An Even Easier Way to Start Mango Pits

After reading my post on starting mango pits, Paula wrote to share her super simple method:

“Thank you for your article on growing mango from seed. I accidentally found a lazy way to do it. Once I eat a mango, I put the remainder of the mango pips in my worm bin for the worms to eat, it is their favorite food. Then I forget about it and a few weeks later the worms have split the seed and most of the time they germinate.

Once the plant has germinated and have the beginnings of a pair of leaves, I take them out of the worm bin and plant them in a pot and off they go. I have kept just one plant, because of space. It has been growing  in a large pot for about 3 years. It got hit hard by a frost a couple of years ago, but came back and is now about 5 feet tall. No fruit yet, I don’t even know the varieties I have grown, I usually buy them from the grocery store. The traditional red/ green ones or champagne mangoes are what I usually buy.

Great method. It’s rather like my old compost pile fruit tree nursery:

Seeds will just pop up under the right conditions, and a compost pile – or worm bin – seem to be perfect for some species.

In my video on germinating mango pits, you can see how I remove the embryo first and plant that:

That improves germination rates; however, it’s totally unnecessary if you are being casual about mango planting. You can just bury pits in the ground and they’ll often grow. I’ve even had them sprout from children throwing the pits on the ground in the yard.

Mangoes are one of the easier fruit trees to grow from seed.

Especially if you let the worms do it for you.