Growing a mango tree from seed – one year time lapse [video]
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I moved to the US, and I haven't had a good mango here. When friends visit Egypt, I tell them to get mangoes (in season, around September), especially a variety known as Eweis. They get obsessed. I've never figured out why the US just doesn't have good mangoes, I'm guessing they're hard to grow locally or ship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gir_Kesar
I feel like I should be able to smell it from across the room, and there should be no fibers. I have had really good mangos in Kenya/Zimbabwe/Zambia too though.
I don’t know the reason, but I can speculate - too many chemicals probably? Every time I am in India, I pig out. Yet, I rarely put on weight. I eat way less (like 50% less) in the U.S, and put on weight easily unless I am super careful.
This is not to say all foods are awesome in India of course. But there is something not right about the quality of food here. Everything seems to be optimized for shelf life, profit, looks and taste, rather than nutrition.
A single mango in my town costs $2.79, it has zero smell and tastes like cardboard. But it doesn’t go bad even after ten days, on the kitchen counter (I mean, outside the refrigerator).
This is starting to swing back, with people appreciating flavor, but this will require people to accept that there are seasons to fruits and vegetables, which is hard when you're used to year-round supply. But if you want a tomato in January or an apple in June, those just aren't going to taste as good.
I have heard the same feedback from others too, I am not the only one.
Someone told me the same chocolates taste better outside U.S, because corn syrup is used in the American version.
If you are lucky you might live near a good farmer's market that has actual seasonal varieties that actually take good in their proper months, and can't be found in other months.
I've heard this take a lot, but I really think it has a lot more to do with how we treat our soils. American agriculture is obsessed with sterile soils. But the MAJORITY of plants in the wild get the MAJORITY of their nutrients from mycorrhizal fungi. Something which is not present in sterilized soil.
They are quite fragile too. Not only are they killed by pesticides/fungicides, but even artificial fertilizers hurt them because plants rely on lack of phosphorus for them to start the signaling process to hook up with the fungi. Artificial phosphorus is much less bioavailable to plants, but its presence is enough to make them not start that complicated chemical dance
The mineral content of our vegetables has declined by over 90% since 1914.[0] I'd find it hard to believe this lack of nutrient doesn't also have a massive impact on flavor profiles
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...
Great comment, thanks. I think people forgot how to farm in 20th century. For example, my grandmother grew up on her parents’ farm, and managed it until the early 2000’s. She didn’t do the farming, she just told the guy who actually did the work what to plant. After grandma passed away my uncle took care of the leasing for a few years. Now Bill Gates probably owns what used to be Grandma’s farm.
At one point grandma started doing no-till to preserve the topsoil, but I think this might have been just spraying with roundup before planting corn and soybeans.
I have a National Geographic magazine, circa 1995, about the Frogs Leap winery [0]. This is an organic winery in California. The author talked about visiting a neighboring conventional vineyard, and how that soil was totally different than the soil at Frogs Leap.
US food inspectors are required in places like India and Asia, but if enough inspectors aren't hired then you can't expect the exports to grow in a meaningful way. As you can imagine incumbent mango producers in the US don't want more inspectors in these countries. It's basically a cartel.
And probably for sales/cosmetics. Eg most people would agree Red Delicious apples are far from being the tastiest, but they have a very appealing name and look great.
(Unfortunately, she has to pick them a bit early if she wants to eat them at all. Left on the tree to their peak they would be lost to the birds.)
When it's mango season in India you could smell from nearby areas (with right wind conditions). The mangoes you get at grocery stores in US has no smell and oftentimes taste plain/lifeless.
There is this store owner who also owns farms in India. They grow mangoes just for Canada.
While you are there, try different mangos likes Desi, Langda, Hafus & Rajapuri.
Then one day my partner walked into the local Pakistani corner shop and stopped. She could SMELL mango. She asked the guy: have you got mangoes? Sure enough he did. She bought a box of four.
Soon as I got home from work that day, I opened the front door and immediately smelt it. "Have you found mangoes?"
Back in Australia, this year has been a very disappointing mango season. Very few of the good ones.
