digging two large contour swales. Mailnly almonds (taken from beneath a mature tree), but also, chestnuts, apricots, apples, plums, and many, many other perenials. My own experience in this particular place was frustrating because field mice ate most of the seeds! I had to come back and re-seed in order to maximize the survival rate of the seeds. I did 3 rounds of seeding (one every month) and in this way I had very good success, especially with almonds. I have most of them under cictern-gravity-fed irrigation, but there were some that sprouted outside the irrigated area. The irrigated almond seedlings are now about 70 cm tall, the non-irrigated are shorter, about 30 cm, both doing absolutelly fine. In the middle of the (very hot and dry) summer, the non-irrigated ones seemed for a while that they were going to die, but they only went "dormant" only to grow new leaves later under the autumn rains, and are doing fine now.
This autumn I went back and did another round of seeding with every kind of seed imaginable, from almonds to chestnuts to rocket to asparagus. I can tell you, almond seedlings are VERY resilient. Some were even eaten by sheep, then they undergone a very severely dry and hot summer, seemed dead, but survived and now are green again.
The pictures show an almond seedling and an apple seedling under irrigation (not much, just 3 mins of gravity fed water from a cistern every week, in the summer months. Still working at it, still learning.