When I was in the Florida master gardener program long ago in North Central Florida, one of the other master gardeners told me that she much preferred North Florida to South Florida. “We have such beautiful big oaks up here, not like down there.”
I laughed. Fort Lauderdale is my hometown. It is a tropical climate and although it’s very urbanized, by nature it is a rainforest ecosystem or close to it. “Down in South Florida,” I said, “the mango trees are as big as oaks!”
This is not an exaggeration. At my in-laws’ house, there are mango trees that were planted in the 1970s. They are now easily 60 feet tall and drop a huge quantity of mangoes across the front yard. When my brother-in-law was a teenager, he took these excellent mangoes to a local grocery and sold them for good money.
Ripe Mangoes are Superb
There is nothing like a fresh mango right from the tree. Some of you from non-tropical climates have never had a real mango. Think of the praises that are given to homegrown tomatoes as compared to the watery, bland tomatoes sold in grocery stores. It’s similar with mangoes. A tree-ripened mango is as far from the hard varnish-flavored mangoes sold at Food Lion or Aldi’s as a greenhouse, hydroponic, watery, bland tomato is from a sun-ripened Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato grown in rich soil. When I was a kid, I wondered why anyone liked eating peaches. Every peach I tried was rubbery and hard, bitter and awful. Then I got to try homegrown tree-ripened peaches and they were a completely different fruit. Most people who believe they don’t like mangoes have no idea what mangoes really are.
Mangoes are easily in the top five fruits ever invented by God. (The other four fruit no longer exist on earth, which leaves mangoes as the number one fruit remaining on this terrestrial sphere.)
The Story of Mom’s Mango Tree
About 12 to 14 years ago, the city of Fort Lauderdale was giving away fruit trees. In order to get one you had to go to a short talk on taking care of trees and then at the end you were given two trees of your choice, according to what they had available. My mom went to the class and chose her two trees: a Navel orange and a mango. She planted those two trees in her backyard in what was shortly to become The Great South Florida Food Forest Project. We built the rest of the food forest around those two trees.
Unfortunately, due to the various diseases plaguing citrus trees in South Florida and the rest of the Sunshine State, the Navel orange declined and died in a short period of time, probably within three years of being planted. The mango, on the other hand, thrived and grew and grew and grew… and started bearing the best mangoes. That tree is currently the star of the food forest project. It drops a ripe mango about every 5 to 10 minutes in season. They are big, sweet, rich, and stringless.
Mango Trees Do Not Have to Get Huge
A few years ago, the tree was getting so large that I pruned off almost half of the top. Without missing a beat it went back into fruit in season and bore another crop of mangoes. Just because mango trees can get as big as oaks, it doesn’t mean that that is the best use of your backyard space. They are quite amenable to pruning.
The Food Forest Course Continues!
This week I am down in South Florida filming segments for the next installation of the in-depth food forest course currently posted in our Skool group.
The first three lessons are already up for our subscribers and four more lessons are planned. I also plan to film a food forest Q&A for our Skool members. It is quite a valuable platform, and it costs about the same per month as a bag of good potting soil. The next chapter in the food forest class will cover how to maintain and keep your canopy in good times and bad as we look at the South Florida food forest project 11 years or more after it began.
Anyhow, that’s enough for today. I have mangoes to eat.
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https://kansasplantfarm.com/plants/manihot-grahamii
This farm in Kansas Zone 6B grows manihot grahamii hook (more correct than manihot grahamii) for sale. Unfortunately, they are out of this plant for this year. Next April it will probably be back up for sale. There is a page that goes into detail about this plant’s needs, growing conditions and how to overwinter it.
I did a load of research trying to answer the question about edibility of the m. grahamii versus m.eschulenta. These two species are close enough to interbreed and both species are edible. However, m. eschulenta has been bred to have bitter and sweet varieties of cassava roots. Nothing has been done with m. grahamii to explore how bitter the roots are to process them for eating or tapioca starch production which is a real shame.
If you are adventurous you can start crossing m. eschulenta (sweet cassava) with m. grahamii and start selecting for hardiness and low CN content. It would only take 5 – 6 years max. The seeds on m. grahamii three in each pod are shot out and travel up to 50 ft. away from the plant. An easier way to get hybrids that would sell like hot cakes would be to cross variegated m. eschulenta with m. grahamii and start selecting for hardiness and variegation among the offspring. With luck that would only take 3 years max.
People in the USA, Europe, Australia and New Zealand are actively searching for m. grahamii. They would go berserk for variegated m. eschulenta x grahamii that is fairly hardy. Get something that is unique and you might get something worth getting a plant patent on. There is a huge market for exotics that are hardy up to Zone 7 that except for a few plants like rosemary and gardenias haven’t been tapped for the gardener who likes to push the limits.