Growing Plants From Foreign Fruits

Problem
I eat lovely fruit overseas and would like to grow the same back home. But it's illegal to import it. Or is it? The Australians don't like you importing fruit and vegetables. Even the remains of a sandwich set the sniffer dogs on you at the airport with a dog handler with a leaflet threatening you with a fine.

Answer
Why bother? A trip round your local supermarket will fill your fridge and plate and fruit bowl with enough stones (or pits as Americans say) to keep you busy preparing pips and planting for many happy hours.

Stories
My late mother-in-law used to grow avocado stones over a glass milk bottle. She put a toothpick in both sides of the stone and water in the bottle. The stone grew roots, then sprouted on top. It more or less grew itself.

If you have a ledge behind your sink, it's easy to watch and water. If you have a balcony, just make a routine and check that the soil is neither dried out nor waterlogged.

London Fruit
In London I recently bought dates from Iran in a Turkish mini supermarket and apricots from Spain in a Tesco Express.

Singapore Fruit
I can buy fresh mangoes in Singapore from various countries, the Philippines and Malaysia. Plus durian - but durians and melons grow rather too big to plant in a pot on the balcony.

But the Singapore block of flats, let's call it a condo, has an allotment.  Fine, if you want to spend the money on renting it and the time on cultivating your plants.

Looking up at the 15 floors of balconies, you can see that some people have lots of plants. Others have none.

The increasing trend worldwide is to make use of the sunny flat roof space and turn it into a garden or vegetable garden.

Other people in Singapore leave their from balcony free of plants to leave room for a table and two chairs, but fill the back balcony with plants.

In Singapore the weather is much the same all year, hot and extra hot, humid, sunny and like a sauna. I am afraid of growing too many items on a balcony because of the risk of breeding insects including mosquitos. We are regularly checked for saucers under plant pots and even plastic bags which could collect rain and breed mosquitos.

London
In London we also have had a glut of insects. We used to be plagued by ants in summer.

Now we have moths. We always had moths and moth balls. But now it's worse, with global warming

Recently in London, after eating fruit, I was looking at the stones left by fruit. I decided to check some websites on how to grow fruit from stones.

The first surprise is that you take off the last vestiges of fruit. I thought the idea was that the fruit supplied the nutrients and I was stealing the food of the poor deprived stone. On the contrary, apparently.

I went onto some American websites. One suggestion was to buy fruit from a Farmer's Market. Oddly, in London, you don't have to go out into the countryside. Saturday morning and weekend in both the suburbs and markets right in the centre of London attract traders from outside London.

From the American websites I learned the trick to getting some stones (or pips) - or pits to grow. Basically, you put them in the cold of your fridge freezer at the right temperature. The potential plant thinks it is winter. After ten weeks you take it out into the warm and it thinks: 'Hey - it's springtime, so I must grow!'

If you travel between two countries, with a holiday home or business office in another country, when you are stuck without outings with friends, or having a day off at the weekend, time to look at your plate and save that stone and grow it.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.