Growing mangoes made easy
2022-02-14T09:30:20+11:00
Here are seven ways to help you grow (and eat!) delicious, lip-smacking, home-grown fruit.
1. Prune annually. Shaping is best started when the tree is young. Cut the sapling back to about 1m to encourage low branching. In the following 2–3 years, trim the branch tips in summer to promote a compact, bushy canopy. Once established, give the tree a prune every summer straight after harvesting mangoes.
2. Keep the tree as dry as possible. For a good crop, mangoes need dry conditions when flowering and fruiting. A few showers and the occasional storm are okay, but if you get a wet spring, the tree is likely to succumb to anthracnose, a black spotty fungal disease that affects the flowers, fruit, leaves and twigs. In wet weather, you can cover the tree with a sheet of clear plastic – draped over a simple frame – to help it stay dry. Remove the plastic sheet after the rain passes.
3. Pick early. There’s no need to wait for mangoes to ripen on the tree. If you do, you’ll likely lose most of them to flying foxes, or they’ll drop to the ground and split. You can pick them early if ripening has already begun. When the fruit are plump with a rounded tip and a slight blush, cut one open. If the flesh near the seed is yellow, ripening has begun, which means you can pick some more and allow them to finish ripening off the tree.
4. Cut with care. Use secateurs or a telescopic pruner to harvest, if possible, and leave a short piece of stem attached, otherwise a large flow of sap from the fruit will spoil and rot the skin. For fruit that are out of reach, make a picking stick with a long pole and a plastic bottle to catch the fruit.
5. Ripen fruit. Lay mangoes out on a table in a shady spot to ripen. They are susceptible to fruit fly when ripening, even off the tree, so cover them with an old sheet. Ripe fruit keeps in the fridge for a week or so.
6. Freeze your mango harvest to enjoy your fruit for longer. Simply cut off the cheeks, scoop out the flesh and lay them flat in large ziplock bags that can be stacked in the freezer – mango smoothies for months!
7. Create dried mango snacks. If you are lucky enough to have a food dehydrator, dried mango is a delicious treat: you can take it anywhere, it’s great for school lunches and it’s a guaranteed crowd pleaser.
Photo by Phil Dudman
