Growing large-seeded trees from seed (flowering quince in this case)

This is what I have found so far to be a good method for growing trees with large seeds, such as apples, quinces, cherries, and probably many others, although so far I have had most success with the red-blossom quince (Chaenomeles) seeds. (Red-blossom quince is among my favourite fruits since tasting the fruits from which the seeds came from, mostly cooked. They also have many more seeds per fruit compared to other pomes.) Although I did not follow this more refined method precisely, I did so well enough that a number of quince seedlings are now happily growing outside.

My experience so far with directly seeding fall-planted seeds in the landscape is so far not very promising. I made a little nursery bed for some of the quinces, none of whom came up, and the same with some herbs. But stratifying them in a jar of light compost in a cool but not freezing place during the winter, and waiting until they begin to sprout, has been very successful so far. I mixed the seeds evenly and tried to remove them as they began to show roots, but I think that the best way is to keep the seeds in the top layer of soil, so that they can grow a taproot down into the soil while simultaneously growing a stem upwards. Taking them to a warm place makes germination faster.

A good time to take them out for clothing the root in earth is between when they have just begun to sprout a taproot and when the seed coat falls off; however, if the jar is taken outside and given into Nature's care, the seedlings can grow a few true leaves before taken out and clothed in earth. I pulled them out; they have a single, mostly straight taproot that does not cling to the soil. (This is why it is good to be generous in the amount of compost used to fill the jar.) Where I thought good to plant, I cleared a small area of earth of weedy perennials, and made a small hole deep enough to fit the taproot, and wrapped the root in the earth. Earlier is better in any case, even if there is frost; seedlings are in general very strong if they are planted early in their lives, because they know the world better.

I am not familiar with this quince. I have a red flowered quince grown for its spring flowers which is a large shrub with very small fruit. My friend has a white flowered  tree quince with large fruit that has a pineapple flavor.  I wish I had tried to grow the seed from the pineapple quince.  The success rate of pome fruit in the soil does seem to be much less than the stone fruit.  Plums especial seem to succeed on their own very well. Peaches and avocado come up in the worm compost.

I have an update now!

Last spring, some fall-sown quince seeds did come up and grow fine in one of the garden beds and are ready for spring growth. It may have been the better, less soggy soil in the garden bed. In fall I did roughly equal outdoor sowing and jar-keeping. The seeds kept in a jar are now beginning to germinate.

Gigantic squirmy roots now! I need to find many pots and much soil for them. It’s very exciting, but I will need to be careful. I have collected so many seeds, but making sure that at least a good amount of them grow to the stage of self-sufficiency will be the hard part. I’ve been using worm castings from underneath some cold composting weed piles, and cut-in-half HDPE milk jugs as pots for some.

And to explain the cedar fronds, I was finding some mold previously and there were some cedar fronds nearby. Thinking it should be antifungal, I put it in, and it seems to have worked because I haven’t seen any problems since adding them. The seeds were packed closely with not a lot of soil, because there were so many of them.

Hi Maieshe,
I'm doing almost the exact same thing at the moment - I just sowed fresh seed in a pot outside at the end of last year and they are germinating nicely now. I think when they are sown direct there is just too many things that find them tasty during the winter (mice, slugs, birds...). Although my pot is not protected (other than standing on an old freezer case) all the seeds seem to have survived to germinate.

A pot of possibility

Interesting what you say about cedar leaves being anti fungal - would that work with any conifer? I do have Western red cedar growing in some of my windbreaks.
As you say the tricky bit will be getting them past the next stage.....I think I will pot up some, and transfer the rest to places in the garden where I hope they might grow. I find a plastic hoop made from a cut off plastic bottle or broken plant pot, can sometimes protect surprisingly well from marauding predators.

Thank you for the suggestion on protecting the plants Nancy. The species of cedar here is Thuja occidentalis as opposed to your Thuja plicata, but since they are close relatives I would think they should be similar in their medicinal qualities.

By any chance have you tried growing cedar from cuttings?

