Mango Tree From Seed to Fruit

one of life's great pleasures is eating food that you grew yourself especially delicious tropical fruit like this mango right here mangoes require very little effort yet they produce massive yields of delicious fruit like this little guy right here i'm standing in front of a row of mango trees over here behind me is a ford tree we'll take a look at that one later behind it is a big giant tree that grows florida reds next to it behind this yellow tree here this tree with the yellow leaves is a star fruit but behind it is a kit mango tree and then next to it is a little tree that grows a mango called carry mango makes an excellent choice for backyard growers because the trees grow really fast they're not picky they don't require a lot of work they will grow as high as you want them to 40 50 feet if you want and 40 50 feet wide if you want they provide shade they provide privacy and they're also a very good wind barrier but mostly because once a year you will get a bounty of delicious fruit today i'm going to teach you how to plant and care for mango trees and if you follow my instructions in just a few short years you'll be sinking your teeth into a beauty like this before i show you how to plant a tree let's talk a little bit about mangoes mangoes are a tropical fruit there's over 400 varieties of mangoes they come in all different kinds of shapes sizes flavors textures this one in my hand is a tommy compare it to this ford look at the difference in size color and on the inside the color will be different this has a yellowish orange flesh on the inside this one has more of a orange red flesh these tommies have a little bit of pulp that gets stuck between your teeth these fords have no pulp at all tommies are ready to pick in june and july my fords don't come in until august september and this guy's green now because he's still not fully ripe but as this fruit ripens it'll turn more and more red and that's how i'll know it's time to pick if you've never tried mangoes and you want to buy a mango at the supermarket just pick out a nice one take it home and when it's a little bit soft when you can kind of squeeze it like this see how i'm just putting little indentations in there it's ready to eat and if you do try that store-bought mango and it doesn't knock your socks off don't be discouraged most of the really good varieties get picked and sold locally so if you can't make it to south florida i suggest you go on google and look up some of our varieties like hayden valencia pride glenn florida red get yourself a box of those and try them out and you will not be disappointed let's simulate what happens in the life cycle of a mango now this fruit isn't from this particular mango tree but for the sake of simulation it would be hanging here from a stem and that mangoes hanging there for months as it ripens blowing in the wind fighting off critters like bugs and worms and fungus and squirrels but eventually something happens that causes that connection to break and your mango falls to the ground now the minute this guy hits the ground he starts to rot and decompose he attracts bugs he attracts worms he attracts squirrels all kinds of critters want to eat the delicious fruit and all that decomposition is really really good for the seed that sits inside of the mango so eventually as this thing rots this seed will be this seed pod will become exposed and inside the seed pod is a mango seed and that seed wants to grow that seed wants to be a big healthy tree much like a mom provides nutrients to a baby in the womb through an umbilical cord the flesh of this fruit provides nutrients this seed needs to germinate into a little seedling and if you don't believe me just take a look at this guy right here this seedling right here is an example of what i just talked about a fruit fell from the tree and laid here until all the flesh from around the seed rotted then its seed pod right here began to open just like this and it sent a root down into the ground and it send a shoot up into the sky and here's another one right here i'll clear it out and lay my tool in front of it so you could see it right there let's zoom down on that guy there's another little baby mango tree so if we want to grow one of these beauties ourselves we have to simulate mother nature's process let's take a walk over to the shade house and i'll show you how we do that here we are in the shade house my old beat up fallen down i'm in the process of fixing up shade house the reason we're here is because like i said we want to simulate mother nature's process to grow these mangoes and every tree i grow starts out here in the shade house including my avocados even though an avocado can take direct sunlight from day one i start them out in here all this shade house does is use a use a combination of this black netting and in my case some crap and dirt that's accumulated on the roof as well as some partial shade from some nearby trees to give these trees partial sunlight throughout the day which makes sense if you think of it right those little baby trees i showed you they're growing in the shade of the canopy of their momma tree now i'm going to show you two ways to grow these little babies the first method is for people who like to tinker it's kind of complicated has a lot of processes and steps and a lot of dependencies the second method is a lot more simple and meant for people who have lives the first methodology we're going to incubate the seeds ourselves in order to do that you need the following materials a mango a plastic bag pruning shears or a sturdy pair of scissors and a knife step one let's cut this seed pod out of our fruit now the first thing you'll notice about the seed pod is it's narrow and flat so when we cut our fruit we want to cut along the narrow orientation of this seed right we don't want to try to cut into this thing and you know hit into the seed right we want to go alongside of it and the way to find the way the seed is oriented in your mango is to take it and drop it and that means that this seed is oriented this way so i want to turn it 90 degrees and do a cut down one side then i turn it to the other side and i make the same cut now i've got the seed pod in the middle here now here's the best part about planting a mango you get to eat your way to the seed holy cow is that good when you've had your fill of flesh from around the seed pod i want you to set aside the other two halves you cut you're going to eat them later as a reward for a job well done and then what i'll do and it helps if you run this thing under water first but you don't really have to i'll kind of hold the seed pod down with a paper towel and just scrape some of the additional these things could be a little slimy so it helps if you put a little paper towel down put your seed pod on top of it hold it with another paper towel and just scrape some of that excess flesh off of there not a hundred percent necessary but it helps once you've cleaned the seed pod it's time to crack it open and get at the seed now if you rub your fingers along the the middle here of the of the seed pod there's a thick end and a thin end i take my pruning shears and i just kind of clip the thin end up here then that'll give you like a little hole here at the at the tip of the pod that you can insert the knife into and just kind of start to open this pot up gently now i'm using a hunting knife it's probably better if you use a uh say like a butter knife and then i'll just take my pruning shears