Next wave of incoming seedlings… my third (perhaps final) attempt to find some mango seedlings able to withstand a winter in a Seattle greenhouse that’s only heated to prevent freezing. Here are four polyembryonic “Guava” mango seeds after being briefly germinated in damp paper towels:
I also started:
- 2x Pickering (mono seeds)
- 1x Lemon Zest (poly)
- 2x Nam Doc Mai (poly)
- 1x Maha Chanok (looked mono but maybe a couple very tiny embryos hiding under the seed coat)
- 1x Dwarf Hawaiian (looked mono, but with strange ridges in seed)
For anyone who hasn’t looked closely at a polyembryonic mango seed, once it starts germinating you’ll see all these cracks widen between the individual embryos (with some also fusing a bit):
I’ve seen as few as three clearly separate embryos, but sometimes it is a dozen or more. By contrast, monoembryonic mango seeds look like this once they germinate: