As I sat on my door step enjoy the last Tangelo from my fruit basket I bite into a seed. I stood up and headed for the trash can with that seed and then stopped myself realizing I’m currently living in prime citrus growing country! Wondering if it really is as easy as planting a citrus seed to grow a new tree, I decided to look it up after I finished my snack and saved all of the seeds I found in my last Tangelo.

My research determined that you can indeed grow citrus from seed, but there are a couple extra steps that make the process faster and easier. I’ll share those in a minute. But even more interesting to me was the fact that you probably won’t end up with the same type of fruit as you started with! Citrus apparently cross pollinates very easily, so you never know what you will end up with when growing a citrus tree from a seed. It might be delicious fruit, and it might not be tasty at all! The exception to this is the Meyer Lemon Tree, which is why these are often grown from seed.

Well, what the heck! I’m always up for a gardening experiment anyway. I’ll enjoy a new plant project even if I don’t end up with Tangelos 5 years from now. If I can even keep the thing alive that long! LOL. Gardening takes practice and I’ve never tried to grow a fruit tree before my Lemon Tree that my mother in law started.

First thing to do is float your citrus seeds of choice in a container of water. Supposedly they are only good seeds if they sink to the bottom. 4 out of 5 of my seeds floated on top, indicating they would not be good seeds but, they are all I have to work with so I decided to include them in my experiment.

Next, I grabbed some finger nail clippers and snipped just the pointed end off of my citrus seeds. Then I pried the outer hard shell off of the seeds, leaving only the skin around the seed.

I separated the citrus seeds on a paper towel and marked the one that sunk to the bottom of my container of water as “good” and the other 4 citrus seeds as “maybe”. Gotta give them a chance, right!?

Then, simple as that, I dampened the paper towel of citrus seeds with water, slipped it into a ziplock bag, labeled it as Tangelo seeds, and slipped it into a dark corner of my drawer in my kitchen. Now to see if I get sprouts!