Before sumo trees were available, many people tried to eat many sumo fruits to find a few seeds and grow seedlings.
If I only have several seeds, how to reliably germinate them? Is cold stratefication necessary?
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Plant citrus seed directly into good quality seed start mix such as Promix BXM. Keep watered but not overwatered until they germinate. Citrus produces a high percentage of apomictic seedlings which means the seedling is a genetic duplicate of the parent. Never let citrus seed completely dry out, they die if they get too dry.
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I have grown many citrus from seed and they do not resemble the parent rather they are a rootstock. I eat an orange or grapefruit and simply spit out the seed and then press the seed in the ground with my shoe right where i ate them. In weeks or days citrus plants pop up.
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I like to remove the seed coat to save some time. Ive used a knife to crack them. Ive also just sat them in a jar with water and changed the water till the seed coat comes off by itself, then plant. Both worked well.
Ive put them directly in a pot and used the paper towel in the zip lock on top of the fridge. Both worked about the same…
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Thanks you guys for the reply!
Now I have the basic idea.
Do you want a scion? I may have some next year. This year is my first year with my plants
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I have done the wet paper towel (with shell and non-shell) and directly sow into the soil. Most grapefruit and orange ripen during the cold season. They are ripening right now. The paper towel method is the fastest, but not the most reliable. Some of them rot because of bacteria. It just take more time to germinate them in the winter and the bacteria got to them first. May be a heating mat might help in this case. The soil method is very slow and you just forget about them. Then one day, they just sprout out. It’s a lot slower, but more reliable.
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Do you think the ones that didn’t resemble the original tree they could have been cross pollinated by other citrus nearby?
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No thanks. I have the seeds germinated in 20 days. 50% of them germinated in a seeding mixture from Walmart. Kind of slow due to low temperature (68F).