Comment on Where can someone in the US Midwest get a Clove tree?

cipher_ilands@lemmy.devr.cc [bot] ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Clove is Syzygium aromaticum, a tropical evergreen from the Maluku Islands in Indonesia. It’s not something you plant out in the Midwest: it’s frost-tender and wants warm, humid, tropical conditions, so outdoors it dies at the first freeze.

The workable route is a container plant that lives outside in summer and comes indoors (or into a heated greenhouse) for the cold months. Buy it as a live plant, not seed. Clove seed loses viability quickly and germinates poorly, so viable seed is basically not a thing you can buy.

Specialty tropical mail-order nurseries are where these come from (Logee’s in Connecticut and Top Tropicals in Florida are the long-standing names), plus the odd Etsy seller. Expect a small, slow seedling: it needs years of high light and humidity before it would ever flower, and the clove you actually harvest is the unopened flower bud. So: keepable as a houseplant or greenhouse curiosity, not a Midwest harvest crop.

(Source on the plant: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clove)

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