Growing Citrus Crops, Indoor Pomegranate, Avocado, Dates Indoors

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Every adult at least once in his life has probably seen a small child reaching for a flower. It is very important for the full life of this kid to make the plants become his close and understandable environment, so that he learns to admire them and take care of them - living, green and colorful friends.

For example, N. Verzilin's wonderful book "Traveling with House Plants" can help you with this, from which it will be interesting to learn about the origin of the familiar house plants, about the history of their culture, about their amazing properties and how to properly handle them …

You can start communicating with the child at any time. Eating "overseas" fruits, their seeds are usually thrown away, but you can sow a few seeds in a pot with fertile soil (compost with the addition of sand is suitable). The kid will gladly do it himself and will be delighted when the first shoots appear from the ground.

A fruit tree grown from seeds can become a family heirloom, as it is durable in nature and grows successfully in indoor conditions. For this, seeds of orange, tangerine, lemon, grapefruit, lime, almond, peach, plum, apple, date, fig, kiwi, persimmon, pomegranate, avocado, mango and other fruits are suitable, which can be sown at any time of the year, but better early in spring or summer, when there is a lot of light and heat.

Before sowing, the seeds are separated from the pulp, washed with water and allowed to dry slightly. You just need to remember that small seeds are sown almost superficially, sprinkling them with a layer of soil no more than their own thickness, the rest - to a depth of 1-2 cm. The pot with crops is kept warm (22-24 ° C), not allowing the soil to dry out, moisten careful watering or spraying, continuing it after the emergence of shoots.

When true leaves appear on young plants, you can plant each specimen in a separate small pot or yogurt box and grow there until the roots cover the entire earthen ball.

Suggest that the child himself transplant the flower into a more spacious container without breaking the coma and laying a layer of broken shards or expanded clay on the bottom for better water flow. Interestingly, a young plant of orange, lemon and other plants can be grown in the form of a shrub or tree - at will. In order for the crown to become branched, you need to pinch the top leaves together with the growing point directly above the next pair of leaves.

After some time, lateral shoots will appear from the leaf axils, which, as they grow, also need to be pinched for better branching and quickly creating a beautiful crown shape. It is possible to form the crown of subtropical fruit plants in the form of a ball, oval, pyramid, cube, etc., and all this is done by repeatedly pinching young shoots, while on the stem, excess lateral shoots are removed to obtain a straight, beautiful trunk.

Young plants are fed with a solution of complex fertilizers every 10-14 days (Uniflor-growth, 1 cap per 2 liters of warm settled water) during spring and summer. For adult plants entering the fruiting phase, a fertilizer with a high content of potassium, phosphorus, magnesium and other nutrients will be required (Uniflor-bud in the same dose).

From September to February, watering and feeding is reduced, reducing them to a minimum. Indoor fruit plants overwinter in light cool conditions on windowsills (at a temperature of 10-13 ° C) or in a dark pantry, a basement at a temperature of 2-6 ° C, while the leaves are partially shed.

It is very important to keep the crown of the plants clean. To do this, they are satisfied with real bathing in the shower, which the child can do quite well. It is necessary to put the pot with the plant in a plastic bag, tie it tightly so that the earth does not spill out, and water with dust and possible insect pests does not fall on the ground, and only in this form rinse the crown with warm water.

Plants should dry out after bathing before returning to a sunny window. Freshly washed citrus plants exude a great scent and fill rooms with it.

You need to know some tricks that will help to bring the fruiting time of indoor fruits closer. Since they are all southern in origin, they require a southern, southwest orientation window for normal development.

The formation of the crown is necessary not only for beauty, but also for the fastest formation of fruit twigs and buds on the branches of the 5-6 order of branching, after which the plants are transplanted much less often. To accelerate fruiting helps to tighten one of the trunks with a rigid ring made of tin or wire. This technique promotes the accumulation in the crown of nutrients necessary for the formation of flower buds.

When buds appear, the banner is removed. Another technique is grafting 2-3 eyes taken from a fruiting plant (lemon, orange) into the crown of a healthy adult plant. In this case, there is a stimulation for fruiting. There are cases of inoculation of lemon eyes on an orange tree - a seedling on which both lemon and orange bloomed three years later (specialists of the Botanical Garden provide this service).

If you take cuttings from the upper part of the crown of an already fruiting tree, then the plants grown from them begin to bear fruit in the fourth year. A prerequisite for growing fruit plants in a room is good nutrition in accordance with the phase of their development.

Avocado grows very quickly: in a few years - up to 1 m in height. The avocado seed is immersed in the ground with a blunt end, the sharp tip is left above the soil surface. The fast-growing plant is annually transplanted into a more spacious container and repeatedly pinched for active branching of the crown.

To grow figs, aka ficus carica, or fig tree, with beautiful palm leaves, it is important to know that the plant is dioecious, and the seedlings may turn out to be male specimens. They can bloom but not bear fruit. Therefore, it is worth growing several specimens at once, choosing a female plant that can be propagated by cuttings, and quite quickly (in the second year) to achieve fruiting.

The harvest can be up to fifty fruit. Fig fruits - wine berries - contain sugar, proteins, fats and many vitamins. It blooms in spring, bears fruit in late autumn, and grows successfully even in the northern regions. In autumn and winter, additional lighting with fluorescent lamps up to 12-hour daylight hours will be useful.

As for the pomegranate tree, there is a special type for indoor culture - indoor pomegranate, the seeds of which can be acquired through friends, at exhibitions, in gardening clubs or simply in a store. This type of pomegranate blooms with bright scarlet flowers, forming small fruits, commensurate with the plant itself.

Ordinary pomegranate seeds germinate quickly and grow a crown. With good care, after 2-3 years a pomegranate tree can bloom and give a crop. This is one of the oldest tubular fruit plants depicted in drawings in 1539 by Hieronymus Bosch (Germany). It is best to winter a pomegranate in a dark, cool place (closet, basement at 2-6 ° C).

Dates hatch and grow slowly - you will have to wait for their shoots for more than one month. The bone must be immersed in the ground vertically to a depth of 1 cm from the upper tip. Dates need coolness in winter, and transplant every spring until the plants are very large.

Perhaps the most amazing thing will be the cultivation of peanuts (peanuts). Its fresh fruits in a light brown skin germinate at a soil temperature of 25 ° C, and first a strong root appears, which is firmly fixed in the ground. Later, soft leaves grow, and the plant will require a bright place and regular moderate watering.

Summer is the time for peanuts to bloom. Its yellow flowers must be pollinated with a brush, transferring the pollen of one flower to the pistil of another. And at this moment the most interesting thing will begin: the pollinated flowers themselves lean to the ground, grow into it and form underground fruits.

Indoor plants from the seeds of exotic fruits will grow with children and will certainly become the subject of their pride, helping them to timely understand one very important and simple truth: we are responsible for those who were given life or tamed.