Valencia Seedlings FREE

Gumnut starts with ...
Hi all,

Due to having our first baby a few weeks ago i need to scale down my hobby. Saying that i have about 50 Valencia seedlings in 32mm peat pellets all very healthy and also there are about 30-60 lemon and Honey Murcott Mandarin seedlings to through in aswell. There all around 7+cm high.

Pick up is in Cameron Park NSW outside Newcastle.

Craig

Pictures - Click to enlarge
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Gumnut says...
Not sure, when we juice oranges or lemons i keep the seeds, same as when eating a mandarin.

MaryT says...
Well said, Brian. I also know how you feel, gumnut, as I tend to stick seeds straight from my mouth into a pot and end up with numerous seedlings. I think these are excellent educational tools and if you have a primary school nearby you ought to take them to a show and tell and give each child a tiny tree. Most of them will die within days/weeks but aha some years later a writer will recall the day Mr Gumnut arrived with a moveable forest; a member on this forum will post a picture of the fruit from his/her tree and who knows, they might even present you with a box of fruit. :)

MaryT says...
Yes, M Nash. Definitely. Propagate!

MaryT says...
True, Brain. We must not expose children to thorns on trees! OH NO. Citrus are incubated in plastic orange nets in Woolies, of course. It would break their hearts to know how long it takes for a tree to grow and bear fruit.

Jason says...
In my experience the time to grow a seedling tree into a good fruiting tree is equal or less than the time required to grow a grafted tree into a decent tree 90% of the time.

Grafted trees might fruit in the first one or second years but it's only 1 or two fruit (who cares) and they loose most of the best part of the growing season either flowering or growing fruit rather than properly growing like a seedling.

So by the time a grafted tree is at a decent size and fruiting worth while amounts of fruit, the seedling is twice the size and a much stronger tree with no graft compatibility issues.

And yes even kids in the most remote places in the world no longer no how to grow seeds!. I taught some young kids in a very wild part of Mexico (no electricity) how to plant seeds, specifically mangos rather than rely on good luck for a tree to self seed and they were all over the idea!:)

I'd love to go back and see how many mango trees the village has now :D

Jason says...
Keeping genetic diversity is also Veeeeeery important. If you only kept the 5 "best" humans and cloned them for all time you would be stuffed come bird flu season.

Not only that, cloned people just like grafted plants are genetically old, very old. Some varieties of plum are hundreds of years old and have all the DNA deformities that come with age, they just don't perform like they used to. Even the Hass avocado already underwent a shift from an upright variety to a ball shaped tree at some stage and its still genetically fairly young. There been a project to try and find a surviving early graft that's still upright.

All worth thinking about :).

MaryT says...
Yes, so much is said about animals becoming extinct but not much on lost cultivars or even species...

Re Hass, Jason - would the solution then be planting losts of Hass seeds hoping that you'll get a 'throw back' ? Why did they breed out the upright variety and why do they want it back?

mtyr says...
It seems as if some of the material presented is distorted. A "sport" is a somatic mutation in ONE tree . It cannot "contaminate" the whole genetic line of ,say, plums. Any mutations in grafted plums ,again for example , will be somatic as no meiosis occurs. Therefore nothing is "lost" as one just needs to go back to an unmutated plum to recover the original genotype.

Gumnut says...
So i guess no1 wants them : ( to the bin then.

Gumnut says...
Its very difficult lol. Id love to do some gorrila planting but due to having a neck injury adventuring cant be achieved : (. Throwing away all them citrus plus a few hundered pomegrante seedlings aswell as a few hundred passion fruit seedlings isnt what i want to do but im struggling with my garden with our new bubba.

Gumnut says...
Definatly have to tell her : ) Ive started growing Natives like Euclypts Banksia, Bottle Brush and grevillea from seed and selling them and giving them away and all the money i make goes to Legacy since i love the germination process and i give neally everything i grow away anyway i might aswell do something good with my hobby and im pretty sure my new daughter will love to help me : )