How to grow a plant from a coconut

Problem
How do you grow a coconut? Can you grow any coconut?

Answer
Yes, a ripe coconut from a tree, or one bought from a supermarket. You plant it up to half way in soil, leave it in a sunny spot indoors or outdoors, and water it every day.

Stories
Successful Coconut growing
I know growing coconuts works. I recently saw a coconut sitting on a table in an allotment by the path in a condominium in Singapore. I was not sure whether it was grown in soil and then dug up for planting by the full time gardens who have a plant nursery in the huge complex which has a dozen blocks of flats in a circle around an Olympic size swimming pool.

Allotments
Residents can rent a teeny allotment, the size of a single bed.

Balconies
Some residents have balconies full of plant pots. I think you should only do that if you have a full time maid to water the plants and remove dead leaves and insects and stagnant water.

Stagnant Water Dangers: Mosquitos
The Singapore government sends around inspectors to check you are not breeding mosquitos in vases and saucers on balconies, or even old shoes, buckets, or bits of bamboo for hanging out washing. The inspectors leave leaflets in several languages for everybody to read.

We had one case of Zika in a nearby block. When you get a cluster of cases, such as two, five, or ten people falling ill, the inspectors are knocking on the doors of every flat, checking the back and from balconies, looking at gutters.

Free Pot Plant
For years I was reluctant to have any plants on my balcony. Eventually, having been given a home grown aloe vera offshoot by a friend who has dozens of plants, I was keen enough to send somebody out on a motorbike to buy a plant pot. My family member came back lugging a large, heavy oblong trough.

The garden centre had no small pots. If they did, they did not reveal them. Instead they had seen the opportunity to sell a large container - plus three bags of bright orange sand.

The oblong container took half an hour to fill. The sandy soil blew all over the balcony making a mess and stains which had to be cleared up.

Discussing Cococnuts
Later that week, I asked about growing a coconut at a meeting of the members of Bukit Batok speakers' club. Several people nodded. Nobody seemed the least bit surprised at the idea.

Watching Coconut Palms
As a child and teenager I had seen pram trees in picture books but never knew there were so many types of palms.

Palm trees surround many swimming pools in condominiums in Singapore, Florida, the South of France and other warm countries. The trees look pretty and provide shade.

Not all palms are coconut palms. (Yet, logically a plan must have a coconut. If not, how do the others reproduce?)

Date Palms
Date palms have much smaller stones, encased in a soft and often mushy luscious date. I remember picking a date from the ground at Ein Gedi with a group of tourists on the path to the famous biblical waterfalls.

I identified several types of palms in Singapore. Fan shape palms are lower and pretty and fan shape. The lipstick palms with their red 'stalks' are elegant.

Over in the USA, the stately straight palms grow alongside roads in Florida in straight lines, obviously planted deliberately. Royal palms.

Once you start looking for palms, you see them all around. In the late 1900s palm trees were rare, except in two small outdoor Botanical gardens in sheltered areas, one in the north and one in Wales.

Nowadays, even in England, especially the south, including London, you see palms in people's front gardens, usually just one small palm. You can buy them from garden centres. A two year old potted palm as tall as me cost about £30 last time I asked, a year or so ago.

Avoid Sitting Under Coconut Palms
I was first told not to sit under a coconut tree when I sat down under a tree in Singapore, right in the centre of the city, at The Beaumont private complex of apartments. I lived there in a rented apartment, right the centre of Singapore, overlooking Orchard Road. An agitated member of the complex staff who was doing his daily cleaning of the pool, removing fallen coconut leaves and debris, ran over and told me not to sit under a tree.
He said: "Must not sit here. Not allowed, la!"
I was puzzled. I asked, "Why not?"
"In case coconut fall."

I thought it was a joke. I looked up and saw coconuts. Being a law abiding person, not wishing to cause trouble, I moved myself, my swim shoes, my towel, and my book, out of the shade of the coconut, over to another table into the shade of a parasol under the shade of the building. I stared back at the coconut palms.

Why were the loungers under the trees if you weren't supposed to sit there?

I vaguely remembered seeing boys running up the diagonal coconut trees on beaches to pick coconuts. Surely the coconuts fall only once a year, when they are ripe? Doesn't some keen member of staff get all the coconut as perks?

