You'd probably need a 100G sized pot for a mango to get big enough to fruit. Though there are some cultivars which seem to fruit at barely 2 or 3 years of age.

Grafting to a mature tree would help. But, in order for the grafted scion to get sufficient vigor, you'd probably have to chop off a major limb and then graft to the resulting suckers. (You'll probably not have any success if you just graft to the tip of an existing branch.)

To ensure that pollen is not mixed with other trees, you'd need to do the cross in a controlled manner.

New cultivars come both from random seedlings and from concentrated breeding efforts. One of the biggest limitations on selecting new mangoes is space, since you need to plant out hundreds or thousands of trees. I know the Zill family owns property in Costa Rica, so I imagine they are using that land to plant out seedlings for the latest mango selection program. Gary has an interesting way of determining which of the young seedlings have promise by smelling the crushed leaves. That's why you'll notice that the lemon zest and coconut cream both have orangey scented leaves (when crushed).

Jeff

I think there have been a few posts on breeding mangos in the past. Here is a general breakdown. If you'd like to know more let me know.

There are two ways it is generally done, random and selective. Selective is the way to go because you can control both parents to try and get the exact flavors or characteristics that you want. Australia is the world leader on selective breeding with their Kensington Pride crosses. Lots of articles online about it.

Random is the way that Zills does it. From my understanding it is not completely random because they plant a lot of a certain mother seed in a row and they have no way of knowing the exact father tree. As Jeff said, the way they select out the seedlings is by smelling the leaves. When selecting for the Lemon Zest I was told that because it came from a batch of PPK seeds, Gary was looking for a smell that was different than the others and thats how he knew it was not one of the polyembronic nucellar seedlings but instead the result of sexual reproduction.

I think Zill's variety selection was done right here in South Florida. I was told that the seedlings were started in containers.

Why are you looking forward to breeding your own mangos though? Learn to do it selectively because random breeding will probably be a big waste of your time.

I read that some guy in India has 315 Mango varieties on one tree, he uses it as the mother tree to get scions from. so its possible to have 1 tree with many varieties on it, that you can use to experiment with, of course keeping track of whats planted on what branch would be the trick here.

I would imagine that if you get half a dozen of the cultivars you want to start crossing on that tree, it would save you a lot of space.

Thanks for the helpful and interesting info! I'll put more research into it. This would be a fun experiment for me. If it goes like I planned, I'll have my own cultivar/s and I might even get them patented if they are awesome. :)

Sheehan - you're correct. Gary did his selection right here in South Florida. Pretty amazing.

Jeff

There isn't really much benefit for the homeowner to get a variety patented. Even for a nursery it isn't that practical. It costs thousands of dollars and unless you have a large scale operation you will probably not make back that money. UF has been successful with patenting their blueberries because of licensing the varieties in a large scale to growers.

A great example of the uselessness of patenting a mango variety is the 'Young' mango. It was patented in 1971 by Sturrock but no one really propagated while it was patented. Once the patent expired it was almost forgotten until Pine Island decided to rename it the Tebow and sell it.

If you do create a new variety that is good you should go the Hatcher route and just market the hell out of it.

Here is a link that might be useful: 'Young' Mango Patent

Tropicalgrower,

Good luck with your breeding effort for mangoes. I am starting on my own breeding project of Opuntia ficus indica.

^Cool. Thanks! :-)