26 New Stour & Avon, December 31, 2021
Home & Garden
Gardening...
DEEP PURPLE: The attractive mango leaves, and the stages of extracting
The festive period is often a time when we expand our usual range of foods with something special, dates, nuts, and perhaps tropical fruits like mango. It is great fun to try and grow some of these plants from seed, and if you have
children of a certain age, it will keep them entertained after the wrapping paper has been cleared away. Dates are the fruit of a palm from the Middle East. In the centre of the fruit is a hard, elongated seed. These can be
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Colourful mango...
readily germinated in around three weeks, if kept warm and moist. After enjoying the fruits, wash the seeds, then immerse them in water for 24 hours. This allows seeds to take in moisture, priming them for germination. Place them on to damp kitchen tissue in a polythene bag and position somewhere warm. Within three weeks, roots should start emerging and plants can be potted individually and kept warm. If you live in a very mild area, you may be able to eventually grow them outdoors in the garden. However, although dates are fascinating to grow, they don’t form the best plant for the garden or home. Within a few years they become armed with razor-sharp, skewer-like spines, to about 8cm. The supermarket chain Tesco sold loads of date palms during early summer, but I wonder how many who purchased them had any idea of the bayonets that would develop. Mangos on the other hand are a much more attractive and unusual houseplant, spoiler alert, unless you have a
tropical greenhouse at your disposal, they will never produce fruit in this country. Mangos are likely to have travelled at least 5,000 miles to reach your home this Christmas. Their cultivation is confined to tropical regions and are native to India and Myanmar. In the wild, fruits are consumed by elephants, which transport seeds before depositing them in their dung. Interestingly, a mango seed starts to germinate when still in its fruit. The seeds don’t have dormancy mechanisms, because in the tropics they are not needed due to the uniform climate. This means mango seeds cannot be stored. In seed biology, these seeds are termed ‘recalcitrant’ because they obstinately defy storage, whereas those we are more familiar with are called ‘orthodox’ seeds. If you have no elephant to hand, removing the seed from a fruit can be a bit tricky and needs care. First, remove the edible flesh from around the fibrous structure that lies at the centre of the fruit. This structure is not the seed, but a tough envelope (called the