I've heard most of the mango strains in Egypt originated in India and spread there during British rule.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/underground-aams-trade...
But as you point out, they require a climate unavailable on the continent so have to be harvested unripe and transported a long distance. I should be amazed they exist at all.
This supply chain aspect operates both ways: pineapples are grown in Hawaii and shipped to the mainland; as a result the only pineapples I’ve ever eaten there are the big flavorless ones sold all around the country. Hopefully the small flavor-packed ones are still grown locally and just provided to locals.
It’s not just tropical foods either. Everything from tomatoes, melons, and grains to chickens and turkeys have been selected and modified for the needs of the supply chain. Although flavor, texture, and, I understand even nutrition has suffered, the net result is that there is a lot less hunger, so I have to consider it a net positive.
My hope is that widespread automation and cheap clean energy will allow more local production and make “small batch” varietals cheaper. And in such a world, instead of indiscriminately pouring herbicides and pesticides to protect the productive crops' robot labor can pluck the weeds and bugs individually from the crops which should improve the quality of the result.
Exactly this. Go back a century and the idea of eating exotic fruits like these was the only available to the wealthiest.
It's a shame in a way that bananas and the like have become ubiquitous, to the detriment of fruits which were locally available.
I’m happy to be able to eat a banana; merely sorry that the ubiquitous one is such a boring variety.
The consequences of the industrial monocrop banana will be solved soon one way or another: the cavendish is under attack and either it will be replaced or all bananas will go extinct. I suppose Hegel would have appreciated this example.
But we’re talking about mangoes and bananas and pineapples and calling those “tropical fruit” when there’s so many fruits in the tropics.
As you say, the “gros michel” cultivar is mostly dead commercially, although there are attempts to get a variant resistant to fungal disease.
I’d like to taste a Gros Michel some day.
In fact, there was a crisis of supply caused by the Panama disease infesting the plantations, and people were very unhappy with that, because they got so used to the fruit.
…assisted by the United States Marines, and in fact the origin of the term “Banana Republic”.
I was shocked by the tastelessness of the company name when the Banana Republic clothing chain opened up.
My father told me he was 27 years old when he ate his first banana. This was in Canada in 1950.
For a couple of months after the wall came down it was impossible to find bananas. Germans love bananas!
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.
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 mangoes really are as great as I've heard them described, I can imagine people would pay a huge premium for them. You could sell them to fancy restaurants, make ultra-luxury fruit baskets (I understand these are a big deal for Asians & Asian Americans), and eventually scale up to selling them to upscale grocery stores.
There are also a few businesses following exactly the model you outline, but they focus on one varietal/cultivar of one fruit, since each requires its own CapEx for its own climate setup.
The host of the YouTube channel https://m.youtube.com/c/WeirdExplorer gets fruits in from both of these all the time, (when he’s not going directly to other countries just to try exotic fruits.)
Most of their fruit really seems just slightly above grocery store quality (though I do live in California, so our fruit is good). The varieties may sound special, but they're often just a branded version of a common citrus, apple, or pear.
Pears are fruits that ripe after being picked from the tree. The photos in the web look like Decana pears, that are known universally as one of the top varieties of common pear.
Freshly picked from the tree are just hard and sweet, nothing special, but wait some days and wow... When the skin starts to feel soft at the touch, the flesh melts like butter and the juice drips from your mouth.
Is annoying to culture (must be pollinated carefully and the steams take strange directions that made it difficult to prune correctly), but is royalty in the pear world.
If yours were from that variety you should give it a second try, wait to middle of summer and taste one in their prime. Is just a pear, but it offers all that one can expect from a pear.
Therefore a fruit that plays in the major leagues and has nothing to envy from tropicals
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.
Since they cannot travel or be kept in inventory, they will never be available fresh more than about 50 miles from where they are grown.
Oregon's berries are no joke.
They told me "The best grapes never make it out of the village. The next best grapes never make it out of the region. The next best grapes never make it out of the country."
Wine was probably a terrible example, being a less perishable good suited for transport, but the quip always stuck with me. No idea the origin.
We (city folk) assume that the best agricultural output is exported, but... why would it be?
