This time we decided to apply some breaks to our busy schedule(s) and wondered how can we make lives for future generations a little better.

Recently, Minal was inspired by a great idea. She learnt about a good Samaritan Mr. Subhajit Mukherjee, currently living in Mumbai, who decided to plant 3,60,000 mango seeds/trees at different places in Mumbai. We both got so inspired from him that we also decided to undertake a similar exercise in Delhi.

The idea was that instead of just savoring tasty mangoes, we decided to re-use them i.e. re-plant them and June/July happens to be a perfect time to do so for two reasons:

1. This is the peak mango season, more mangoes would mean more seeds at disposal.
2. This is the time when sowing can happen to get the maximum water consumption in the rainy season starting in July to August in India.

After having studied a little more on mango plantation, we got our act together and started preserving the mango guthlees (seeds) for over two weeks. We would then wash them, dry them for days till they are moisture free and then break each seed apart to extract the mango seed/seedling inside. We ended up collecting 15 seeds and sowed 7 on first day and 8 on the second day. Please see the video below to see what we did:

You can see the seedlings all put in a bucket together:

The next task was to decide or rather explore where do we go and plant these seeds. Without putting much thought, Minal suggested to plant them on the road meridian(s)/dividers in front of our society. Luckily, it started drizzling during the activity and in a short while, it started to rain heavily when we were almost done with sowing. Here’s a glimpse of fist day’s activities:

Since we didn’t have much of manure available with us, we ended up using packed food for seedlings.

Glimpse of 2nd day’s activities:

The best part was Sarah’s enthusiam for this initiative. She was so dedicated and focused as can be seen from the video here:

There were few passers by who continued to watch three of us while we continued. 2 of them even resolved to help water these seedlings.

We bid goodbye to these seeds with a promise to come back again and water them and take care of them like we would’ve done for our personal garden.

We started planting on June 5 and we hope to plant more seeds and has set an internal target of reaching 100 by August 5 ( which is Sarah`s Birthday).

Hope you like reading this post. Do leave your feedback/comments.

Till then, stay safe and take care!