How to Grow Plum Seeds as a Small Potted Plant? A Detailed Guide to the Planting Method
Plum fruits ripen between July and August, plump and round, delicate and translucent, beautiful in form, and sweet in taste, making them one of people's favorite fruits. So, after eating a plum, how do you grow plum seeds as a small potted plant?
1. How to Grow Plum Seeds as a Small Potted Plant?
Select ripe, plump plums, and after eating them, wash all the flesh off the seeds and let them dry in a ventilated place. After drying, wrap them in a paper towel and spray it damp; in about a week they will split and show white. Once they have split, plant them in a flower pot, and simply provide good care afterward.
2. Plum Propagation Methods
1. Grafting
Common rootstocks include wild peach and Chinese plum. Wild peach used as a rootstock has strong compatibility, grows fast, bears fruit early, tolerates drought, and produces large, sweet fruit, but it does not tolerate wet conditions, is prone to crown gall and gummosis, and the tree declines early with a short lifespan; plum rootstock is suitable for humid areas, with a high grafting survival rate, long lifespan, heavy feeding, and high yield, but the fruit is not as large as with peach rootstock.
Scions are collected from high-quality, high-yielding mother trees, selecting well-developed one-year-old branches from the middle and upper outer part of the canopy; generally, the sooner they are collected and grafted, the higher the survival rate, and branches from winter pruning can also be stored for use as scions. Grafting can be done by bud grafting or cut grafting. Bud grafting is done from June to August, and cut grafting from January to February.
2. Cuttage
One-year-old branches root very easily when cuttings are taken and grow into seedlings. In addition, digging up root segments 7-8mm in diameter in winter for cuttings also roots easily.
3. Division
Suckers sprouting at the root crown can be used for division propagation; usually soil is mounded around the root crown to promote the formation of adventitious buds on horizontal roots, and after the shoots sprout, the following year the root-sucker seedlings are separated from the mother plant to become independent small seedlings for transplanting.
Growing plum seeds as a small potted plant is actually very simple; after planting, you just need to provide good care.