Maieshe Ljin wrote:By any chance have you tried growing cedar from cuttings?

Tried a couple of times and failed so far!
I gather they need to be softwood cuttings so taken in summer and kept humid...Maybe start a new thread and see if anyone has some tips. I'd like to take cuttings of local juniper.....

I've done this too with seeds from shop-bought fruits.  Successes:  quince, peach, nectarine.  Also some hazels which I picked from a local cemetery.  However, only the quince saplings are still alive;  I should have watered the hazels better after transplant, and the peaches and nectarines were all stricken with peach leaf curl.  I do still have one sad small peach in a planter still, but I don't think it'll ever amount to anything and is not worth planting out because it's so susceptible to the leaf curl.  Lessons have been learned...

Like Nancy I simply sowed them in pots/planters outside over winter.  I put the hazel seeds way up high to protect them from mice (successfully--I'm still disappointed in myself for neglecting them afterward).  I grew them all on in those planters for a year before transplanting.  My remaining survivors--the two quinces--are still young but I have high hopes for them

I'd like to try growing the red-flowering quince. There are a few I see in bloom in people's gardens on our evening walk. When they have ripe fruit, I will ask if I can take a few.

Autumn sown hazelnuts grow way too easily at our UK place. Every pot in our yard has a few seedlings popping up now, some have more, thanks to a busy squirrel! I also had good numbers planted directly in the ground in autumn 2022 germinate last spring at our Bulgarian place. Sadly all but one of the nicely growing seedlings were killed by a "helpful" neighbour strimming the garden. I'd hoped to plant a load more last autumn but for various reasons didn't get back. I'm hoping that the lone survivor of the weed-whacker massacre survived the drought.

I can't speak to quince at all as it isn't hardy in this part of the world.  I do like the information at Incredible Seeds (flowering quince) - it is a commercial site, but they do a good job of explaining how the seeds should be handled for germination success and they give an idea of expected germination rates.  I linked the flowering quince, but they have a wide variety of fruit and nut trees as well as other stuff - they are located in Nova Scotia, so do have a lot of seeds available for warmer zones than my part of the world.

I'm not affiliated with them, but I did purchase my first batch of seeds a few months back and so have some tree seeds in stratification right now.

Hans Quistorff wrote:I am not familiar with this quince. I have a red flowered quince grown for its spring flowers which is a large shrub with very small fruit. My friend has a white flowered  tree quince with large fruit that has a pineapple flavor.

It's confusing when two different plants get given the same name, quince..
True quince, what I call posh quince, is a tree, with white flowers and hard fuzzy-skinned fruit - Cydonia oblonga. I sowed some seed from fresh fruit one autumn, I've one plant from that; later, some other seeds went into a pot and I got half a dozen, no special attention. Thornless
Flowering quince is a bush, there's 3 or 4 species, common garden ones are Chaenomeles japonica (brick coloured flowers, small fragrant fruit with short shelf-life, dense bush - that I'm trying to extricate but it seems to have suckered to something really dense); and C. speciosa with flowers of various colours between white and bright red, fruit up to reasonable apple size that store pretty well. Both these fruit reliably, but are to some degree thorny.
Less hardy is Chaenomeles cathayensis, with the largest fruits and is very thorny.
Chaenomeles is so reliable in countries like Ukraine there are small plantations and research into developing commercial varieties, using various species and interpecific hybrids. See https://www.actahort.org/books/1307/1307_6.htm
I use the fruits of C speciosa to add tang to apple dishes, a touch of sour to curries, stir-fries etc, mixed with Poncirus trifoliata fruit for marmalade flavour, or with rosemary in a fruit flapjack.

I scattered residue from apple pressing as a mulch one autumn - got a rash of seedlings the following year. Drought put paid to their hopes!

