★ How to: Grow Orange Trees from Seed (A Complete Step by Step Guide)

[Music] today's project diary is a step-by-step guide on how to grow orange trees from seed hi and welcome to project diaries today i'm going to teach you how to grow an orange tree from a leftover orange now first up we need to get the seed out of this and here's how you do it so i've managed to find a leftover orange in this week's food waste bin so the first thing to do is just cut it from top to bottom the reason why you don't cut it across the middle is just in case you cut through all the seeds now i will express that i am doing this from food waste so i don't even know what variety of orange this is and growing from any kind of seed you're not guaranteed to know exactly how it's going to taste once it's grown just carry on cutting the orange in quarters until you've found all of the seeds that are inside now growing any kind of citrus and fruit tree from seeds isn't a quick payoff you have to be patient because these will take up to three to five years to fruit trees of any type are really heavy feeders so if you don't fertilize or water correctly you may not get any fruit at all the other thing is citrus and fruit trees really benefit by having two to three of the same variety so bees can cross pollinate them and help for a bigger yield which is why i'm going to try to extract as many seeds as i can and germinate them all now other people online would suggest to dry these out for a few days but i find doing this will make the seeds crack more and your success rate will be lower so here's my quick and easy way on how to do this better so instead of wasting days drying them out get yourself some kitchen roll and as soon as you've extracted the seeds from the orange try and dry them out a little bit just try and get the sticky residue off and all the juice it should be quite easy now doing it while the seeds are still damp will mean that the shell doesn't crisp up and they're a little bit more flexible and easy to remove now once you've dried the seed off as best you can you'll see a flat end at the top and a pointy end at the bottom now the easiest thing to do is just try and get your fingernail in between the layers and prys the seed open gently being as gentle as you can you should be able to price both layers open and peel the seed nicely the seed may also come with the skin around it so try and remove that as well the reason why we peel the seed is to help it germinate a lot quicker if you leave it in the shell this could take up to three to four weeks or maybe even right inside and become completely useless doing it this way has given me a hundred percent success rate and allows me to see results within a few weeks the next step is get yourself a clean piece of kitchen roll and place the seeds in the middle gently making sure that each seed isn't touching and they're about an inch apart fold each side of the kitchen roll to the center covering each seed once you folded over each corner and covered all the seeds you just need to write on it to make sure you know which seeds are what the next step is to water it now you don't want this too wet and you don't want it too dry just try and get it in between and so it's not dripping push out any air pockets the final stage is get yourself a square piece of cling film and place the square of the tissue paper with the seeds in it in the center then fold over each corner of the cling film creating an airtight wrap once you finish folding all the sides press on the top gently and squeeze all the air out now you just have to place this in a warm dark place for a week or two here are the seeds two weeks later and as you can see i've gently taken it out the cling film now just unfold all the layers and being really careful not to break the seeds now it doesn't matter if you do leave a bit of the kitchen roll on the seeds because that will just rot away anyway once you plant it just be really careful not to break the root system then get yourself any kind of planting container but making sure there's enough drainage holes in the bottom now you can use homemade compost or any kind of potting soil once you've filled it you just need to dig a little hole and place the seed inside just make sure that the seed is buried two to three times its own size i'm really happy with the root system on this so i am going to bury a little bit deeper than i usually would but make sure that the whole root and the seed are completely covered this may take a little bit more compost i'm just going to top it up now don't push the soil down too hard but pat it down just to get rid of any air pockets once it's all covered nicely you just need to water it in the last thing to do is just label it up now all that's left to do is leave these pots on a warm windowsill or a greenhouse anywhere that gets at least six hours sunlight a day you should start seeing the seedlings pushing through the soil as little as five days later here they are again just over two weeks and again just under four weeks now we should be really into summer by now but the days and nights are still really cold so i think this is hindering the growth process this is six weeks in and they've only just started producing their true leaves i've decided to repot these early hoping that the new nutrients in the soil will give these a little boost this is eight weeks in and as you can see they've hardly progressed in the past few weeks now this is definitely down to lack of heat and lack of sunlight so i suggest you do keep these as warm as possible so here you go here's the orange tree there now i've left this video a lot longer than i did in the lemon tree video mainly because a lot of people asked me if i could do it a lot longer this time so this is six months in um now it has taken me a lot longer to grow this one mainly because when i started the lemon tree i actually started it in the winter weirdly enough and the central heating of the house and growing it indoors helped it germinate and grow a lot quicker until i brought it outside with these i started these in late spring and we've had a terrible summer this year so what were the cold nights and lots of rain these haven't grown quickly at all so i don't know if you can learn something from that but if you are growing these in england i'd probably start germinating them in the winter uh now this has got a few more problems uh i'll do a close-up on the leaves now um as you can see there's a yellowing of the leaves but it's leaving a dark green vein system in there uh this is chlorosis and what it is is the ph levels in the soil uh all citrus trees are really heavy feeders um so basically it's just taking all the nutrients and all the raw material out of the soil and now it's having a deficiency mainly an iron deficiency uh it could also be manganese and zinc but i'll do another video on um fertilizers and treatments for ph levels in your soil but um hopefully this has helped you to give you a lot of confidence to do this in the future learn by my mistakes and good luck growing your own and i'll see you again next time don't forget to subscribe if you'd like to keep up to date on my next uploads here's some links to some of my other videos and if you've tried these or any of my other projects i'd love to see your progress so please upload any of your photos to my facebook gardening group in the description below thanks for watching and i'll see you again next time

Channel: Project Diaries

Views: 764,090

Keywords: how to grow orange trees from seed, how to grow an orange tree, growing an orange tree, grow an orange tree from seed, how to grow an orange tree from seed, how to germinate orange seeds, growing orange seeds, how to grow orange seeds, how to plant orange seeds, how to grow a orange tree from seed, grow orange tree, grow orange seed, how to grow oranges, growing an orange seed, orange seed, how to grow citrus trees from seed, growing citrus trees, easy way to grow oranges

Id: n2nYr-Kf5rQ

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2016