Can You Grow a Peach Tree From a Peach Pit?

Can you grow a peach tree from a peach pit? You sure can! In fact, you can grow most fruit trees from seed and it’s a great way of growing lots of fruit trees for free.

David the Good wrote a great tutorial on growing peach trees from seed. I’ve pasted his video below. He says germinating peach pits is amazingly easy! You can read the full article here.

This is a photo his friend sent him of her germinated peach seeds:

Can You Grow a Peach Tree From a Peach Pit?

Definitely. You can grow pretty much any fruit tree from seed.

The thing to keep in mind is that peach seeds need cold stratification to germinate. Cold stratification is the process of simulating nature, where a seed gets a very cold winter before the warm spring hits.

David mentions there are 6 ways of cold stratification.

1. Cold water soaking
2. Refrigeration
3. Planting in the fall
4. Planting in winter
5. Snow planting
6. Outdoor treatment

Many people will tell you it’s not worth starting a fruit tree from seed. They say they don’t fruit well, the fruit doesn’t taste nice, etc.

In my experience, growing fruit trees from seeds is a great way to grow them. Yes, not all of them are great, but most of them are great and some of them are exceptional.

Seed-grown fruit trees are often tougher, more resilient, and adapt better to their environment.

Grafted fruit trees will forever have a weak spot around the graft site.

You’ll often see growth coming from below the graft, and often this growth is faster and tougher than the growth above the graft. That’s because the “bottom” part of the grafted tree is seed-grown, which means it’s tougher and grows better.

The only reason for buying a grafted fruit tree is if you want to get a specific type of fruit, like an Emperor mandarin or a Hass avocado, for example. You can grow avocados from seed too, they take a while to germinate, but they grow very quickly.

In poor soil, my seed-grown avocado fruited in 5 years. I now have great soil and my 1,5-year-old avocado, grown from seed, is over 7ft tall and I have no doubts it will produce its first fruits this year.

How to Germinate a Peach Seed

David started with 50 peach pits he found underneath a Tropic Beauty Peach in Florida.

You can see in the video above how he did it. He also created a cartoon image with the steps involved:

Here’s his video showing you some of the peach trees that he grew from a peach pit.

He germinated his peach pits in the fridge, look how lovely the resulting fruit is!

David’s peach trees produced amazingly well. It’s almost hard to believe, but in their second year, they produced 5 gallons of peaches. He mentioned the seed-grown peaches grew better and faster than his grafted trees, and they produced more fruit.

Growing Peach Trees

Peach trees need a certain number of chill hours per year to fruit well. In the tropics, we often don’t get enough chill hours. Most peaches grow well in zones 6-9 (check your zone on the USDA Zoning Map).

Look for peach varieties that are low-chill. Here’s a list of peaches and peach-like fruits that are low-chill:

• Babcock Peach Tree. Zones 6-10
• Peach Ventura
• Peach Bonita
• Santa Barbara Peach. Zones 8-10
• Peach Mid Pride
• Nectarine Arctic Rose. Zones 8-10
• Nectarine Double Delight

Micro-climates also help when you’re trying to grow fruit trees that aren’t “suited” to your climate. Read more about micro-climates and food forests.

Germinating Fruit Trees In the Compost Pile

One more tip.

Seeds often germinate well in the compost.

I guess it’s warm, soft, moist, and nutritious. I’ve tried to sprout mango seeds in pots many times, but the most successful way of growing them from seed is to simply dump them in the compost pile. They nearly all sprout.

The hardest part of this is that you often don’t know which tree the seed came from. Unless you mark each one, you’ll end up with 100s of seedlings of unknown type. I guess there are worse problems to have.

Where to Get the Peach Pits to Germinate?

A friend’s or someone else’s yard is your best bet. Locally grown trees are adapted to your climate and make great germinating stock.

Farmer’s markets are a great place too. Supermarket-bought fruit also often sprouts, but they may be GMO no-sprout varieties. They’re all worth a go though, it doesn’t take much more work to germinate 50 seeds than it does 10!

What do you think about growing peach trees from seed? Are you going to try it?