How to Get FREE Blueberry Plants from Store Bought Blueberries!

will and Laurent and welcome to another very exciting episode here on the mi girder channel I know you're going to love this one because in this episode we're going to talk about how to sprout blueberry seedlings from store-bought blueberries it's a real easy way to get free plants from blueberries that may have gone bad so I'm going to show you how to sprout them I'm going to show you how to harvest the seeds and I'm gonna show you my preferred method of sprouting them and there's a quick quick tip that a lot of people that have tried to sprout blueberries probably would have had more success had they known this quick tip so I'm going to give you that as well so stay tuned don't miss it you're going to love this episode I guarantee it let's go [Music] alright so the first things you're going to need to make this happen is a blender some old blueberries some paper towel and just a little bit of water here so this is all you're going to need a matte white actually and zip lock bag but I'll grab that a second um so the first quick tip about your blueberries this is the quick tip I was talking about here so quick tip of why many people fail at sprouting blueberry seeds is this it all comes down to the blueberries themselves you need to make sure the blueberries come from the United States if they come from out of the United States during the off season many blueberry growers are down in South America and because US quarantine laws state that anything coming from you know coming from other countries in the United States need to be radiated and that means they just take a low level of radiation and it kills off any bugs or pests what it also does is it makes the seeds enviable so you essentially have a fruit that you know is is by our standards fruit but the seeds are dead any pests are dead any molds board you know things like that they're all dead and so your seeds will not sprout but if they're from the United States you're a-ok the next thing is you need to make sure that they've been put in the freezer now this is a very very vital step that a lot of people miss blueberry seeds are perennial and therefore their seeds need to be stratified stratification is the process of actually putting them through or simulating winter like conditions a lot of people will leave them in the fridge for too long and you kind of wrinkly and pretty that's what happened to these ones we forgot them in the back of the fridge when we're on vacation and we're going to take them with us and you know that goes where the blueberries go oh they're shoot they're in the back of the fridge and then you come back to a weird science experiment so we fry them in the fridge they got nice and wrinkly pruney unable to be eaten there it is we threw them in the freezer threw them in the freezer for about two two and a half weeks ish and that is enough time because they need at freezing conditions or below freezing conditions for at least three weeks the longer the better but too long after say about five to six weeks it's not going to do any good to the fruit itself so you want to just put it through a few weeks a winter light conditions that's going to do is going to tell the seeds inside the blueberries hey you know hey we've fallen from the plant winter has come now it's time to sprout so once you've done that that is the initial stage that takes some time then what you can do is throw the fruit into a blender you don't need that much to make it happen but I'll throw in about half this container or whatever you do this even a few seeds we're going to throw in our water and you want a fair amount of water here because what's going to happen is your blender is going to masticate all the fruit masticating is just breaking it up so it's going to break up the fruit turn it into kind of pulp and all of your heavy viable seeds will sink down to the bottom as you'll see so let's go all right and about ten seconds where the blending is all it takes he's got a kind of a really watered-down smoothie consistency here and all your seeds are going to in the bottom of this of the the pitcher here so all we're going to do now is we're just going to strain off the the liquid and the seeds will have settled down to the bottom and so what we have to do is we just have to rinse this with water continuously and the heavy seeds will have floated down to the bottom and as you can see all the seeds are actually down here still that haven't even come out so most of this liquid actually is is mostly just you know just blueberry pulp and water and stuff like that so we can dump this out and then most of your seeds are actually down here I thought I'd have to do some more straining but they sunk pretty well in this in this example so alright let's go ahead over to the sink and we'll get that next up done and we're just rinsing out the pitcher there and now you have your seeds which will have sunk down to the bottom and any pulp so we want to do is we want to just kind of mix this around and gently dump the liquid because the seeds are the heaviest component the seeds will sink to the bottom and any enviable seeds or pulp will float out we just want to keep repeating this step until we have just pure seed all right and at the very bottom you'll see there's all your blueberry seeds they're completely fine they've not been damaged by the blender and that's because the seeds are too small to be damaged by the blades of the blender but everything else is mashed up so all right so now we're ready to go to the next step which is to get them ready to sprout all right so all I'm doing is I'm just sliding into a ziplock bag here a piece of paper towel and this is what we're going to sprout on our seeds out I fold it over about three to four times actually just so that there's some thickness to it so it'll hold on to water pretty well and you're really good sprouting bed for our seeds because they do take a while to sprout blueberry seeds will sprout in in the best conditions around two weeks so they're going to be in here for a while so you want it to stay Dan we're going to put some water in here but just enough so the paper towel absorbs all the water and then we're going to let just hold it upside down and let anything else drip out you don't want any excess water you only want the paper towel to be holding the moisture that is the secret to using the paper towel sprouted method and the next thing we're going to do is we're just going to take a scoop full of our seeds as you can see they make a lot and we're just going to take our seed we're going to just smear it as evenly as possible over the over the paper towel here use my fingers here might be a little bit easier but you just want even dispersion of the seeds you don't want any seeds to be stacked up really heavily or you know clumped up you want to be able to see when they're starting to germinate so having having that dispersion is is pretty important so yeah so there we go there is all you need to do now all we're going to do is just seal it we're going to put it in a warm dark location extremely important a bit warm and dark so we're going to put it in our pantry in a in the stew pantry in our upper shelf in our pantry pretty nice and warm there and that's going to be all we're going to do we're going to start to see sprouts about two to three weeks and then we can move them into a into a soilless potting mix to get them growing alright so there you go there is how you sprout blueberry seedlings from store-bought blueberries hopefully you all enjoyed I really do hope you try this now as a side note even though we're going to be sprouting these and getting a ton of free plants we still will be buying blueberry seedlings because the thing about these is when you sprout blueberry seedlings from store-bought blueberries you never really know the variety or the the type that you're going to get even if you really like the flavor the blueberries that you had blueberries much like apples they're very unpredictable because they're open pollinated and honey bees will pollinate multiple types of blueberries and typically blueberry growers will grow multiple varieties of blueberries to better their production because when you grow more than one variety next to each other they'll actually help you help each other out same thing with apples and same with pears a lot of different things are like that so so when they cross pollinate you're going to have a hybrid you're going to have a hybrid blueberry so we're going to be getting some very dependable known varieties from you know from a in actual nursery and also to plus side to that is that they'll fruit sooner so these will fruit about four years we got four years to wait so we're going to definitely be sprouting these as well because we'll get a bunch of free plants which is great and want some stuff to give away to friends and family as well but then we'll also get some plants that will sprout and about article fruit in about a year or two years and that's so we can have some you know instant gratification so just keep that in mind and let me know if you plan on doing this in the comments box below let me know if y'all so many questions and also please do hit this like button it really really helps us out helps us grow helps content go to more people that would like to see it and also if you have not yet already click that subscribe button you can click it somewhere over here or over here I'll have a little circle that you can click and that will direct you to subscribe our channel alright hey hopefully I'll enjoy hope you learn something new and as always Luke from the mi Gardner channel reminding you to grow big or go home we'll catch you later see ya bye [Music]

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Views: 3,298,318

Rating: 4.7722073 out of 5

Keywords: store bought, plants, Premiere_Elements_14, how to grow, migardener, stratification, free, migardener.com, blueberry plants, blueberry, how to grow blueberry plants, growing blueberries, blueberry seeds, harvesting seeds from blueberries, store bought fruit, growing store bought fruit, free plants, how to, how-to, howto, tutorial, growing from seed, how to sprout seeds, how to sprout blueberry seeds

Id: _-eIkTfHWBM

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2017