I can imagine that a crop of dates might get eaten by birds.

However, later, when I saw a coconut on the ground, I realised that logically, coconuts, like chestnuts (called conkers in England) and other seeds, must eventually fall. When coconuts get ripe, if they fall, they are large and heavy.

I'd never heard of anybody being killed by a falling coconut. It might strike you (excuse the pun) as being funny. I'm sure in real life it would not be funny at all. I looked it up on the web. Sure enough, I found a case of somebody being killed by a coconut, sheltering from sun or rain under a coconut tree.

Children might not know about the danger, just as tourists don't know.

Collecting Coconuts
Watching workmen in Singapore by the pool, alongside the coconut trees, on an orange platform, cutting down leaves and passing coconuts to the ground, recently, I was tempted to ask if I could have a coconut. I imagined that between half a dozen members of staff looking after the grounds, the coconuts would be shared out. Eventually I went over and asked.

"Are you taking all the coconuts, or can I have one?"

'Yes, take two, three, four, Ma-am, as many as you like. If not, only throw away."

I eagerly took a coconut. It was heavy. I asked the man if he would kindly put it on a nearby table. He put out four for me. He slit a strip of the outside, leaving it hanging, and tied two of the coconuts together to make them easier to carry.

I want back to the workers and asked, "Are you taking the coconuts home to eat?"

"No, no."

I wondered if the management forbade it.

I asked, "Why not?"

"Live in Malaysia, Ma'am. Too far, too heavy, to carry. Anyways, got lots of coconuts in Malaysia."

So I sent my coconuts upstairs.

My family did not share my enthusiasm.

Photo of coconuts in Singapore. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright. 2017.

I was told: "Don't bring them indoors. We'll get insects everywhere. They are covered in insects!"

I left the coconuts outside the from door, they, like me, feeling and looking rejected and dejected, out in the corridor.

But the corridor was being painted. I had to move the coconuts. A worker might fall. Paint could spatter on them preventing growth, or creating a bad smell. Thinking they were unwanted, somebody might throw them away.

In England I had to ask my house sitters or neighbours to water my indoor plants. I thought of putting my orchids out of conservatory into the garden. I didn't trust the gardeners to water the plants. But the rain might do the job in springtime, although not in a hot summer with a long dry spell. Unfortunately, despite 2016 being one of the hottest years on record, overall, England has four seasons. We had snow in January in 2017.

Afterwards I looked at my aloe vera plant growing in a pot on the balcony in Singapore. It has survived on its own for several weeks when nobody remembered to water it or when everybody was away. Bingo! That's where my coconuts could sit. Singapore rarely goes a day without rain.

On the other hand, I remember what I was told by a taxi driver when I first arrived in Singapore, 'Trees grow full height in three years"

How soon would my coconut grow? How tall would it grow? How urgently did I need to water it? Would it never grow if it dried out? Surely not. The coconuts you buy from supermarkets have coconut milk inside.

I shall keep you posted on the progress of my coconuts.

Tips
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut

Video on growing in the US in a conservatory if you are not in the humid tropics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv4JaCFbTdI

On Youtube another video (from New Zealand?) on how to choose a supermarket coconut which is dehusced, if you can hear the coconut milk switching around; then grow a coconut indoors in a pail of water in a hot cupboard, weighted down in the water by a rock, then kept humid in a plastic bag with a little water for humidity, the green shoot going out of the black circular dot or 'eye' which faces up to the sun, and a brown root growing downwards over the outside. Results are seen after about about a month. You can subscribe to this man's site for updates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BieelvE_ZPI

The green coconut is young and provides an almost colourless and thin coconut water. A few months later the coconut turns brown and you have less of the liquid and more of the 'meat'. Coconut 'milk', whiter and creamier, more like milk, is extracted from the meat.
https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/fruits/coconut/when-are-coconuts-ripe.htm

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, teacher and tutor of English for adults, author of 20 books on subjects such as Wedding Speeches and Toasts, etiquette, quotations, educational and humorous poetry on animals.Read my profiles and posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, videos on YouTube, books on Amazon.com and Lulu.com . Thank you for reading. Comments welcome. Please like my posts, follow and share.

(Photos will be added shortly, when I've re-loaded the latest software update and got the hang of how to load up from my mobile.)