The price differential for quality likely isn't very large, local consumption is relatively modest compared to output, and cap that off with the freshness timer.
The best wine I've ever had was in the French countryside. The best beef I've had was in a dirty road place in the middle of cow country. The best salmon I've had was in Seattle. The best sushi I've had was behind Tsukiji (when they still did wholesale fish there).
Eat local is as much about quality as it is other things.
For the same reason everything else is exported. Its value somewhere else is higher than its local value.
Sometimes it's better to have good wine and one less euro, than another euro and worse wine.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=cube+sh...
If not a market in the USA, maybe in the very luxury food segment in Japan and South Korea, in whatever sort of food retailers occupy the market niche that is even more expensive than Whole Foods.
As a hobbyist rare fruit grower and someone who spends a lot of time watching rare fruit YouTube, I would say that even though all the ingredients are there, it would be a huge uphill battle.
First, let me say the amount of hype right now around rare fruit is completely insane. It's literally hundreds of times harder to get the top fruit cultivars than it is to get a new nike drop, a PS5, etc. Often they only go on sale one day a year and are completely sold out in less than a minute.
The problem though is that to build a business you need repeat customers. There aren't many people willing to pay $20+ for some weird looking fruit they've never heard of, let alone do this on a weekly basis. Similarly, there aren't many people willing to pay $20+ for a single apple on a regular basis, when they can buy apples at the store for less than a dollar.
As it currently stands, most of the people who would be interested in this don't have the money to pay for it, and most of the people with the money to pay for it aren't interested. I think YouTube has the potential to change this, but it clearly hasn't happened yet.
It would be cool to open a story in NYC dedicated entirely to rare and luxury fruit, but it would be an insane amount of work to market it. And even if you were successful, VCs would just give hundreds of millions of dollars to some Adam Neumann type who would put you out of business by selling the same things at a massive loss.
Receiving a shipment like that would be a joyous monthly treat.
I can’t be the only one … can I?
I mean the person growing the mango is most likely paying a few hundred bucks per mango, on the assumption that they'll get one or two every couple years if they keep it in a container, so in comparison paying a few hundred bucks a month and getting actual fruit is a pretty good deal.
I don't think it's VCs per se. For example, Amazon is actively trying to get in to fresh food logistics of late with their stores and various acquisitions, and they are public.
It's the 21st century object sales fallacy. Significant returns only exist at scale and you can't compete with capital, so what's the point of starting a venture in object sales today? It's default-dead in the face of its eventual competition, unless you have some angle like lockdown on the object sourcing through extremely complex objects, unassailable distribution or some alternative revenue model.
https://www.seriouseats.com/what-are-pawpaws-wild-fruit-midw...
There is also similar one that we call Custard Apple. Different islands may have different names for these fruits.
Not to be eaten in very big amounts in any case by their Annonacins (linked with Parkinson disease)
There are companies working very hard at developing new variants of fruits and vegetables that grow faster, are less susceptible to pests, don’t get damaged as much in transit, look like what consumers expect them to look like (no matter what the reality is), and smell good. Unfortunately, taste is never there. For instance have you ever noticed how hard tomatoes skin is at the supermarket vs the ones you grow yourself or even the “heirloom” variety? Tougher skin is not very pleasant but they survive shipping better.
This is my hypothesis why fruits and vegs used to taste so much better. It’s gotten worse over time with each generation of hybrids.
Farmers select for traits that increase profit. Since most markets don't let customers actually taste the product, they aren't choosing to buy it on that quality, and no one in the commercial space is trying to optimize it.
Instead customers are buying fruit that LOOKS good - big, bright, colorful, blemish-free (survives transport without damage).
So farmers plant fruits that will look good, survive transport, and have large yields. Unfortunately optimizing those qualities tends to get you terribly bland tasting fruit.
Ironically - pre-industrial revolution, when most fruits were grown and consumed locally, it was the opposite - people tended to select for fruits that were good tasting.
Baby carrots are carved from disfigured (but otherwise edible) carrots, because otherwise most people won't buy disfigured carrots.
