For those interested in growing tropical & sub-tropical plants from seed - mangoes, avocados, citrus, papayas, etc. - Melvin Wei [0] has a great youtube channel. There is a certain hacker spirit to his approach, with lots of experimentation in getting these somewhat atypical houseplants to grow in pots.
Growing a mango tree from seed – one year time lapse [video]
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Re: Growing a mango tree from seed – one year time lapse [video]
#102I really want a solar powered time lapse camera that takes a photo around noon every day, saves to SD card. Would be great for plant time lapses. I haven't been able to find anyone who's done this already. It seems like there are trail cams and similar that have all the parts, so this should be possible to manufacture for a price point of around $50, and I think it would be an amazing product: I bet every gardening e…
I wonder if there's any way to do crowdfunding for products that don't exist yet. I don't mean kickstarter, in that case there's someone who wants to make the thing already. I mean for things where there are a lot of people who want it to exist, and could pledge some cash to motivate someone to make the damn thing.
One I've been waiting for since 2008 is a general purpose epaper tablet / laptop, and I see its nonexistence lamented here at least once a year.
Re: Growing a mango tree from seed – one year time lapse [video]
#103I really want a solar powered time lapse camera that takes a photo around noon every day, saves to SD card. Would be great for plant time lapses. I haven't been able to find anyone who's done this already. It seems like there are trail cams and similar that have all the parts, so this should be possible to manufacture for a price point of around $50, and I think it would be an amazing product: I bet every gardening e…
Bonus fun idea: I think if you used a synchronized array of about a dozen of these you could use photogrammetry to make an animated 3d model of plant growth, which I would love.
Re: Growing a mango tree from seed – one year time lapse [video]
#104For growing mango from seed, or really anything from seed, you cannot beat a small plastic container (like what cottage cheese, sour cream, or green yogurt might come in) filled halfway with coconut coir. It's absolutely the best medium for germinating seed. Fill halfway with coir and water once a week. Coconut coir keeps water evenly distributed and I've never had a seed or seedling mold over using it. I personally…
I use gravel.
Re: Growing a mango tree from seed – one year time lapse [video]
#105This is interesting. Do mangoes grow true from seed? I have some apple trees grown from seed and they’re effectively ornamentals. I suppose I could ferment and distill the fruit, but I’m certainly not going to eat it.
I found a different video from a Mango and Avocado grower who says he typically grafts in a branch of a tree with good fruit behavior onto a newly sprouted mango plant. He says letting an ungrafted plant grow to maturity will produce a tree, but will probably not produce a good crop of fruit, due to the variability of DNA.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2czF7QBxPs
Made me wonder if that’s why industrial produce doesn’t taste as good as natural. Could removing genetic diversity in fruit cause mutations to creep in?
Re: Growing a mango tree from seed – one year time lapse [video]
#106I really want a solar powered time lapse camera that takes a photo around noon every day, saves to SD card. Would be great for plant time lapses. I haven't been able to find anyone who's done this already. It seems like there are trail cams and similar that have all the parts, so this should be possible to manufacture for a price point of around $50, and I think it would be an amazing product: I bet every gardening e…
Not exactly what you’re asking for (at least price wise), but there are solar power adapters for trail cams: https://www.basspro.com/shop/en/tactacam-external-solar-pane...
Re: Growing a mango tree from seed – one year time lapse [video]
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bananas went (commercially) extinct decades ago. The things sold in stores today are a different fruit.
You can still get the smaller, wilder variety in other places in the world. For instance, the Philippines.
I remember walking into a small village store in Costa Rica to be confronted by about 10 named varieties of bananas, and noticing in the core a box just marked "apple". It was a cool inversion of the usual pattern in the US (and Europe).
Re: Growing a mango tree from seed – one year time lapse [video]
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of tropical fruit is uninteresting in the USA: bananas, pineapple, mangoes etc have little flavor and typically one variety is available at most. I sometimes have 50 year old memories in dreams of eating fresh fruit and they are so different in form and flavor I wonder if they are hallucinations. But as you point out, they require a climate unavailable on the continent so have to be harvested unripe and transpo…
As a whole, food quality is the us is not great. Specially fresh produce. The lack of affordable farmer market is my take on it. And I don’t mean fancy farmer market for bourgeois bohème type. Where I grew up poor folks go to the market because it’s cheaper than a supermarket.
> Where I grew up poor folks go to the market because it’s cheaper than a supermarket.
It is very difficult, in fact almost impossible, for individual farmers to beat supermarket prices any more, largely thanks to vertical integration within agriculture and food processing.
This means that by and large, the point of farmers markets now has to be mostly about what you declaim: "bourgeois bohème type". If you don't have much money to spend on food, you won't be buying it directly from farmers anymore. That's sad, and seems weirdly wrong, but that's one of the paradoxes of scale in an industrialized, fossil-fuel enhanced agricultural system.
Re: Growing a mango tree from seed – one year time lapse [video]
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of tropical fruit is uninteresting in the USA: bananas, pineapple, mangoes etc have little flavor and typically one variety is available at most. I sometimes have 50 year old memories in dreams of eating fresh fruit and they are so different in form and flavor I wonder if they are hallucinations. But as you point out, they require a climate unavailable on the continent so have to be harvested unripe and transpo…
I wonder if there's a market in the U.S. for luxury fruits. I always hear about these incredible fruits available abroad that are only available in certain seasons, in certain climates, that decay quickly and travel poorly. Presumably, you could grow god-tier mangoes year-round, right in the city, by simulating the right climate in fancy greenhouses - if you did it right, you wouldn't have an electric bill. If the ma…
The margin on fruit and vegetable is typically low so you’d need quite a high margin, small volume plan. Might be doable.
Also: people in climate A don’t really know how to eat something from climate B (“how to” meaning recipes, is this dessert or a staple, etc) so you’d end up with a small customer base. Not a bad thing for a small lifestyle business in a big city.
Re: Growing a mango tree from seed – one year time lapse [video]
#110For those interested in growing tropical & sub-tropical plants from seed - mangoes, avocados, citrus, papayas, etc. - Melvin Wei [0] has a great youtube channel. There is a certain hacker spirit to his approach, with lots of experimentation in getting these somewhat atypical houseplants to grow in pots. [0] https://www.youtube.com/c/TheMelvinWei
From personal experience, the easiest way to sprout an avocado pit is to throw it in some moist dirt and put clear plastic over it to keep the moisture in.
They take about 30 to 45 days to sprout. And the success rate it about 75%. (though I've never been scientific about it, so my numbers may be off)
My setup is two 8qt plastic storage containers. One for dirt, and one to trap the moisture.