Pomegranate – Sapling to Harvest

Pomegranate fruit as we know has lot of health benefits like anti-oxidants, rich in Vitamin C and much needed for increasing the Haemoglobin level. It has many more healthcares benefits which you could google and see 🙂 I read that even the tender leaves of the pomegranate plant has lot of good nutrients and even the flowers can made into tea.

The pomegranate plant at home has an interesting history. At home, we drink pomegranate milk shake almost everyday and since we compost all organic food waste, the seeds from the filtered juice went into compost and started growing into small saplings. The fully grown tree at home was one such sapling. Initially I didn’t knew it was Pomegranate and then researched and found out what plant it was.

The sapling will look like the one below, with leaves sprouting out in alternate directions and the branches will also form the same way. The sapling needs to be watered daily and manure added once in 2 weeks. In a month you can see it will almost grow into a shrub.

The plant will grow into small tree is time period of 6 months. The picture below is when the plant was about 6 months old and started flowering. I kept adding good manure (cow dung and compost mix) once in 2 weeks, hence the plant was healthy enough to produce lots of flowers in 6 months. Initially it had flower drop issues and once we had roses and other flower plants added for pollination, slowly it started bearing fruit. The first fruit is also shown below, which was the size of coin.

In around 8-9 months, it started producing more fruits. Each fruit will take atleast 2 months to ripe. The first harvest started around November and had around 10-12 fruits for the season, which was good enough for a one year old plant. The fruits were of medium size and were rich red in colour with an excellent taste. Few of the harvested fruits below:

This is how the tree looks like currently after almost a year and all the harvest, I hope it starts flowering again soon as I can see flowers coming up again and produce more fruits.

It was so beautiful to see the full journey of a sapling grow into a tree and bear fruits and the joy it gives when you harvest and eat your produce is unmatchable. This also takes a lot of patience since this is not like harvesting herbs or smaller plants which can be done within a month. It will take a lot of effort and time to see something beautiful like this but it will be worth all the wait 🙂