Growing Beach Plums and Other Plants from Seed

Buying plants in pots is expensive, but collecting seeds is free, so last fall I decided to save seeds from a variety of plants so I could try growing them. Most seeds from plants that grow wild in our climate need a period of "stratification." This means exposure to moisture and cold, and it simulates the environment a seed would encounter in nature, once it fell off the mother plant and went through winter. Most seeds will not sprout until after this, which makes sense: if a seed sprouted without stratification, it would sprout in the fall and then the young plant would be killed by the arrival of winter. Much better to wait until spring, then sprout.

I looked up ways to stratify seeds at home. Most of the info I found mentioned putting the seed into moist peat moss in a ziploc and leaving it in the refrigerator for a month or more. Other sources said you could use paper towels, but I was afraid the bleach or other chemicals in the paper towels would affect the seeds, so I used peat moss.

I collected seeds from beach plums, beach roses, and elderberry bushes that were growing in the wild. (I also collected seed from goji berries and seed from cranberries I bought at the grocery store, but I'll describe those in another post).

I put it in bags of peat moss last October, and stuck it in my fridge.

Today I took out the packages of seeds. The seeds had grown much plumper, and some of the beach plum seeds had begun to sprout:

One difficulty with the "peat moss in a bag" system is that with smaller seeds, it can be difficult to find the seeds when it's time to plant. If the seeds are small, it's easier to fill a prescription bottle with dampened peat moss and put the seeds in that:

Then you have far less material to go picking through, looking for tiny seeds.

Today I mixed equal amounts of sand (free, from the beach) and topsoil, filled pots with the mix, and planted several seeds in each pot. Then I put them outside, since it's warming up now. And now I'll wait to see what happens. If they grow, I'll plant some in my yard, and plant the others in random places around town: part of my "stealth wild edible plants" program. I plant native edible plants in places where they belong, or won't be noticed: scrubby woods, edges of roads, the back ends of parks where things have been allowed to grow wild and no one cuts the grass. Maybe other foragers will find them, or the birds might like the fruits; it's just a way of creating a little bit more nature here on the Island.

Update: This is for Bill, who asked what the bush looks like:

The easiest way to find beach plums is to go around in spring and look for them when they're flowering; then later in the summer you can come back and look for the fruit. This year (2013) I'll take some photos of the flowering bushes to help you know what to look for.