I Grew Loquat Trees From Seed and this is what happened – Full tutorial

Let’s explore how I grew Loquat trees from seed, right through to harvest. This took several years to get to this point and today we’ll dive into the full journey from start to finish of growing these beautiful and productive fruit trees!

Quick facts about Loquats:
•Loquats (Eriobotrya japonica) are evergreen trees native to China.
•They belong to the Rosaceae family, which also includes apples, pears, and roses.
•Loquat trees can tolerate temperatures down as low as 10°F (-12°C) without serious damage, but temperatures below 27°F (-3°C) can kill the flowers or fruit.
•The fruit is also known by other names, including Japanese plum, Chinese plum, and pipa in Chinese.
•Loquats have been cultivated for over a thousand years, prized for their sweet and tangy flavor.
•Loquats are rich in vitamins A and C, as well as potassium and dietary fiber.
•Loquat leaf tea, also known as “biwa cha” in Japanese, is a popular beverage in East Asia. It is made by steeping dried or fresh loquat leaves in hot water. This tea is believed to have various health benefits, including soothing sore throats and aiding digestion.

Let me know in the comments what you like about Loquats! And thank so much for watching 🙂

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VIDEO SUGGESTIONS FOR YOU:
Grafting Loquat Trees – Learn How To Graft – https://youtu.be/lOkFUHxO8ug
Growing & Tasting Some Of My Favourite Unusual Fruits – https://youtu.be/1u1DbPL8wzo
How I Grow Watermelons From Seed to Harvest – ft. Two Awesome Varieties -https://youtu.be/md0as5LQPHs

Books I’ve enjoyed and found helpful:

Grafting and Budding: A Practical Guide for Fruit and Nut Plants and Ornamentals
From Amazon – https://amzn.to/3iniYQa
From Fishpond (NZ & Australia etc.) – http://www.fishpond.co.nz/product_info.php?ref=3784&id=9780643093973&affiliate_banner_id=1″ target=”_blank

The Food Forest Handbook: Design and Manage a Home-Scale Perennial Polyculture Garden https://amzn.to/3imbZHo

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Hi, I’m Kalem, and this channel features all sorts of unusual and exotic fruiting plants with tips of how to successfully grow them. I’m interested in all things gardening and love growing my own food and all types of edible plants.
I live on a 2 acre piece of land in New Zealand where we are turning a grass paddock into and abundant, edible paradise and food forest! So come along on this journey with me as I experiment with growing, and try to push the limits of what I can grow. I’ll share with you my successes and failures so hopefully you’ll learn from them and have a go yourself! Come learn with me and Subscribe to join this awesome community 🙂

0:00 Intro
0:20 A bit about Loquat Fruits
1:28 How to Grow Loquat Seeds
2:00 4 Month Old Seedlings
2:21 How To Plant a Loquat Tree
3:14 Trees at 2.5 years old
3:54 Grafting some of the Loquat trees
5:34 Loquats are flowering!
6:50 Fruits are ready (5 Year Update)
8:13 Ways to use Loquat fruit
8:35 What’s better? Grafted or No Grafted?
9:35 Loquat Satisfaction! 😀

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Hey guys it’s welcome back so I’m standing next to this low quat tree that I grew from seed around 6 years ago with three other low quat trees as well today we’re going to dive into that journey of growing these trees talk about how long they each took to fruit how you can

Speed up the Fring process as well as cover some tips to get the most success out of growing these really amazing fruit trees lot trees are among some of the most beautiful fruit trees you can grow with these large glossy Evergreen leaves and not only that they can be extremely prolific providing large

Amounts of fruit at time of year when there’s not many other things Fring in the garden otherwise known as The Hungry Gap I remember when I was a kid climbing a massive low quat tree and sitting up on the branch like a monkey just gorging myself on the fruits and while I wasn’t

