well howdy folks hi desert garden here today what i'd like to do is show you guys how to do something really cool and that is to start a pomegranate tree from seed some people refer to a pomegranate as a bush because they will get real bushy depending on how you let them grow but for the most part i hear people refer to them as pomegranate trees so that's that's what i think they are but uh pomegranates are really great i love them i really want to grow one because they're so expensive if you buy them in the store and if you can grow your own that's always just so much better so we're going to start off with what i'm going to show you guys first is preparing the soil so i've already started to prepare my soil here so i'm just going to show it to you to show you what i got all right so here this is one of those little jiffy containers that i got last year and it's like a little uh greenhouse thing it's pretty cool you put the little top on it and it does have some ventilation of course but for the most part it holds the moisture in real well now um i've already like i said put some soil in here actually what this is these are worm castings from my worm bin i'm just going to give you a sneak peek here are my worm bins over here there's the worm bin back there in the corner that these castings came out of and here is the high desert garden flow through bin which i built myself recently and i showed a video on that but anyhow you don't have to have worm castings to do this certainly seeds will sprout in just about anything because they have the energy they need to sprout contain within the seed of course once that seed sprouts and puts down roots it's going to need nutrients but then again you don't need worm castings like i have here in fact this is not pure worm castings i i put i filled this about halfway with peat moss you could use peat moss or cocoa core uh and then i i put you know i filled it up the rest of the way with castings so it's about one part peat moss one part castings and again you don't even have to do that you can use regular potting soil all right so don't stress about it if you don't have these things if you're just getting started as a gardener and you don't have this stuff don't worry about it anyhow the reason why i prepared this dirt in this tray is so that i could measure it out now i got to mix it all right so you can see there's the peat moss so i'm going to mix this finish mixing this soil and put it back in here i'm not going to bore you with that here are the pomegranate seeds i'm going to plant in here now i'm going to show you right quick how i am going to prepare the seeds so let's get our seeds here pomegranate seeds are just so wonderful aren't they all right so i'm going to take a seed and essentially you're just going to eat the outside coating off of it you can peel it off you can do whatever you want to get it off but it's good all right so when you're doing this in your mouth you just want to be careful that you do not bite down on the seed here is what the seed looks like with that outer coating off of it just a little white seed that's what we're going to be planting so i'm going to go ahead and do that to the rest of the seeds that i will be planting and then we're gonna get to planting them all right so i got my soil mixture i got most the soil in here i saved some in the container here because i like to put my seeds down and i just like to put some dirt over the top of it all right so here is what the seeds look like once you get that outer coating off are just these little white seeds so i went ahead and i i decided to just do 10 seeds and i'm going to eat the rest because they're so good all right so i'm just going to place some seeds in here i don't like where that one's placed let's place it there ish there we go i like to try and lay them in there sideways on their side kind of like they're going to bed because when they sprout they're going to sprout out one end and it'll be easier for them to stand up if they're on their side same goes for pumpkin seeds and just about any seed that's kind of elongated like this you want to put it to bed right on its side it's just less energy for it to stand up all right just like so the really cool thing about harvesting just a few castings from the worm bin um i saw so many juvenile worms in there many of them were large enough for me to pick out and throw back in the worm bin some of them are just so small you know if you try to pick them up you're going to kill them so there are tiny tiny tiny baby worms in here uh that's okay there's plenty of peat moss in there for them to eat so uh there i've got the seeds to bed now to go ahead and lay some more dirt across and you only need you know quarter to a half inch dirt on the top there you don't need a lot so just trickle some dirt on there and we will lightly push down on it we won't compact it or anything like that if you do a little bit it's not a big deal but you don't want to press on it so hard that you shove your seed way down into the bottom all right so there we go uh so then you know in a couple years from now we should have some pomegranates this is one of those things that does take time but it's uh pretty neat pretty cool to be able to do it so what i will do is my soil is pre-moistened i might spray it down just a couple sprays with a spray bottle uh i will put the top on it i will put it in a place where it can kind of get some indirect light um if i give it any direct sunlight at all it'll be very very little and this little top will uh hold the moisture in pretty much regardless anyway but um this isn't going to need a lot of sun for these to sprout now once they sprout yes i will definitely want them to at least get really good indirect light especially once they sprout and then kind of work them slowly into the sunlight you know i just want to say again this is one of those things that you know you may not see results from right away you know it's not like planting a tomato or planting some lettuce but it's never too late to get started you know no matter how old you are i mean i'm 38 and i wish i had got started much much younger because a lot of the things that i would really like to be reaping