Citrus plant question

[dustin0352]

My question is can I take seed from an orange, tangerine, grapefuit and plant it and have it grow into a fruit bearing tree? I think i was told one time that it has to be grafted or whatnot in order to get fruit. Any citrus experts out there????

[Tony]

OK not an expert on the subject here, but my understanding is you can plant the seeds and grow a tree from any of the fruit you mentioned but the resulting trees may or may not bare fruit and if they do bare fruit, the fruit may or may not be good to eat, or give as much juice, or have to thick a skin, etc.

[hegar]

I agree with Tony. You should be able to plant a seed that will bear fruit. The fruit that the plant will bear will most likely be different than the fruit from which the new plant was grown. It may be smaller or have other properties. However, it should be edible, just like the fruit from which it came. I have grown a nectarine tree and a pomegranate bush from seed and in both cases the fruit was of respectable size. The fruit that you do commercially purchase is the result of selective breeding and when you buy a plant at a nursery you will usually purchase one that does have a specific cultivar name like "Wonderful" for a pomegranate, "Braeburn" for an apple, etc.. These plants have been produced by grafting and budding techniques and thus will be exactly like the parent plant (named cultivar).

Harald

[Harriet]

Most Florida citrus is grafted. I think you are likely to get a real sour fruit if you grow it from seed.

[Buck Hemenway]

We used to do a lot of volunteer work anwering questions about gardens here. The number one question was always "why doesn't my lemon tree produce fruit?". The answer is that if they were grown from seed,they need to be at least 15 years old.

The variability of open pollinated fruit is even more random than our succulents. Nearly every fruit (citrus or not) that we eat was at one time a sport on a tree of something entirely different. So, the likleyhood is that the seed,, if pollinated by exactly the same species would not produce the same fruit as the mother tree. The fact is that is has been pollinated by something else, more than likely and will produce something entirely different, in 15 years or so.

The other issue is that the trees that we get fruit from are all grafted on to root stock that is much more hardy than the natural tree. There is a very good chance that a tree grown from seed will succumb early in life to some rot or fungus that won't touch a grafted tree.

[dustin0352]

Thank you for all the info everyone! Guess its best to buy a potted tree from the fruit stands?

[GeneS]

Hi,

All you might ever need to know about backyard citrus can be found or followed from this link
http://ucanr.org/sites/home_orchard/Fru ... ts/Citrus/

Check this site for Florida specific information which will be the same for your initial question
http://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/mastergardener/

Cheers ... GeneS

[Buck Hemenway]

Thank you for all the info everyone! Guess its best to buy a potted tree from the fruit stands?

All of that said, Grow It, see what happens, but buy what you want from the fruit nursery.

[promethean_spark]

It will be a long wait though, citrus trees take over a decade to reach 'puberty' and start producing. However, you can graft mature wood onto a seedling and it will start bearing next year.

WRG to cultivars, the trees with names have been selected from hundreds of thousands of plants for the highest quality. They are Olympians of the tree world, this is also true of root stocks (which often are a selectively bred cultivar too). Think Michael Phelps torso on Lance Armstrong's legs.

OTOH, the Haas avacado, which is the most popular commercial variety, started out as a seed of unknown parentage in a gardeners yard. He even tried (and failed) to graft onto it a couple times before giving up and letting it grow on to find that it produced great fruit. So you could get something great, but the odds are slim.