Hello everyone, I’m starting this thread to track seed grown mango trees to fruition. I would like to gather information on the following:
1) Is it Polyembryonic or Monoembryonic?
2) How long did it take the seedling to fruit(include location)?
3) Growth habits of the tree, especially compared to maternal parent tree
4) Track production of the tree as it grows
5) If it’s a Polyembryonic seedling:
5a) How many sprouts did you get from the seed?
5b) Which seedling(s) did you grow out? The largest, medium, smallest or all?
5c) Which of the seedlings came out true to variety? The largest, medium, smallest or all?
5d) If you only got a single sprout from a Polyembryonic seed variety, did it turn out to be a clone or the zygotic seedling?
Edited post to include link of Mono Vs Polyembryonic mango varieties
http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=12030.0It would be great to have pictures of the trees in different stages of growth. For Polyembryonic varieties, it would be especially important to track quality of fruit from the zygotic seedlings or off type seedlings from a Polyembryonic seed.
I’m especially interested in Polyembryonic off types because of the potential for superior fruit due to plants produced through selfing which sets the traits of that particular variety. A selfed mango flower is a flower of Sweet Tart for example, that was pollinated by itself(Sweet Tart). The resulting seedling is 100% Sweet Tart genetics but it is not a clone because there is a re arrangement of the chromosomes.
Actually, the zygotic seedling that was outcrossed with a different variety is just as interesting because of the increased genetic material incorporated by the pollinating parent. The increased genetic pool allows for a significantly higher chance that the resulting seedling will produce fruit that is much different than the maternal parent.
A Zygotic Sweet Tart seedling that was not selfed, for example, may produce fruit that tastes very different than the fruit produced from the maternal parent or a selfed seedling. This however, is highly unlikely because Sweet Tart is a variety that has certain dominant traits that have been concentrated or binned over the years.
Sweet Tart is a seedling of Zill Indochinese(ZIC) and both ZIC and Sweet Tart have that Indochinese flavor. Venus and Kathy(K3) are also descended from ZIC and they all have a similar Indochinese flavor according to my palate. Hey m not saying that they all taste the same but I can definitely detect that Indochinese flavor in all three.
We know that the Indochinese flavor is a heritable trait of ZIC seedlings but but we don’t know if it’s a simple dominant recessive trait or if it’s a lot more complicated and involves multiple alleles.
I also want to mention that we don’t have all the data. For example, how many ZIC seedlings did the Zill’s plant out. If they planted out 100 ZIC seedlings and purposefully selected the seedlings that had the Indochinese flavor, then my statements above may be completely off base.
What if Sweet Tart, Venus and Kathy were the only seedlings out of the 100 that had the Indochinese flavor?
I’m pretty much just thinking (typing) out loud now but I hope that you can see that I’m just trying to gather as much data as possible. The more data we can collect, the more accurate of a picture we can create and the better we will begin to understand and perhaps predict which seedlings may give better fruit.
Many members have asked questions such as, “which seedling from a Polyembryonic mango seed is the clone?” The literature out there sometimes can have conflicting conclusions or it may be variety specific but if we gather more data, we may be able to come up with a reasonably acceptable answer in the near future.
I know that there are already many members out there that have already planted mangos from seed and it would be great if you can add that data to this thread.
I believe Chris Wenzel from Truly Tropical has a video or two regarding seedling grown mango trees. Videos are a great option if you are so inclined.
Anyways, i hope anyone that has a seed grown mango tree can contribute to this thread. Thanks in advance!
Simon