My Brookslate mango tree is pumping this year. It looks like it has to many fruit. My concern is the tree branches might snap. Should i sacrifice some of the smaller fruit for the betterment of the larger fruit and the tree itself?
removing some fruit from my mango tree
Aloha,
My mango seem to thin themselves out by dropping quite a few fruit as they start to get larger - they are also large, older trees and we have never had any worry about snapping a branch with the weight. If your tree is a young one with slim branches I would be inclined to thin them too, just as Hetty says.
Last year was a bumper crop for us here in Kihei, not so much this year as we had rain almost every time 5 of the trees put out blossoms - three times so far this year! Still enough fruit on two of the trees ( later blooming) to keep us happy - wish they would hurry up and ripen!
You need to say at what stage the fruit are. Are they still very small?
Can you show the tree and fruit? It would probably help to give the tree K-Mag and a bloom promoter.
Some neighbors have limbs propped up.
I pick up small fruits that have been dropped, and they soften and sweeten in a few days. I've been nibbling mangoes since they were three inches long.
The big mangoes on one tree are just barely getting some color, but are sweet and ripe, still hard to touch on the outside. And they are sprouting roots, inside the fruits!
to tropical breeze..
This tree is perhaps 15 years old and is relatively small compared to my other giant old mango trees.
The tree is freekin loaded.
It appears the tree flowered twice in succession. Therefore, the smaller fruit is about as long as my thumb. The larger fruit is a little larger then my hand. The fully mature fruit of the Brookslate is perhaps 6 to 8 inches long..
The Brookslate tree matures in August, and continuous through September and October.
One year i did have one of my mango trees loose a huge branch because it was over loaded with fruit.
I've got over 500 mango trees but they're mostly Kensington Prides and R2E2's. Never had any problems with overloading branches breaking. There's always masses of flowers, then masses of small fruit, but they always thin themselves out. Some branches sag but I only cut them out later if they are get too close to the ground. If a branch is in too much shade it can grow thin and weak, but usually is has fewer fruit. It could be something related to the variety you have. Have you checked around locally with other people who have the same?
It's a wonderful sight to see a fully loaded mango! Hopefully some of the larger fruit will ripen before the next lot increase in size. Are you in a windy area? The trades do a good job of thining in my garden!
What do you do with all your ripe fruit? I freeze some and make lots of mango leather to send to my grandkids on the mainland as well as the usual mouses, pies, and curds. Last year there were so many mangos in Kihei that even the food bank would turn boxes away daily LOL!
Good luck, and let us know if you decide to thin the tree or not.
Jen
to bravheartsmom and Molamola.
The last 2 years my three giant mango trees (chinese mango [this tree is huge and could be 100 years old], Perie mango [old and probably 70 years old} and common mango [unknown age but at least 50]) vomited probably a ton of mangoes on me. I made lots of mango butter, mango pies, frozen mangoes, gave as many away as i could. this year my giant trees are resting...thank gawd!!!!. Its the baby tree, maybe 15 years old that is over loaded. These Brookslate's are probably the best of my eating mangoes. I will be freezing as many mangoes as i can, giving them away and we will just be turning into mango pigs.
To tropicalbreeze.
This Brookslate tree is quite a small tree. maybe 20 feet tall with relatively spindally branches. I went out and propped up some of the branches. I pulled off quite a few of the tiniest mangoes.. hopefully that will help some years ago my Perie tree got so over loaded a branch the length of a city bus broke off because of over loading. It sounded like a cannon going off at 2 in the morning and it hit a car.
Thank you everyone for the help aloha from Kauai/Hawaii
Our largest trees here are usually Bowen Mangos which have been abandoned or left go as shade trees. For fruit people mostly use grafted trees which normally don't get so high and are lopped back to 4 metres, or 4.5 metres at most, to keep them more manageable and the fruit more easily harvested. I haven't seen a Bowen loose any limbs, and they get quite huge and have tonnes of fruit. So most likely it's a characteristic of the varieties you have. Mangos are biennial, in that they produce more prolifically every second year.
I have a perie mango tree that is 12 yrs. old this year. She used to give us tons of great-tasting, sweet, medium-sized fruit when the tree was much smaller (between 5-8 feet), but as she got taller and bigger, she has barely any fruit and this year we can count maybe 15-20 fruit on the whole tree! I'm jealous of all of you out there who have so many fruit on your trees! What are we doing wrong? We are preparing (after June) to prune back the tree. Any advice?
You aren't giving too much fertiliser, are you? Particularly too much nitrogen will give very nice lush growth but very little fruit. "12 year old" for a mango is really "12 year young", they normally produce really well way beyond that age. Does it still flower abundantly, or has the flowering diminished as well?
My trees are not as loaded this year either - which is actually a good thing as I still have a lot frozen from last year!
This year we had quite a wet winter on Maui with heavy rain at times, and most of the blossom dropped to the ground without setting fruit - I wonder if that could be the problem with your tree? I know that Oahu had (and is still having) a lot of rain storms. I think that if the rain comes at the wrong time it does effect the fruit set. We had a bumper crop in Kihei in 2008 - a year we had almost no winter rain at all - just a thought.
Also, I am noticing many fewer bees this year - anyone know if Mango is wind or bee pollinated? Tropicbreeze will know!
We had a huge Mango tree cut back at work two years ago - I mean right back to the main trunk, it looked awful! It was over the driveway and the fruit was bonking visitors on the head when they would sudenly drop, there were also two rental cars that got dents on them from falling fruit. This year the tree is quite recovered and has fruit on it again. Total mutilation doesn't seem to hurt them to much, although it was terrible sight at the time. Mango is a really pretty wood if you want to keep some of the limbs and do some carpentry!
Aloha,
Jenn
Jenn, mangos are biennial in that they produce heavily every second year. And the ideal climate for them is strong monsoonal with a very dry winter and any amount of rain during the wet season. A lot of mangos here (including some of mine ) stand in water and/or saturated soil for the whole wet season. They're also very susceptible to fungal disease so very humid conditions during flowering will damage flowers. We usually don't get any rain during flowering. Most people wait until there's about 80% and then turn on the irrigation (at ground level). Irrigation even at ground level too early will also cause flower drop. Fruiting is over before the monsoon sets in.
The flowers are tiny and are pollinated by insects. That includes moths, bees, wasps, flies, etc. Flies are good pollinators, so much so that some mango growers hang rotting carcases in their orchards to attract flies. Flies like the meat for protein and the nectar for carbohydrate. Wasps do the same but get their meat from other insects or spiders. Bees get their protein from pollen and carbs from nectar. It all balances out.
Severe pruning doesn't usually worry them but if it's too humid fungus can get into the wood. So in humid conditions some sort of antifungal paste is recommended for pruning cuts. I've seen them pruned back to a trunk with a few short branches. As they shoot the new branches are thinned out to open the tree up to sunlight and air movement. Another pruning method is "hedging". That's where you prune back each side of the tree to little more than trunk width and your rows end up like walls of mangos. This allows the sun right in and more rows of trees per unit of area. That effectively gives you more roots per tree mass, better feeding produces more fruit.
Such a wealth of info - thanks so much Tropicbreeze!
Hikaicharlie, I wonder if the rainy, humid winter we had is the problem with your fruit set, as Tropicbreeze said? My trees often have a second flowering and set another lot of fruit- do yours?