A huge fan of the slightly fuzzy skin that would make my skin crawl and give me goosebumps it was worth it for that really juicy Tangy and sweet flesh inside although lat trees can grow pretty large don’t worry if you have a smaller Garden there’s a few ways that

You can go about that one way is you can just prune it quite heavily to the shape and size that you want you can also grow it in a container if you want quite a large container works well and that will keep it much smaller than if you just

LIF a tree in the ground to its own devices and there is another thing as well that will keep these trees smaller but we’ll talk about that a bit later on if you open up a low quat fruit you’ll find these Brown seeds inside and some

Fruits will just have one seed some will have two or three or four and even if you have several different fruits from the same tree they can each have a different number of seeds inside which is quite interesting the main thing to know though when it comes to starting

Low quat seeds is to make sure you sew them when they’re fresh these are not a seed that you would dry out because the viability of them will drop and the good thing is because low quats are ripe in the springtime you can take those seeds out when they’re fresh plant them

Straight away and then they have all spring and summer when the weather’s warmer to grow and get to a nice size for my original loquat trees that I’m showing you today I just took the seeds and put them about an inch deep in some potting mix I kept them watered and in a

Nice warm spot and that’s all you need to do easy as after around 4 months they had turned into these small trees and then I just potted them up into some slightly larger pots but if I was going to do this again what I’d do is just pre off the multiple

Trunks that some of the seedlings had and just leave one trunk or stem per plant because later on I ended up cutting off those extra trunks anyway after the tree had already used more energy on growing them it’s now been a year since I planted the seeds and the leaves are just looking

Beautiful today I’m going to trans plant them into some bigger pots and I thought with this really big one here that’s just shot off it’s doing really well I don’t really want to leave it in a pot so I’m going to plant this one in the ground loquat trees do like a good

Amount of sun and I’ve got a pretty sunny spot for this one but a little bit of part shade should be okay too I’m digging a hole about double the width of the pot that the tree was in and I’ve got a bit of compost here and some sheet

Manure pallets which I’m going to mix in well into the top soil this isn’t something that you really need to do because low quats are pretty tolerant to a bunch of different soil conditions but since it’s spring I figure this should help to give the tree that extra boost

While the weather is nice and warm after a water in and some nice mulch the tree is all set to go about a year and a half later you can see there’s quite a noticeable difference between the tree that I’ve got in the ground here and the trees

That are still in their pots the ones in their pots were actually left in quite small pots for too long because life just got a bit busy so that really did slow down the growth for a good while and a similar thing happened to the tree

That’s in the ground as well in the summer time when it was like quite a bit of a drought and we weren’t giving it as much water as we would have liked that did slow it down so they are pretty drought tolerant like it never really

Wited or had any issues that it showed all it did from being a bit dry was just not put on as much growth but even still it’s doing fairly well thanks to that thick layer of mulch around the roots a few months later in Spring I decided to

Have a go at grafting the loquat trees that I still had in their pots this is something that could be done when your seedling is anywhere from about a year old for me I didn’t get onto it that early but that’s okay let’s dive into what grafting is why it’s beneficial and

I’ll show you how to do it a few of you guys have told me that they can take up to about 7 years to fruit if you grow them from seed and I’ve read this online as well and so by grafting you can actually speed up how soon that you get

Fruit from your plants so basically this is going to be our root stock and I’m going to be chopping it off and adding this Branch onto the top and letting this become all of the new growth this Branch here actually came from a mature loquat tree that I found and it was

Fruiting as well so I was able to taste the fruit and I really liked the fruit it didn’t really have much fuzz on the outside and also it was a nice sweet flavor it’s going to mean that I can grow a tree that has the exact same characteristics as the tree that this

Branch came out of and so one of those characteristics is that it’s old enough to be able to be fruiting and so by adding the on I could get through as soon as even next year I do have a full detailed video showing step by step the

Process of grafting low quat trees and I’ll link that below but this is something that’s actually pretty simple and low quats are a great tree to practice grafting on even if you’ve never done it before because generally they’re pretty easy and success rate tends to be fairly high so yeah I’d