Real baby carrots are very nice, but tender roots from forked carrots (that would be otherwise discarded when are perfectly ok to eat), is a tradeoff solution and decent replacement
I'm thinking back almost 50 years ago, the Kilimanjaro base camp. Our group (traveling Johannesburg to London overland, Kilimanjaro was simply a stop along the way) bought an entire stalk of bananas. It sat there for some days as we ate the tiny but oh-so-tasty bananas. It wasn't finished when it was time to head out. When we stopped for lunch it was thrown away as it was an inedible mess. Admittedly, it had simply been sitting on a seat in a truck and the roads were bad, but bananas are pretty hard to protect. (And anyone trying to ship them out of there would have had to use the same roads.)
I used to like bananas, but after that experience grocery store bananas hold little interest for me.
[1] in Spanish “cámaras de maduración”, not sure of the translation of this
Bet they ar least taste better than super market stuff. However, I guess it is no business if you could sell them two months a year.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2013/may/why-do-indian-...
They are available all year, but varietals and prices vary wildly when it's not "season."
There are also great mangoes in Spain and the Canary Islands, but they're very different and (I hate to say it!) not as loved by the locals as they should be.
I have yet to encounter a decent mango in the US, but it's only been about a year since I started looking seriously, so maybe I'm just not clued in. Maybe Florida?
When I visited Greece, the food was so much better than anything else I've ever tasted. It's not one problem in the US, it's every level of our supply chain is geared towards mass market tasteless junk.
Going out of my way to eat as much junk food as possible, I actually noticed I lost a bit of weight from the two weeks or so I spent in Europe.
I'm hoping to live outside the United States for at least a few months to see if this was a fluke.
I'm used to the chaunsa variety, but I've found that alphonso mangos are a good substitute and are not too difficult to find in the US. I don't know how those varieties compare to the ones commonly found in Egypt.
I gave them plenty of chances, in every corner of the country, in every season I could find them. Always terrible.
We are talking about different fruits here: Prunus domestica, The Common or European plum, and Prunus salicina, the Japanese plum are, by far, the most cultured.
European plums are sweet, acidic, fleshy and firm, with a rich taste.
Japanese plums are sweet, acidic, have a less complex taste and are soft and --watery-- by nature.
The best Japanese plums are decent fruits with an useful trait. Matures earlier, so if you buy plums in June are most probably Japanese plums. You will have a sweet-acidic ball of water all the times.
Not much unlike cherries that mature at the same time, everybody loves and are basically sugar and water. The good part is that you can have plums off-season. They aren't the best, but is the best plum that you can have in May-June; and is the only that you can culture in warm areas. Their season extends to July and maybe August.
European plums --require-- cold. Without a minimum amount of frost hours in winter will not bloom. A few mature as early as June or as late as October, but the common season ranges from mid July to mid Sept. Those fruits had much more time and sun to develop their flavor and are more diverse and different in nature, with several subgroups. Some are mostly acidic and some store a lot of sugar. Some have a very nice trait, a 'clinging seed' (can be detached cleanly from the edible part). Unlike Japanese, they can be dehydrated and stored as prunes for many months. In sum, a much more versatile fruit.
And there are the new pluots an plumcots also. Hybrids from plum and apricot that taste like very good european plums.
So you need to educate yourself in what to expect, or ask in your grocery. There are lots of different fruits in the Prunus genus.
The one with red flesh, and the one with yellow flesh. (Could be the same one at different points in its life)
My baseline is the plums I ate growing up in Argentina.
The red ones are full of flavor, especially when ripe. The softer they get the juicer and sweeter they get. These are bigger in size.
The yellow ones are more acidic, but get sweeter as they ripen. Also good. Smaller in size, I can fit a whole one in my mouth. I find the same red/yellow variants in the US. But without the flavor. They are also flavorless no matter what stage you eat them at. Ripe, not ripe, all the same: water. The yellow ones are just bleh. Acidic without the good side.
I gave them plenty of chances at different times of the year and in different locations. The best ones I had were in upstate NY in September, but still about 7/10ths of the flavor of the ones in South America.
