Avocado, mango, papaya and pineapple from seed.

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Avocado, Mango, Papaya and Pineapple
some things never change. The Tucson Gardener found its readers searching for information on the avocado. Individuals made their guacamole or added avocado to their salads and are left with two or three large avocado pits. It seems wasteful to toss them out in the trash or add them to the compost bin. I'm guessing some people want to know how to plant the seed while others want to know if they can plant a tree in their back yard and harvest avocados a year or two later. You can certainly plant the pits and produce a tree. Harvesting fruit? Not likely.

The work involved in preparing the edible portion of mango fruit, and finding that a large part of the fruit is seed pod makes you wonder if you can somehow get more for your money. It seems as if you paid more for the large seed inside than you did edible fruit. Times are tough and you want to get a bit more value from that fruit so you begin to think maybe you can plant the seed and grow a mango producing tree. You can certainly grow a mango tree from the fruit's seed, but maintaining a healthy tree and finding the ideal environment for fruit production is a whole other ball game. One you're not likely to win.

The heavy tropical papaya's from Hawaii or Mexico are full of black, knobby seeds. Do you scoop them out like a cantaloupe and toss them in the trash or compost bin? You can, but you might also want to try planting a few to watch how fast they can grow into a tropical, decorative plant. Once again, getting fruit to produce on the eventual six to eight foot trunk in the Tucson environment without lots of gardener or greenhouse help may seem near impossible.

And how about that expensive pineapple you purchased that sometimes turn out to be tasteless because its not quite ripe, or worse, its kind of dark and mushy inside because it sat on the grocery store shelf or kitchen counter too long. Those often dry looking leaves on the crown of the fruit can actually be transformed into a healthy looking pineapple plant. And after a couple years of growth, that plant might give you the best chance to grow a new tropical fruit from grocery store produce.

If you're willing to take the time and collect the seeds and prepare them for planting, novice gardeners can certainly grow a few plants from the seeds of avocado, mango and papaya. And its not very difficult to propagate a pineapple plant from the leftover crown of the pineapple fruit. Unfortunately the chance of seeing the production of new fruit from your efforts is pretty slim, especially in Tucson's hot, dry climate with hard water, poor soil and the early morning freezing temperatures of winter. From my experience your best chance would be the production of a small fruit on the pineapple and if you can keep the plants from freezing or dying from overwatering you might get a papaya or two on the fast growing plants.

Below are the links to the various plants and information on how to grow them from seed or plant propagation from a pineapple crown.

	Avocado
	Mango
	Papaya
	Pineapple