A step by step guide on how to propagate a nectarine from seed.

The fun part for me about gardening and working with plants in general is to watch them evolve and grow into something beautiful. While I successfully propagated my avocado seeds I never thought about doing it with other trees as well. My avocados are thriving and you can see my posts about them here: https://green-thumbed-swede.com/2019/11/08/growing-avocado-tree-from-seed/ & https://green-thumbed-swede.com/2020/05/06/growing-avocado-tree-from-seed-pt-2/ .

And since the avocados are doing great I thought why not try something else as well, I mean what is there to lose? It will either work or it won’t. I already managed to propagate some lemon seeds and will post about those soon as well but then I thought I’d try a nectarine. I normally don’t buy nectarines as they are not my first choice of fruit but I will eat them if they are there, and we recieved a couple of them in our Oddbox one week so I thought why not? What I didn’t expect was how quick and easy the propagation would be.

So the first thing I did right after eating my bectarine was to to crack open the stone. I used pliers but you kinda have to be careful because it took me a few tries as I ended up crushing a few seeds in the process. Once you have your nice seed in one piece you put it on some kitchen towel and fold it up. After that spray it with some water and leave in a closed container until it starts to sprout. Depending on how warm it is in your house you may need to spray the rolled up seed often otherwise it may die.

My nectarine seed did not take long to sprout but I think it was also due to the really hot weather that we had. I also reused a plastic bag that something arrived in to keep the seed in. I would puff it up to get some air into the bag and then use a bag clip to close it so I essentially created a small greenhouse for the seed where there was lots of moisture and I did not need to spray more water that often.

After 20 days the nectarine seed was fully propagated so I decided to try and pot it in some soil. To be honest I wasn’t too enthusiastic as I have had failures before where everything looked great but once I put it in soil the plant decided to give up on me(an orange seedling most recently). Now of course I know that this little seedling ha a long way to go and will probably never give me any fruit but it has been a nice little journey and it’s really cool to see the different stages of the propagation.

And this is what the plant looks now almost three weeks after planting it. I think it will be many years before it becomes a fully fledged tree 😉