Use Your Seasonal Fruit Delivery to Grow a Tree (Really!)

I mentioned in my last post that my kids love nectarines; they just can’t get enough. So even though we don’t have a backyard, I thought it would be fun to see if we could grow a nectarine tree from seed.

Farms generally don’t do this. They start their orchards with rootstock—hardy tree roots they can combine with the stem of another tree, like assembling a puzzle. It’s a safer option to preserve the quality and variety of the fruit, because fruit trees grown from seed are unpredictable. But sprouting something from seed is fun and easy. You can try it at home or even make it a workplace activity. Just save a few pits from your office’s seasonal fruit delivery and challenge your coworkers to a tree-growing contest!

Here’s the method we’re trying, in case you’d like to give it a go too.

Step 1: Prepare Your Pit

First, pick out a juicy nectarine and eat the fruit around the pit. Then, clean off all of the flesh and let the pit dry for a few days. Cleaning the pits (we did two) was surprisingly tricky for me, but I got as much flesh off as I could and left them on my kitchen windowsill to dry out.

Step 2: Get Your Seed

After the pit has dried for a few days, it’s time to break it open and get the seed out. You can use nutcrackers or pliers. This was annoyingly challenging! I don’t have a nutcracker, and apparently, I don’t have strong enough hands for pit-cracking with pliers. So I resorted to a hammer.

Step 3: Make Your Temporary Pot

After you have your seed, put it in a plastic bag with about an inch of room-temperature water. Seal the bag and let it sit for 2–3 hours. After the seed has soaked, add potting soil, using just enough that it’s damp but not soggy.

Step 4: Wait for a Sprout (Singing Optional)

This is the hard part: Put the bag in your fridge away from other fruits and vegetables, and see if it sprouts. This can take several weeks, and in my house, we’re still in the waiting phase. Sometimes I’ll find my boys peeking into the fridge and poking at the seeds to see if they’re growing. We all like to talk to them, and “Come on, little nectarines!” has become the mantra of our kitchen. My youngest, who loves to make up songs, even sings to the seeds.

Step 5: Plant Your Nectarine

If we do get our seeds to sprout, the last step will be planting them in a pot with good soil. They should continue to grow from there.

I have to be honest, I don’t have high hopes for our little nectarines. But the kids and I have had a lot of fun growing them, and I think it’s really cool to use something I’ve eaten to grow something else. If you get farm-fresh nectarines in your next seasonal fruit delivery from The FruitGuys, I hope you’ll give growing one a try. You might be surprised by how much you enjoy it!