"True Quince", (Cydonia oblonga) is an amazingly productive  perfect for homesteads. Survives summer heat with little to no irrigation, and winter flooding.
My apples are almost always wormy and often take a year off, but the little quince, with no care, just pumps out lots and lots of fruit every year with no pest damage whatsoever. There are grafted varieties, but I find that the seedlings are more productive. Far tastier than applesauce, the canned product is our winter staple. Drought-tolerant, and just the right size to make a spot of shade to sit by in summer, but not shade out big parts of the yard. I love them, and find the seeds sprout well if I just put them in a pot outside and leave it all winter. Here is a source for seeds: https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p579/Quince.html

We had quite severe drought in our Bulgarian garden last year, and our one true Cydonia quince still fruited magnificently, while the pear, apple, and peach dropped all their fruit early or had pest issues.

I want to grow some of the smaller Chaenomeles as well. They sound reliable and useful.

I’m glad to hear what people have to say of various kinds of quince. All of this knowledge and experience are very helpful. And Jamie, thank you for telling us about the true quince! It is inspiring me to try planting some myself.

Another story. Once, after having tried and loved the taste of local quinces, and seeing one from the store I bought a few, but for some reason they very awful, and something looked wrong about the seeds so I composted them too. I assume it’s some modern variety that has had all the flavor bred out of it, accompanied by bad soil and bad growing practices. But again, I once visited a goat farm and saw that they had a small true quince tree, maybe three or four feet tall, and when I asked about it the grower said that they were already fruiting, and they liked the fruit. So I’m interested now in trying to grow an older variety of true quince some day. (And as the saying goes—the best time to plant a tree is yesterday.)

There is now the first one sprouting inside! And there are a few more today beginning to poke up in the cold frame.

Jane Mulberry wrote:... smaller Chaenomeles as well...

I have a very pretty red flowering Chaenomeles.  However, I think the fruit is absolutely horrible :)  Even stewed with a load of sugar it's unacceptably bitter, and is so hard it takes ages to cook soft.  And I know it can't be just me, because I've even found fallen fruit in the spring that is still sound.  Nothing wants to eat it!

I know it is commercially grown in other parts of the world, hopefully a more palatable variety than mine.  And despite the fruit it's a nice little shrub;  the flowers are delightful in spring and it provides cover for birds, being a bit tangled and spiky.  I'll just be staying away from that awful fruit.

Experimenting with stool layering quince and growing from fallen fruit seeds. Will let you know how it goes.

Linda Kurtz wrote:Experimenting with stool layering quince and growing from fallen fruit seeds. Will let you know how it goes.

While grafting onto quince (Cydonia), I get many offcuts that I stick in water. The more mature ones root, and I'm able to transplant.
Doesn't work quite as well with apple.

I have noticed this with Chaenomeles. I stuck some prunings in a pond and a few roots formed, they were mature branches. I’ll have to try again maybe with some mature branches. I planted a sucker a while ago and the plant mysteriously disappeared a few days later.

I came across an incredible wild plum growing in Springdale, the little town just outside of Zion National Park, along the side of the road as I was walking back to my vehicle with my wife after a dinner in town on a recent trip to Zion.

Slightly smaller than a golfball, orange skin with vivid yellow flesh. Tart at the skin, and near the pit, but sweet and incredibly citrusy in a way I've never tasted in a plum through most of the flesh.

Seeds are small, around the diameter of a dime and a quarter inch thick.

I wish I would have harvested more, but I grabbed around a half dozen just as I was walking by, and by the time I got to my vehicle, I knew I was saving the seed.

They're cold-stratified in my fridge right now, and I'll keep them there until September and then pull one and see if it'll germinate. If it does, I'll pull the rest, if not, I'll save them and try again later.

Thing is, I've only got 4 seeds, and they're seeds of the greatest wild plum I've ever eaten, and I've eaten thousands. I'm bigly hoping to have success with these seeds, preferably all of them, because I'll plant one in the ground at home, and bucket plant the rest to be planted next year in my clandestine, guerrilla community food forest project where there are already hundreds of wild plums which are the hybridized seedlings of the American and European plums which were planted in the pioneer orchards in the area more than a century ago.

