“Life, uh, finds a way.”
(Jurassic Park, dir. Stephen Spielberg, Universal Pictures, 1993)
It’s not guaranteed these shoots will grow into trees that flower and produce fruit, you’ll just have to wait and see. However, even if they never flower or produce fruit, you will still have a lush, evergreen miniature shrub tree, probably with sweet-scented leaves.
The reason citrus trees do not always bear desirable fruit is because of the mixed parental genetics within the seed itself. Citrus seeds are frequently nucellar polyembryonic seeds, meaning there’s more than one embryo per seed.
In short, plants do this to create genetic variation to increase its chances of survival. Seeds with varying copies of its genetic material with different potential traits to express are more likely to survive and adapt than identical single copies. In fact, with a few exceptions, most fruit trees are not “true to seed,” or, will not produce fruit identical to the tree it came from.
The calamansi almost always sprouted multiple shoots. The kumquats almost always sprouted single shoots. If you have a polyembryonic shoot, you might have to select the strongest shoots for long term growth at your discretion. Re-pot and grow them separately; as one will inevitably take energy from the other.
With polyembryonic seeds like most of the calamansi, it’s likely that shoots of multiple parentage within one seed have sprouted, and one of these will grow true to seed. The monoembryonic seeds that only grew one shoot, like almost all of the kumquats, are not likely to grow true to seed and won’t produce fruit like the parent tree.
The seeds I planted contain genetic material from multiple generations of everything those fruits were a hybrid of. This is not unlike how we humans are the product of two parents but don’t have identical traits or genes of solely one or the other. As offspring, we may resemble one another and both parents, but we’re not always exactly alike, and certain traits are not always guaranteed to be expressed.
In the case of fruit trees, the resulting fruit you grow might be the same as, or better than, or (more likely) worse than the fruit the seed came from. The odds are high that it will be different somehow.
🍋🧬🍊🔬🍋🧬🍊
All citrus fruits are hybrids of two or more original species: the citron, the pomelo, and the mandarin orange. These ancestral species originated in various tropical and sub-tropical regions of the Asian continent (India, Southeast Asia, and China). The drastic periods of climate change during the Miocene and Pliocene epochs (between 23M and 5M years ago) enabled these ancestor species to grow wild, with specimens and pollen samples dating back to these periods; eventually leading to human cultivation starting around 6,000-3,000 years ago.
Today, we know the descendants of these ancestral fruits as oranges (mandarin + pomelo), lemons (bitter orange + citron), grapefruits (sweet orange + pomelo), tangerines (mandarin orange varieties + pomelo), Meyer lemons (mandarin + citron + pomelo), Clementines (sweet orange + mandarin), and more.
Kumquats are classified as citrus japonica, and contain different cultivars (Meiwa, Nagami, etc.). The seeds I germinated and planted almost always grew one shoot, or, are monoembryonic.
Calamansi are a hybrid of mandarin orange + kumquat. I noticed that the Calamansi seeds were almost always polyembryonic, and grew multiple shoots, all of which show slightly variable traits and leaf shapes. I didn’t label Group 1 so my labels are educated guesses, based on leaf shape.