I’ve grown plenty of trees from seed, but never a peach pit. My intention is to simply use them as rootstocks.
Here’s my question:
Will the pits survive just laying out in the open for a couple of months until it’s time to stratify them? I don’t want to stratify yet, because they’ll try germinating in the refrigerator in the dead of winter (per my past experiences with trees from seed) when I really have nowhere to safely put them.
So I guess my question is, if I’m not ready to start stratification yet, how should I store them in the meantime?
I potted some up last year. You can put the pots where they can not be touched. Let them stratify outdoor and grow in spring. Worked pretty well for me.
They pop up all over my property from animals and me throwing rotten fruit. Those are on the ground the whole time. I don’t think there is any right or wrong time.
Don’t let them sit above ground in the sun though, they will dry out. I am surprised the squirrels go after them, I never had problems with squirrels. Also I never had problems with peaches sprouting too much in the fridge. They are about the easiest fruit tree to propagate and one of the reasons I stopped buying peach rootstocks… they grow themselves with no work at all.
I once was digging in my front yard and found a peach pit that someone discarded. It had started to germinate, so I planted it in my back yard. A few years later, it bore fruit. For a few years, I got a shopping bag full of the most delicious peaches I had ever tasted but then we had a very cold winter and it died. ( I was in USDA zone 6a.)
I let my pits dry out for a short time then actually cracked them open and removed the seeds by October. I put the peach seeds in a jelly jar and added a small amount of plant starter mix in the bottom of the jar and over the top of the peach seeds. Store in refrigerator until Spring.
Some usually are sprouted out when I remove them from the refrigerator in spring and plant. Store too wet and they will rot.