the benefits from because they take several years to grill i'm happy to just start with them and it'll be several years but that's also part of the fun i do wish i had started younger but it's never too late to get started gardening uh it's been the greatest hobby it's been the greatest life change i've ever made so i hope this video finds you well i hope you give it a try the brand uh i just wanted to mention also the brand of pomegranate that i planted here is just the typical brand that you get in the store if you bought pomegranates in the store the brand that you probably got is wonderful wonderful is the most popular brand and it is a really good eating pomegranate the seeds have just a little crunch to them but they're not too crunchy and you can get different varieties of pomegranate some that will have a much less of a crunch to the seeds and and some that may have rock hard seeds so do your research if you do purchase pomegranate seeds or even a pomegranate tree online from a nursery or something like that do your research on it before you get it me personally i don't mind having a seed that has a little bit of a crunch i would like to get other varieties that have even less of a crunch and try some different varieties there's some really good russian varieties out there anyways i'm gonna bring you guys the update when these seeds do sprout so i'm bringing you another update on the pomegranate seeds because they are to the point now where i need to transplant them out of the mini jiffy greenhouse and i need to transplant them into some individual pots anyways i decided to put the uh the jiffy greenhouse on a heating pad specifically for um sprouting seeds not just any old heating pad make sure if you get a heating pad things like peppers and and obviously pomegranates like the heat um from the heating pad so i i put them on the heating pad and within three days uh i had pomegranate seeds popping up everywhere so they didn't exactly germinate within six days they may have if i had had them on the heating pad the whole time but once i placed them on the heating pad like i said it was only a matter of three days so um yeah let me show you what they look like all right so this is a pomegranate seedling you can see it looks nothing like a tomato seedling it is kind of yet to unravel obviously you can see i've already potted this one up i put it in a nice big pot now the soil that i used believe it or not uh i have not gone down to the big box store and bought gardening soil or anything in quite some time so the bedding that i've been making for my worms my worm bins makes great potting soil because i mean it's 50 compost 50 cocoa core so it works great i used that as well as i added um a good handful of worm castings to the mix and that's how i potted this up so when when i do um transplant seedlings i like to give them a little miniature greenhouse like this it's just a pop bottle it does have ventilation through the top because you do want to it to be able to get some air circulation in there but this has worked great for me i've never had a seedling fail um obviously you don't have to do this for many seedlings like tomatoes and and seedlings like that that do great but i find that squash pumpkins um you know cucumbers um any tropicalish kind of plant like a you know a pomegranate as well is going to do really really well if you put a little miniature greenhouse on there because what it does is it prevents it from drying out or or transpiring all that moisture out of its little leaves it allows the roots to take hold and settle in and begin to pull the moisture up uh so i usually like to cover it up for a week or so so i'm going to go ahead and show you the rest of them here all right so this is our jiffy mini uh greenhouse and here are the other four that have sprouted thus far so you can see obviously they look totally different than the volunteer tomato seedlings that you saw in here before um the little seed packet just came off of the top of that one so there they are um i've decided to just transplant three because i don't need a ton of pomegranate you know trees sitting around so i've got these other two pots and i'm gonna i've already done one so i'm just gonna do two more and i'm gonna show you how i how i do that how i'm transplanting these so you wanna be very careful not to disturb too much the roots of the plant the tree i like to take something like a spoon and run it down the side make sure i grab a nice big chunk of the soil with it and there you have it you want to be careful that your soil doesn't crumble away you can probably see remember when i planted these seedlings i had baby worms in there you might be able to see that in the in the shot there so now i take this let's push this aside take my pot make a make a little space for it maybe a little bit more to make sure i can get it in there and then it just goes right down in there like i said you want to be careful i mean using the method that i use even if you disturb the roots a little bit not a big deal because of the fact that i covered up with the little mini greenhouse those roots are going to have plenty of time to recover as long as you keep it nice and humid so i'm just going to sort of tamper a little bit the soil a good way to think about this when you're tampering it down just don't don't press very hard you don't want to press any harder than you would on you know like your eyeball or something like that so there we've got the pomegranate seedling in the pot and like i said i will take one of these many greenhouses and i'm going to put this in the patio door in the window where it can get a decent amount of sunlight all right so i wouldn't exactly want to stick it outside quite yet but in the window where it can get lots of sun a south facing south facing window is going to be great and i will go ahead and bring you guys an update uh you know oh i don't know probably in a couple weeks a month uh so you can see how these are doing uh with the soil the cocoa core the nice light fluffy soil with the worm castings i think it is going to do really great so go ahead and hit that button and subscribe give it a thumbs up and you will see the update coming up here soon