Right now I am traveling in Mexico and craving fresh fruit, especially mango, everyday. So fresh, so refreshing, and so bright. It feels like vacation in your hand (or glass).
Some American perspective for you.
Why don't we get good mangos? The only good ones cost around 7 EUR per fruit and are flown in from the tropics.
Someday, I hope to taste a real mango.
Hard ones soft ones they are just great.
In Germany? I still like them so much to risk buying them but it's a depressing gamble :-(
Sadly, these days in Melbourne the majority of mangoes sold at supermarkets and fruit shops are Calypso mangoes, which are powdery, not as sweet, and not as juicy. I find this weird though given that 80% of mangoes produced in Australia are Kensington mangoes and yet are harder to find :(
Thank me when you and your family enjoy it. Good luck! (You’ll need it. People will fight for those mangoes in the US)
I personally use 2 lb greek yogurt (or soup, as in from Costco) containers because the extra height also lets me keep the seed in there longer and develop initial root structure. That's incredibly helpful for transferring to pots, and a little coconut coir in the soul doesn't hurt.
> Trichoderma is a naturally occurring fungus in coco peat; it works in symbiosis with plant roots to protect them from pathogenic fungi such as Pythium. It is not present in sterilised coco peat[citation needed].
Edit: Hard to find a video that don't involve cannabis growing, but here's a decent one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GrnTSXsFKI
Coconut coir is a real pain and struggle to remove and separate from the roots when you need a transplant.
Likewise small plastic containers are way too small for growing trees especially from large and medium seeds like nuts or mangoes.
Ideally, you want to pick a really big one (at least 5 to 8 liters) with a preference for depth over width, to grant the tree more space to grow and not damage the roots. They are quite sensitive in the first year, and each transplant will slow the growth for 1 to 3 weeks.
Growth is driven by two things : environment (sun/water/temperature) and soil. The one you find in most gardening shops is fine, as long as it's not too heavy and doesn't contain peat (might be difficult for our North American friends). I switched to fine, light soil with mycorrhizae and wood fiber, with a greater success.
Fertilizer is completely optional in the first year, but if you add some, avoid putting it in contact with the roots.
Finally, trees grow stronger if they are kept without support under the assault of the rain, wind and sun. They are meant to resist and adapt to their environment, so you really don't need to add a prop to keep them straight.
This year, I'm testing different style of pruning. My intuition tells me that no-to-very-light pruning yields better development than the fast and heavy pruning you see in gardening shops.
PS: I've grown 30 trees from seeds on my small balcony.
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 enthusiast would want one.
Anyone know of a sku that already exists? I Google it a couple times a year, still haven't found it. Anyone want to get this made, maybe send me one as thanks, and you keep all the profits you reap? :-D. I really just want this to exist.
(Happy to 3d model prototype housings to help! But I don't know EE. Chris at mckoss dot com)
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.
Although this might be not 100% what you want - you are aware that decent epaper Android devices e.g. from Onyx have been available for a few years now? Have a look e.g. at the BOOX Note Air2. Of course they are marketed as e-readers, and are quite pricey.
I expect if you eliminated the need for taking video and motion detection, should be able to get away with smaller panel and battery. Most trail cams also have IR modes, don't need that, which would drop cost as well.
Or roll your own: It's overkill, but lots of solar-powered battery-backed raspberry pi systems out there. If it only needs to run for a few minutes/day. You can undersize the solar if you can skip cloudy days when there's not much growth anyway.
Maybe an old laptop with webcam or some digital cameras with 'remote' triggers could fill the role.
An RTC chip with alarm function could send a power-on signal every day and at least a pi can self-shutoff once the job is complete.
"Not all RTC chips have alarm functions but a few that do are the DS3231 (Maxim Integrated), MCP79410 (Microchip) and ISL12026 (Intersil). Here, a DS3231M is used to construct a simple, but fully functional, RTC building block and, further, to construct an example RTC-based switch."
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/projects/build-programmable...
