The Last of the Green Mango Harvest

Agriculture is and will always be a temperamental game, one year could be heaven and the next could be hell. Despite how much care you give, or what efforts you end up putting in, you are still at the hands of nature, and believe you me, she can be a very cruel mistress...

This year has been a roller-coaster of sorts, given all the uncertainty that rolled in with the covid tide and for us here on the farm, we were not even sure if we would be getting a harvest from the mango trees after the strenuous drought of the past few years that we had to deal with.
As you can see in the picture above, although the new growth on the trees are looking vibrant, and the fruit (sparce) but healthy, you can see that the tree itself has taken quite a beating. And over the next few weeks, I will be focusing intensely on getting these trees back into shape so that we can have a crop improvement with the next harvest season, and I hope that I will be able to share this with you guys... (If I remember to take the camera when I go out to work :D)

This year we harvested mainly for the Atchar market, and as such we only harvested the green immature fruits, sparingly leaving some on the trees for household use and gifting. Atchar is a pickle / preserve with Indian culinary origin, that is made from the green mango fruit. These fruit are picked young and then carted to the production factory, where the fruit are weight and the farmers then get paid per ton delivered.

A green fruit is a green fruit?

You might think that this is a straight forward set deal, however the processing factories are quite specific in the fruits they buy.

Firstly, the fruit has to be green, and this doesn't just mean the skin, sporadically fruits are cut open to ensure that the fruit is completely immature and that it has not reached any point of ripening, inside or out, even the slightest coloring on the inside of one of your fruits, and they will not take that entire batch.

Secondly, the husk of the pip needs to be undeveloped and soft, the atchar pickle is in fact made with the whole fruit, this includes the pip and the husk, and once the husk has started to harden around the pip, the mangoes are no longer acceptable, and the batch is disqualified.

But over and above having to cautiously monitor the fruit so that you get the optimal tonnage without leaving the fruits on the tree too long, you also have to watch the market prices - and if you get everything just right and have a sizable harvest for the year, you are lucky.

Looks can be deceiving.

On the other hand, this tiny fruit above, although it looks like a smaller version of a mature ripening fruit, is in fact just sun-burnt. And yes, mangoes can get sunburn. This causes the discoloration in the skin of the fruit, and more often than not these fruits are weened by the mother tree and very seldom reach maturity.
Some older fruits could also get sun burned, and such fruit when picked for the general consumer market is found undesirable due to the sunspots.

With that being said, lets have a look at the harvesting process.

Unlike picking table fruit, which is done individually one fruit at a time when the fruit is mature enough to release from the tree easily, the green mangos are harvested by beating into the tree with a long stick, this the causes the young fruit to fall down from the tree where they are then collected and sorted into lug-boxes. Each crate containing a rough average of 20kg of fruits.

Every fruit is checked carefully before being placed into the crates, and every time we move to the next tree, a few fruits are sampled and cut in half to check for any signs of hardening or ripening.

One of the things about picking up the fruit is being vigilant at all times. Africa being Africa creatures and critters of all kinds ten to be doing their daily rounds while you try to work - nature does not stop its habits for the convenience of man. Finding deadly snakes such as Black Mamba, Rinkals and boomslang is certainly not uncommon this time of year, and the chances of an unexpected encounter increases when you are out in the orchards. These snakes are extremely venomous, an a single bite form any one of those could be fatal. To give you an idea, the venom from the bite of a bite from a black mamba has the ability to kill you within 25min - that is about the travel time to the closest hospital, thats not accounting the time needed to get transport ready and the patient loaded into the car...

But snakes arn't the only concern, you also have to watch for things like giant rock monitors or even tiny spiders as you can see in the picture below.

These little guys might look small, but trust me their citotoxic bite packs a powerful punch. And although they would generally scurry out of your way, but if you don't pay attention, you could easily end up accidentally get one between the fruit and your hand, in which case they will resort to a defensive nibble.

But if you manage to escape all of that and fill the crates, these will then get stacked on the truck and once I have a full load, these are taken in to be weighed and processed.

In all honesty as much as we look forward to the annual harvesting of the mangoes, I must admit that I am always relieved once it is over!