ARIEF HIDAYAT

MANGO TREE….

Mango trees have been cultivated and grafted for hundreds of years. Grafting was a 'secret' in many cultures and tasty mangoes were status symbols for the royalty only. Ancient kings would steal limbs off each others' mango trees and bribe and kidnap the other kings' gardeners. Peasants were punished for possession of mango fruit or unauthorized cultivation of mango fruit trees. Royalty would try to surpass each other with lavish mango parties and huge gifts of  perfect, ripe, delicious mango fruits. Some of today's Indochinese awesome varieties existed many, many years ago exactly as we have them now

Mango trees are evergreens. 

The civilized grafted mango trees we have now are nothing like the ancient, wild trees whose small fruit tasted like turpentine and had the texture of nylon yarn. The old test of a mango fruit was it's stringiness, it's fiber content. You used to judge a mango by how much dental floss it had. The advent of the free exchange of scientific and agricultural data changed all that. Grafting began to be widely practiced.

Mango fruit from seeds is never the same as the mother tree's fruit. So the seed out of a great tasting fruit will likely produce a tree yielding horrible tasting fibrous fruit. The only certain way to be sure you'll have tasty fruit is to propagate (by grafting, and in some cases cloning) an existing particular, individual tree (DNA-wise) whose quality is proven.

The odds of a seed producing worthwhile fruit are very, very small. Like one in a hundred million.All mango trees grown from any seed are properly called "Wild Mango Trees". These trees, at 2 foot tall no more, are suitable to graft to but are only worth about $.25 each. Don't sprout a mango seed unless you are able to finish the job by grafting onto it!

All good tasting mango varieties are grafted. It's easy with younger trees to see the graft...just look near the base of the trunk and you can see a scar that circles all the way around the trunk. Older trees have the scar too if they are grafted, it's just harder to see. Use a whisk broom to clean off the old bark and dirt from the bottom one foot or so. If necessary use a metal tool to scrape bfrom the root joint up to the first limb. If that doesn't find it, kill it. 

Watch out for grafted trees that have been frozen back to the stump and all the top (good) part of the graft (scion) has died of the freeze and only the rootstock has survived and branched...such trees, if they do live and re-grow, produce very inferior fruit. It is a good citizen's duty to kill these "fruiting wounded" so that people sampling mangoes for the first time will not taste their unpleasant "free" fruits and form an aversion to all mangoes. A chainsaw to the trunk at the ground line followed by a quart of roundup spread over the stump surface and surrounding area should do it.

Grafting Is When You Artificially Attach a Tiny Proto-Limb (Bud) of a Desirable Tree to the Lower Trunk of a Similar Tree, Usually a Sapling, Thereby Prolonging the Life and Fruiting Ability of the Desirable Tree. THIS CAN RESULT IN A SINGLE DESIRABLE TREE'S DNA BEING USED FOR AN INDEFINITELY LONG TIME! Like possibly thousands of years!

Sometimes young trees sprout limbs from BELOW the graft's scar, always kill these limbs because they will produce bad tasting fruits and weaken the good scion above the graft.

Grafting occurs in nature, for example, when two trees growing too close together constantly rub limbs in the wind scraping them both bare at one spot and they both 'bleed' sap and when the windy season ends they are still pressed together and grow 'joined' together over months into one tree. Grafted. There is this type of 'joining' in root systems too. Many huge groves are really one tree.

THE END…