The John Chapman Project: Growing Trees From Seeds

If you ask my wife, she will tell you how I have always got some kind of crazy project going on, so a couple of weeks ago, I started working on a new project to try to save and plant the seeds from the fruit I eat. It started out as a simple concept, but quickly blossomed into something more.

At first it even seemed as though it might be a small project. In fact it started with a single fruit; an Asian pear my wife had brought home from the local oriental store. After eating the fruit, I found 8 seeds that looked just like apple seeds inside. “I should plant these” I thought to myself, “I’ve never seen an Asian pear tree before, so I wonder what it looks like.”  Then I bought a couple of mangos, and decided to grow them as well.  Now I have grown mangos from seeds before, though they won’t overwinter outside here, they make good potted trees to bring in during the winter as long as you keep them pruned. So I knew it was not only possible, but fairly easy to grow at least some trees from seeds.

To get started I bought about $20 worth of potting soil from the store (I still have more than half left) as well as a bag of popsicle sticks from the craft store.  I used the popsicle sticks to mark what kind of seed was planted in each pot. For the pots, I punched a hole in the bottom of some yogurt cups I had been saving just for seed planting. So I got to reuse the yogurt cups, and I got to reuse what few popsicle sticks I got from the popsicles I ate this year.  The rest of the popsicle sticks cost me around $2.50 at the craft store for a pack of 200. Then I simply went to work filling the pots with soil and dropping a seed in each one.  I didn’t do anything special to prepare the seeds, though it should be noted that if you’re impatient and want them to grow quickly after planting them, there are some seeds that you’ll want to refrigerate for up to 60 days before planting. For my project however, I am content to wait until winter turns my garage into a natural refrigerator.

I started out planting just 8 seeds, but every day I added between 3 and 15 more and the project quickly grew into something much bigger than I ever anticipated. Today, six of the eight original Asian pear seeds have sprouted and there are an additional 200+ planted seeds in my garage that I’m just waiting to come up.  I only live on a third of an acre property, but I am constantly finding new ways to work more trees into my property. I already have 10 fruit trees on my little sliver of land, and I have got 5 more on order in the fall. That’s in addition to the large willow and Japanese maple trees already growing here. So I expect to be able to work in a few more before the property gets tree-crowded, but it goes without saying that I won’t have room for all 200 if they all come up.

Even after the trees that do germinate begin to grow, it will still be several years before they begin bearing fruit. Then there’s no guarantee that they will all bear good fruit. While some trees like peach trees will generally grow true to their parent from seed, other trees like apple trees do not grow true to the parent, so it’s a toss-up whether you’ll get good fruit from it or not. That’s ok though because even if most of the resulting trees don’t produce good fruit, they’ll still produce fruit that the local wildlife will thrive on. Furthermore whether or not the trees produce any fruit at all, they will still flower, which provides food for pollinating insects and birds.

Some of you might be wondering what I’m going to do with hundreds of fruit trees that may or may not produce good fruit. Well the first thing I’ll do is offer free trees to all my neighbors in the neighborhood. After that I’ll place an ad offering free trees to anyone living within my zip code. If I still have trees left after that I’ll plant them on some undeveloped property near me. The reason I want these trees near me is that they’ll provide food for my bees, food for local wildlife, pretty flowers in the springtime, and for those trees that do bear good fruit, they will reduce the carbon footprint of the local food economy by bringing the food source closer to home for the people who eat the fruit. They will also help cushion the area against the effects of possible food shortages in the future.

Sometime around planting the 150th tree seed I decided that this was a full-scale major project and therefore it deserved a proper name. I dubbed this ‘The John Chapman Project’ in honor of John Chapman whom you may better recognize as Johnny Appleseed. I thought it only fitting since he did much the same thing as he wandered the countryside planting apple seeds wherever he went and starting several hundred apple orchards and having planted literally millions of apple trees. Though my project seems minuscule compared to his, and I intend to plant fruit tree seeds of all types, I still thought it fitting to pay homage to such a man after my own heart. By the way, there is an apple tree known to have been planted by Johnny Appleseed that’s still alive in an Ohio orchard.  It’s getting close to being 200 years old.

For now I will keep plugging away planting seed after seed, and in the next few years I hope to convince at least a few teachers to try a project like this with their classrooms. It is an excellent learning opportunity where you can teach the kids about American history via Johnny Appleseed, about botany, and about the environment and the sun or rain cycles, even about nutrition. I can think of no other classroom projects that would cost a total of under $20 and would tie into so many different lessons. Plus there is a high likelihood that many of the tree seedlings going home with the children will get planted somewhere because how can a parent bring themselves to destroy something their kid brings home and is proud of completing.  Even if nothing else were to come from it, the trees will help remove at least some of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Apple Tree that is 3 years old below:

Asian Pear Trees Below: