Hey Future,
Here’s a synopsis. My yard is very small so I plant most my mango trees at my friends and relatives houses. I’ve planted so many seedlings that I’ve lost track of many of them. Some have died and some are huge now. Many years ago, I planted out a bunch of Lemon Zest seedlings. Ever since I found out there are so many disease issues with this variety, I have replaced many of them with Sweet Tart and various other seedlings so I had to start over again.
Brads( Spaugh’s) orchard is where I planted a majority of the seedlings and many of them are starting to really take off. We have seedlings of most the newer Zill varieties including both monoembryonic and Polyembryonic varieties planted out. Ill have to stop by the orchard and take some pictures. Our biggest seedling is probably a Sweet Tart seedling that is nice and bushy with strong upright branching. We have E4, Sweet Tart, Orange Sherbet, butter Cream, M4, Pina Colada, Fruit Punch, Coconut Cream, Fruit Cocktail, Honey KISS, NDM and many other seedlings planted out.
In my yard, I have a Sweet Tart Seedling that is 4 years old. It was squished in between two large trees and is shaded much of the day but it flowered in 3 years from planting the seed and it flowered again this year( 4 years from seed). This year, I thought I removed all the blooms but one hid under some leaves and I’m allowing it to grow since it was palm size when I discovered it. I’ll take a picture later.
I also have a NDM seedling that flowered in its third or fourth year from planting the seed and it held small fruits which aborted. I grafted over most the branches but I still have one branch from the original seedling.
The Double Stone graft experiments gave me fruiting trees that were too precocious. 12 inch tall trees were blooming and holding fruit which is a very bad thing because it delayed vegetative growth and there was extremely high mortality rate of about 80-90% after 5 years or so.
From the DSG experiments, I used that info and started my California Super mango rootstock experiments.
http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=20852.0 This CSMR technique gave me the most incredible growth I have seen. Because this technique does Not involve grafting with mature scions, the resulting multiple rootstock tree exploded with growth. Some mistakes that I made are that I kept the seedling trees in much too small of a pot and did not up pot them appropriately.
My CSMR tree was planted at an orchard where It grew like crazy but unfortunately, the gophers and or rabbits had a strong liking to the multiple rootstock trees. Perhaps the multiple rootstock trees have more sap flow/moisture and are preferred over single rootstock trees.
I grew the seedlings in a special root pruning pot which is a critical part of the experiments.
You can use fabric pots or any of the newer root pruning pots or paints. As soon as the pot is filled with roots, it should be up potted to the next larger size of root pruning pot until the plant and/or root mass is large enough for field planting.
This technique gave me the largest rootstock in the shortest amount of time. Getting the largest rootstock is one of the most important factors for maximizing fruit production when growing mango trees in SoCal but this may not be an issue with growing mangos at your location.
Multiple rootstock trees are likely cost and time/labor prohibitive on a commercial scale.
Here in California, we start getting fruit production within a year or two of grafting mature scions.
I still have lots of experiments going and some that ended early because other trusted members of this forum already has proof of concept.
For Example, if you just want to test out seedling varieties for quality of fruit, the fastest way to achieve this is to graft seedling scions onto mature rootstocks. Cookie Monster grew a bunch of Orange Sherbet seedlings and grafted the seedling scions onto his mature trees. This enabled him to Fruit his seedling trees in the shortest amount of time possible and he was able to prove that his seedling OS trees did produce fruit identical to the true OS and some people that have tasted his fruit say his fruit is perhaps even better than the original OS but his excellent tasting fruit may also be attributable to his great gardening skills and his knowledge of fertilization.
The above was already discussed in literature and Cookie Monster proved it in his climate so that’s good enough for me. I’m still trying to answer questions that are counter to what most the mango growers are looking for.
In my climate, we have no issues with flowering and fruit production(except for specific varieties like LZ) so I’m trying to find a technique that grows the largest tree possible in the shortest amount of time.
I’m still gathering data on what happens if you graft seedling scions onto mature fruiting rootstocks in cold climates and so far, it looks like the grafted scions are able to delay flowering for 1-2 years which is extremely beneficial for growers in colder climates like California.
Simon