These palm seedlings almost fooled me into pulling them out, because they look just like weeds at first. looking like weeds. I mistook the slender shoots for errant blades of grass.
But when those little spears start to unfurl, they become recognizable as the pleated leaves of baby palms.
When the palm tree trimmers came to top my neighbor's majestic tree last October, they knocked down thousands of shiny black seeds and I filled a whole bucket with them before sitting down to research palm tree propagation on the internet.
The news there was pretty grim. Some experts warned that palm seeds could take months, even years to sprout! But my neighbor laughed and showed me all the "volunteers" in his yard. Some weeks after returning from a trip in January, I looked the topic up again and read an opinion that only fresh seeds should be expected to sprout. Oh, well! I shrugged and put a handful of the three-month old seeds into a glass of water to soak overnight, and then the next day pushed them into the soil in a pot of Thai Basil, and pretty much forgot about them until today.
Now there are seven cute little palm trees growing in my pot.
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