Spreading My Seed - Mango Seed Germination

As you know, I've been chronicling my daily adventures growing my young mango plant.  When I started it, I showed you a picture of my mango seed as it was planted in the ground already.  Although I described it, there was no visual reference.   Since I've been eating a good number of mangoes as of late, I have more seed samples and I plan to plant them all.

First thing I did after eating the mango was to brush away excess flesh and then wrap the big seed in tissue paper.  My thanks to Starbucks and Greenwich for providing me with enough tissues to use.   This picture is after a couple of days and the seed has totally dried out.

After peeling off the recycled tissue paper and you will see the shriveled, dried seeds.  You will probably know that you did it properly when there are no ants in your tissue.  This means the flesh was sufficiently scraped off.

The next step is to open the seed and let the inner seed out.  How do you open the fibrous shell?  You can crack it open like watermelon seed.  That's what I did the last time.  Today, I sliced open the flat part. The rounded area contains the inner seed so don't slice into that, lest you damage it.  Once you take the inner seeds out of the fibrous shell, they will look like this.  I think they're shaped like kidneys.

Finally, I bag these seeds along with the used tissue paper using a zip locked plastic bag and I pour some water in just enough to keep everything wet.  I subsequently placed this bag on top of a large water tank in our backyard  since it gets really hot there.  And that's what you'd want for the seeds: a really hot, sunny place.  You also put it in a zip locked bag so the moisture is retained.  Hot and Humid rocks!  I wish I can go to Boracay.  In my prior attempts, I became impatient and just planted the seeds although they weren't ready.  I'm not sure, but I think that's contributing to my low germination rate.  So these ones, I'll bag, sun and forget while I take care of my other green concerns.

By the way, the last time I did this Mang Jun cleaned our yard and threw away my seeds!  I almost went on a stabbing spree because of that.  So if you plan to spread a couple of seeds around, make sure you don't have a Mang Jun!  Otherwise, I might see a headline reading:  Mango Seed Massacre!  Thrown seeds! Thrown Lives!  

Enjoy!  If you have your own germination stories, please share.

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