like a scissors and kind of cut the pot a little bit being careful not to clip the seed on the inside then once you get a decent start on it you see you can just split the pod right open and extract your seed boom now we're going to create an environment for this guy in this plastic bag and at this point in its life all it really needs is moisture in order to give it moisture i just reuse the paper towel i've been using cut it into strips now i'm not trying to be super precise here or anything i'm just cutting strips to kind of make my own homemade straw and once i have that made i take a little bit of water and just spill it onto my plate or onto my cutting board then i soak it up with my homemade straw i just want to make it damp i don't want this stuff to be soft and wet just a just enough to dampen the little shreds i just cut up i insert those into my plastic bag like this now i have a plastic bag with some damp homemade straw take my seed i just kind of bury it in here bury it in the straw nice like that see it in there then i zip it up i don't suck the air out or anything like that i just leave it as is zip it up set it aside now let this sit somewhere at room temperature for a week to 10 days something like that and hopefully your seed will throw a little root and throw a little shoot and if it does it'll be time to put it in a pot like this guy here i've had him going for about probably 10 days or so and i'm not sure if you could see in there but look at he's already thrown his for his shoot he's got already some leaves coming in let me open that thing up and show you i don't know if i want to smell that so here we go i'm just trying to be careful with it here so i removed the the packing the homemade crap that i put in there and yeah look at what we have here so this guy's already put out a little bit of a root in the makings of a tree so now we have to put this sucker in soil now remember i told you this was a complicated process right you got to cut open the fruit cut open the pod make the little incubator wait hopefully the thing grows and then transplant it to dirt so do i have any dirt yeah and now this is pretty easy you just take a little pot with some potting soil now i start out with these very small pots and then i'll gradually move them into bigger pots but i actually don't want my seedlings to grow too big too fast because i want to keep them small so i can graft them later and we'll talk about why and then simply plant the seed so make sure the roots going to be well under the under the soil the potting soil put the seed in so the the tree is sticking up and then i'll take a handful handful of new new potting soil and just kind of put it around just enough so a little bit of that top of the seed is showing i'll water this properly later but i just want to give a little drink of water right now and there you have the complicated method for planting a mango tree the easiest way to plant a mango tree is to get yourself a nice big powder i prefer to use a shallow rectangular pan then you take your mango throw it in the dirt and i'll just leave this guy sit here just like he's under the tree and as it rots the seed will germinate and it'll eventually take root there's only one problem with that method it waste mango that i could otherwise be eating so why not just cut two halves set them aside for a snack and just take this part and lay it in the soil now you might think i'm joking but if you go to a nursery that grows mango trees you're going to find these long tables with rectangular powders like this very shallow with little halves of mangoes sitting in them allowing those seeds to germinate allowing mother nature to do her job and here's an example of some trees i started gosh maybe a month ago i just put you know one mango slice like that into each pot and as you see here there's the the seed pod the seed inside of there is growing he has shot a root down into the ground and he has shot this chute up like this so i have a couple of these here in the shade house and i have another maybe 15 or 20 growing out in my nursery but i have them in the in the shady section of the nursery if someday you want this tree to produce beautiful mangoes like this you have one more step grafting and grafting means we take a tree and plant it from seed and we let it grow then we clip that tree and we cut a little slice in its center we take a clipping called a scion from another tree whose behavior we like whose behavior we want to replicate and we insert that scion into our initial seedling and the reason we do that is for predictability the tree from which we got this clipping is a very good tree it performs really well it provides a lot of fruit and it provides a lot of tasty fruit it provides that fruit at a time of year that we would like to harvest it but if we just left it up to the seedling we might never get fruit or we might sometimes get fruit or if we do get fruit it might not taste all that good the reason is the dna in order to grow fruit a tree has to be pollinated and that process of pollination takes pollen from one tree and puts it in another tree and that's where we get our seed so this seed actually contains the dna of the tree from which it was grown but also dna from the tree that pollinated the tree from which this was grown we have no way of knowing where that pollen came from and we have no way of knowing what the combination of that tree's dna and our tree's dna is going to create this might have created a seed that produces the best fruit we ever tasted but more likely it's produced a seed that's going to be fussy and not want to produce fruit or if it produces the fruit it's not going to taste all that good but fortunately for us grafting takes all the guesswork the best example i could give is let's say you have workers working for you and out of 10 workers you got two of them that are really good and eight of them that are only so so imagine if you could just cut a little piece of skin from all your good workers and insert it into all the workers that you'd like to get more out of them and then all of a sudden those eight that aren't really producing are producing as much as the two that are that's what grafting is if you search my youtube page you'll find some videos i've made about why to graft versus growing a tree from seed and everything i said in those videos applies to avocados but it also applies to mangoes so here's what i think you should do go out to the store get your hands on a box of mangoes bring it home and enjoy them and if you decide you like the flavor and you think you'd like to grow mangoes at home use one of the two techniques i showed you in this video right you can incubate a seed in a bag or plant your fruit directly in soil and don't do one seed do five or six if you if you if you plant five or six and three or four grow pick your strongest one pick your strongest two pot those and let them grow to maturity but if you take your chances with only one or two they might not take they might not grow it's like anything else you've ever planted and if you want to look really good while you're planting these trees get yourself a sleepy lizard t-shirt at guacfarm.com g-u-a-c-f-a-r-m guacfarm.com while you do that i'm gonna head inside and finish off these mangoes and we'll see you on the next video

Channel: SleepyLizard

Views: 137,783

Rating: 4.9252629 out of 5

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Id: Q2czF7QBxPs

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020