Recommend checking out that full video if you’d like to see how that full process works and just a side note sometimes low quat trees are actually grafted onto Quint root stock and this causes a bit of a dwarfing effect and makes the tree stay at a bit of a smaller size

And having that compact tree makes it more manageable if you have a smaller space I ended up planting the grafted trees in the ground during the next spring and just a few months later when autumn arrived they started to flower and this is the power of grafting

Because even though the tree was pretty small to begin with due to being stuck in a small pot once it was grafted it kind of tricks the tree into thinking that it’s a mature tree since the branch that I grafted on came from that mature loat tree so getting fruit at this stage

When the plant is still pretty small and has been somewhat neglected in the pot is pretty awesome and that’s all thanks to that crafting it can be a good idea to remove the flowers for that first year so the tree can focus on growing in size and The graft becoming stronger however I

Ended up just letting them do their thing to see what would happen at the same time that these grafted trees were flowering I also noticed some flowers starting to appear on my seedling lot tree that I had planted in the ground first this was just 4 and 1/2 years from when

I first planted the seed so I’m pretty soaked with that result from a Seedling tree and although you know online sources said maybe 7 years to start getting fruit to see these flowers start to form after 4 and 1/2 years shows that it can be worth experimenting a little

Bit and seeing what you end up with around 6 months later and the flowers had then turned into fruits so this is the seedling loquat tree with some of its fruits overall there’s probably around 25 fruits on on it which isn’t heaps for its size but it is a

Good start for its first year fruiting so I’m pretty happy with that this here is one of my low quat trees that’s got a bunch of fruit on it at the moment and this one is one of the ones that I grafted and if you look down

Here comparing the graft how it was when we first did it now you can almost not even see where the graft is it’s healed really well and we’ve got a nice strong tree and you can see we’ve got some nice Bunches of fruits on these which I wasn’t really even expecting this year

But I’m stoked to see that we’ve got some so I’ll break one of these off and give it a try so really nice looking fruit and these are just like little rub marks it’s not bruised or anything that’s just kind of marks on the skin bit of a

Seed really nice and sweet and juicy I guess it kind of tastes almost like a mixture of Plum and apricot like not as intense flavor as an apricot but really juicy like a plum it’s a good good flavor another name for these is Chinese plum or even Japanese Plum I believe and

In this this particular fruit there were five seeds but a really good amount of Flesh really really nice juicy fruit and one of the things I really like about these is that they fruit in the springtime when there’s not really that many other fruits in the garden and so

Yeah it just ties That Gap over the fruits are also very versatile you can of course just eat them fresh we’ll make jams and other preserves I’ve also Frozen them for smoothies and I’ve dehydrated them as well and that really intensifies the flavor and sweetness and

Makes for a pretty tasty snack that will last for many months if you don’t eat them all at once that is it’s actually been another year since I showed you guys the fruits on this grafted tree so it’s put on a nice bit of size I’m hoping to get lots more

Flowers and fruits this year but what I would say is that although the grafted tree fruited at the same time as the seedling tree did they both took 5 years to produce their first fruits remember that I didn’t graft them at the earliest stage that I could I did take a few

Years while they were just sitting in pots so if you want to get fruit as fast as possible you can just graft them after 1 year and then you should be seeing fruit like 2 or 3 years after first putting the seed in the ground which is pretty good and otherwise if

You don’t want to get into the grafting I think it’s still worth growing them from seed they were delicious fruits and they only took 5 years which is not too bad and in other cases it might take a bit longer but the great thing with

These trees is that as you can see they are so ornamental and so beautiful these two flies mating up here that even just growing them for the aesthetic of the stunning tree that they are is a win in my book and then when fruit come they come and that’s great and there’s really

Nothing like standing beside a tree savoring the fruits that it Bears all while reminiscing about the moment you planted that very seed that’s a powerful reminder that every small action we take has the potential to blossom into something Extraordinary