Mango and Avocado season

It’s that time of year again – mango and avocado season! We’ve been buying both at the San Ignacio market for a month or so, but just in the past couple of weeks our mango trees have started to bear fruit. This is the first time in the two and a half years we’ve lived here that we’re getting much of anything from our mango trees. When we moved here, they were overgrown with vines, and we didn’t get all the vines chopped out of the trees until well after the first year when the trees should have been bearing. Then, last year was an avocado year – the local lore says that bumper crops of mangos and avocados rotate so every other year you get a good crop from one or the other – so we didn’t get too many mangoes from our trees.

This year is different. It’s a mango year, and our trees are finally healthy enough to bear some fruit. We’ve seen some trees around that are just loaded with fruit, and ours aren’t like that yet, but we have about half a dozen mango trees, and they’re all different varieties, and they are all bearing some fruit. I never realized there were so many types of mangoes. They vary in size from the little black mangoes, which are only about two inches long, to the big red ones, which are about six or eight inches long, very fat, and probably weigh almost a pound each. They all have different textures, from very stringy to very pulpy, with pits of different sizes and shapes. And, they all taste a little different, from very sweet to tangy and almost citrus-like. Tom and I like them all, and keep rating the different trees, and as each new tree bears, that’s the one we deem the favorite of the day.

Being an off-year for avocados, our trees aren’t as loaded as they were last year. However, they have some avocados growing, and we just have to wait until September or so for them to ripen. We’re told our trees are late bearers, which we always enjoy in October when all the other avocados are gone, and we’re still getting them fresh from the tree in our pasture.