In 2013 I wanted to create a simple time-lapse camera: 3 intervals (every minute, hour or day - rotary switch), store on SD card, recharge via solar, weatherproof;
"Can't be that hard", I thought and started interviewing potential clients and because of the nice 3D renderings and eventual 3D prints I got back "So cool - I want one" and naiv as I was I registered a business and collected a few hundred pre-orders at $150. Even had a cheap startup booth at CES in the basement next to the washrooms one year.
When they say "Hardware is hard" they are sugar-coating it. I could rant for days about the things that happened over the 2 years that it took to ship the first camera. We underestimated everything: Optics for example and what role condensation plays when deployed outdoors for long periods of time, or the impact of temperature on batteries. Also, just having a "cool" product was not enough to launch a sustainable business. Without recurring revenue, customer support was a pain.
I was lucky that some of our early clients were enterprises who wanted to pay monthly fees for extra services, otherwise we would have gone bankrupt trying to make consumers happy.
Eventually I decided that for us "only a camera that generates MRR is a good camera" and stopped selling to consumers. But it sure makes me happy still seeing recently made videos on social media from cameras I assembled myself.
Anyway, times have changed, maybe someone wants to give it another shot, happy to share more of the experiences I had.
Be aware though, manufacturing electronics is even harder these days. I know because we still make cameras. They are a necessary evil to get the kind of data our customers in Agriculture and Construction need to operate.
I am Michael Schwanzer of Toronto based ZEITDICE INC. Happy to be contacted via LinkedIn or our website.
Does anyone know why the leaves are initially so dark and then become lighter? Is that common in plants?
I’ve noticed the same thing in frangipani. I assume it has something to do with the same amount of chlorophyll being distributed over a greater area, but that’s just a guess.
Also note that the leaves don’t just get lighter as they grow: the older ones also start to become dark again as they die.
Some nutritients / elements are rare and plants need to manage them carefully. That also means that they need to protect themselves against animals feeding on them. For that, they develop antifeedants [0] for example. Maybe plants develop the structure of leaves and antifeedants first before eventually loading it with chlorophyll [1] for which e.g. magnesium is required (no idea if that counts as rare but it is certainly harder to acquire than hydrogen, oxygen or carbon.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifeedant
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophyll#Chemical_structure
The seed can be planted with the husk, but removing it speeds up the germination because the embryo can access light and water more easily.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1259/
The megafaunal partner of the mango is probably the elephant, which is still extant in the native range of the mango.
Nature is pretty clever, imho.
These plants usually evolve to serve a particular ecological niche. It's kinda like the soil's immune system. Exposing bare soil to direct sunlight is one of the most harmful things you can do to a soil ecosystem. So many plants evolved seeds that lay dormant until they're needed to come and protect the soil
Plants like dandelions are known as major weeds, but they only germinate in soils that are too compacted (e.g. a farmland with a history of plowing). These dandelions take over, decompact the soil, and then get "outcompeted" by other plants (usually perennials with longer lifespans).
I use scarequotes for competition because it's a good example of a natural system where "competition" is a lens of analyzing nature that could cause you to miss the bigger picture
From what I've seen it's common in at least a subset of plants, that fresh leaves have a very distinctive red-ish colour.
Yes. Red pigments are a common defense against cold and radiation. They are masked later by the green pigments.
The leaves close up at daytime, but open up at night, through a process called Nyctinasty. It's amazing how motile plants can be.
The channel has some more interesting videos. I wish someone did videos to demonstrate phototropism, hydrotropism etc. It would be much cooler to have those videos around, which could be used to explain such concepts to kids.
There are some clips available on youtube, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM-Ilh2lHZk
When I did this the pi would acquire an image every N minutes, save it with a sequentially timestamped filename into a working directory. Then another system in my house would periodically rsync the contents of the pi's working directory to itself. From there, it's a one line ffmpeg command to turn the series of JPG or PNG files into a video at your choice of time interval/frame rate, resolution and codec.
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.
The amount of chemical synthesis (I know nothing about chemistry) from the raw materials of dirt and water and light into the crazy amount of nutrients are fibers and whatnot found in a plant is absolutely astonishing!
Among other things I've got five little macadamia trees, three Torrey pine trees, two carob trees that just sprouted, and a sequoiadendron giganteum seedling about an inch tall. (It's funny to me that the Giant Sequoia seeds are tiny, smaller than a grain of rice, yet the tree grows to be so huge.)
