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How to grow Wisteria from Seed
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Anyone know hot to grow this from seed?
My friends mother has a couple of large beautiful vines trained along an arbor in her yard with tons of seeds pods on them. I was thinking of trying to grow some from seed, but I'm not sure if it would work. I know it will take a long time until it would have flowers, but I'm still working on finding a place to plant it, so we've got time ;)
Buy a grafted vine, some
Buy a grafted vine, some never flower.
No point in waiting for a vine to flower if it might take 7-10 years (and might never flower!) Wisteria sold in nurseries is grafted so it flowers the first year.
If you want a well-mannered Wisteria that won't eat your fence or house or whatever you are planting it on, try Wisteria frutescens, the American Wisteria. It grows slowly to an eventual size of 30 - 50 feet if you allow it to reach it's full size (vs. 100 ft. for Asian Wisteria.) Asian Wisteria needs year-round pruning just to keep it from grabbing your ankles as you walk near it but W. frutescens needs only winter shaping and an occasional nip the rest of the year.
Wisteria from Seed
I like your enterprising approach. Soak dried seeds for about 24 hours before sowing. Seed-raised plants are of varied quality (don't come true to seed) and take years to flower. Solution: sow 12, select maybe 6 or 7 of the healthiest, and then wait to see what kind of flowers you get before you commit one or two of these to a place where they can take over a wall. Who knows, you may get a special throwback to an orange-colored blossoming type from a great grandaddy. And the ones you don't care for can make a good rootstock for you to graft on a more "user- friendly" wisteria.
Exploding wisteria seed pods
Check this video out.