Planting Chinese Wolfberry
Answered by: Conrad Richter
Question from: Tina Shier
Posted on: March 25, 2001

We bought some Chinese Wolfberry seed from you this year and I am a little confused as to what to do with it. Do I dry the berries and get the seed, plant the berry, or fight them out of the berry? In another Q&A you said there were a couple of seeds and when we broke them open there were around 20 or so, Are the very tiny yellowy-beige seeds underdeveloped?

You can plant the berries whole or you can remove the seeds from the berries first and plant them. We find it easier to simply "sow" the berries as if they were seeds, and then when the seedlings come up, we transplant them. Although the seedlings come up fairly crowded, we find that it is not too difficult to divide them and transplant them.

This is the traditional way that Chinese farmers start this plant. It may be better in the future for us to separate the seeds from the berries and sell the seed already cleaned; but we find that most people are having adequate success following the traditional method. Furthermore, keeping the seeds in the berry may actually help to increase the longevity of the seeds by maintaining the right conditions around the seeds while in storage.

The impression I gave in the earlier posting that there are only a few seeds per berry is not correct; there, as you have found, more than a dozen seeds per berry.

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