It's fun and fascinating to watch them sprout and grow.
(FWIW, I really like J.L. Hudson for seeds: https://jlhudsonseeds.net/index.html They have all kinds of plants from all over the world, really good prices and quality, and I like their attitude.)
Some plants will die right away so at least it’s a fast failure.
But others will be ok for quite a while, several months or even a year or two. And then they’ll start yellowing, losing leaves, whatever, and eventually die.
Even plants that are supposedly hardy, like ivy.
I absolutely hate growing plants, and it actually makes me angry to see them fail. Even though I love an interior with plants, I’m actually feeling better if I never tried to have the plant than if I did and it inevitably dies.
Luckily, I live in nature and can open the windows instead, my surroundings being a forest.
1) Were you feeding them at all? Maybe they were just running out of nutrients.
2) Something environmental in your area, bad water or radon or something.
The video show very well the continuous grow. Something interesting happened at the end, probably hormones added.
Atmospheric carbon capture visualized
Yes, also when things are in season those fruits and vegetables taste better in your tropical/subtropical countries, but that's the problem with places like India, when things aren't in season it's difficult to get those items or they are really expensive and really bad quality. In the US (esp. in CA!) I can get decent quality fruits and vegetables almost year round and I can grow lots of things on my own, freeze them, and then enjoy them year round too. The open stall markets where the majority of Indians do their grocery shopping only have seasonal vegetables, there's 0 refrigeration. The chicken and fish areas are full of blood, it's very unhygienic and if you want beef or pork, good luck.
Also in India the concept of eating raw leafy green salads is completely foreign and due to lack of food hygiene there's no demand for eating raw lettuces. The blistering heat also doesn't help for growing kales, chards, and microgreens. Leafy vegetables must be cooked or flash boiled. Again, you can get microgreens at the supermarkets but it's more expensive than in the US and just like everyone else there I'm not going to eat raw leafy greens for fear of getting food poisoning. People in the US complaining about low quality food have no idea how good they have it, even with the few ecoli scares you have a few times of the year, you can be sure major stores pull the bad produce. Before I go to India and immediately after coming back I eat tons of salad loaded with avocados, various types of nuts/seeds, various types of berries, olives, and various other fruits and vegetables. I find myself craving these items a few days into my month long India trips. It's easy to eat and live a healthy lifestyle in the US, not so much in India.
Alphonso and ataulfo are not the same thing, not even close except they are both mangoes.
Alphonso is a uniquely fragrant and flavorful variety from India which is very rare to find in the US but you should be able to find it canned in pulp form.
Ataulfo is an ordinary mango from Mexico that is available everywhere in CA, including in organic form at Costco.
I think seeing any sapling grow from a seed is mesmerising.
P.S: I don't know why the shell of the seed had to be removed as in the video. The sapling grows without removing the shell of the seed. This process looks like Cesarean of a mango seed :)
I'm under a year in with this thing and I was wondering how it would start branching out, if leaves would become branches or what. Seeing the budding at the top at the end was pretty cool. Now I know what to expect.
Yet being able to witness the passage of time outside of the scale of time provokes a mini existential crisis for me.
The Youtube channel says they will post another video when the first fruit is born in 2026. It’s kind of like watching babies growing up. You know that in five years, they will still be a baby, but 5 years to us adults could mean a new job, the death of someone, a completely different life philosophy.
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?
Time scaling (slower or faster) is almost like an additional sense, in a way similar to micro- and tele-scopes, eh?
That, whatever it is, must be conscious and not just “on some level” as if humans have retained some special social status across species.
Mangos are sensible to mineral deficiencies.
Very interesting to watch grow though - each set of leaves starting out floppy and purple then stiffening up and turning green, just like the one in the video.
I just planted the whole mango pit as-is, without removing the inner seed, and it had no problem germinating.
If interested, I highly recommend (not a pure science book) Hidden Life Of Trees https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...
Anyway testing multi line text reply for my upcoming HN app.
Please ignore.
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