So, it would be wonderful to add these incredible genetics to that system z especially since it volunteered in a place as harsh as the outskirts of Zion Canyon.

That sounds incredible, I'd have grabbed every seed I could find. Plum seeds tend to germinate pretty reliably with a winter outside in moist sand, the hard part is the wait to see what the seedling actually produces. Could be years before you know if it kept any of that citrus flavour.

Joao Winckler wrote:That sounds incredible, I'd have grabbed every seed I could find. Plum seeds tend to germinate pretty reliably with a winter outside in moist sand, the hard part is the wait to see what the seedling actually produces. Could be years before you know if it kept any of that citrus flavour.

It's only hard if you make it hard, eh Joao? Otherwise, you just get 'em in the ground and wait.

I have some seedlings growing in my yarden now that came from seed harvested from my favorite local wild plums. I should know whether they're keepers in another year or two.

Also protecting from rodents and excessive freezing is important.

My plums are all direct seeded as well. It does seem like they need some freezing or perhaps leeching to want to germinate. Most of the seeds I planted did not grow.

I had some peach pits sitting in a jar of soil and they haven’t germinated. I am trying cracking the pits, taking out the kernel, and soaking in cold refrigerated water for maybe a week. This technique worked very well for some out-of-season medicinal herb seeds so why not try fruit trees? Supposed to get the germination inhibitors out more easily.

My quince tree from seed flowered for the first time this year!  Only about six flowers, none set fruit.  The other tree is a year behind, no flowers (not pictured).

My sad peach tree (also not pictured) has spent the past two winters under cover and this has dramatically improved its health:  no leaf curl infection since then.  I still can't plant it in the ground, but maybe I'll get some fruit off it in the future?  It's got so much more growth on it than it did two years ago.

M Ljin wrote:I had some peach pits sitting in a jar of soil and they haven’t germinated. I am trying cracking the pits, taking out the kernel, and soaking in cold refrigerated water for maybe a week. This technique worked very well for some out-of-season medicinal herb seeds so why not try fruit trees? Supposed to get the germination inhibitors out more easily.

Yet peaches will come up, as volunteers, all over the place if you don't try!

They do! Although, the peach pits do need mulching here or they will freeze to death.

Anthony Powell wrote:

Flowering quince is a bush, there's 3 or 4 species, common garden ones are Chaenomeles japonica (brick coloured flowers, small fragrant fruit with short shelf-life, dense bush - that I'm trying to extricate but it seems to have suckered to something really dense); and C. speciosa with flowers of various colours between white and bright red, fruit up to reasonable apple size that store pretty well. Both these fruit reliably, but are to some degree thorny.
Less hardy is Chaenomeles cathayensis, with the largest fruits and is very thorny.
Chaenomeles is so reliable in countries like Ukraine there are small plantations and research into developing commercial varieties, using various species and interpecific hybrids.

Im really surprised! It turns out that I must have Chaenomeles Speciosa with red flowers, and all along I thought it was Chaenomeles Japonica! I haven't don't a lot with the fruit yet, but it's like a firm lemon apple, texture is good but too hard and sour for fresh eating.

And that's amazing about the hybrids, hopefully we'll see the fruit of those labors soon! I will check it out and let you know if I get my hands on one of them!

Jamie Chevalier wrote:"True Quince", (Cydonia oblonga) is an amazingly productive  perfect for homesteads. Survives summer heat with little to no irrigation, l

It's my experience that they grow in dry climates that are hot in the summer and pretty cold in the winter, I assume that's because they can compete there, not because they need the extremes.

M Ljin wrote:I had some peach pits sitting in a jar of soil and they haven’t germinated. I am trying cracking the pits, taking out the kernel, and soaking in cold refrigerated water for maybe a week. This technique worked very well for some out-of-season medicinal herb seeds so why not try fruit trees? Supposed to get the germination inhibitors out more easily.

I know a local arborist who has cracked and sprouted apricots, so it ought to work for peaches.