When I gave a small bag of mangoes from our home garden to the newspaper boy, he smiled graciously, revealing the depth of gratitude in his heart. The solitary mango tree has been a source of happiness for our family and many others around us every summer.
It’s about 30 years old now, growing with its tall branches spreading out beyond our open terrace. We feel thrilled seeing mangoes at eye level from the terrace, giving a rare opportunity to touch and feel them.
There have been many suggestions about how to use the 300 to 400 fruits every year. We dismissed the suggestion to give the whole tree on lease to merchants as it could wipe out all the fruits in one stroke. Though fruits left half-eaten by squirrels, birds and bats may look like an avoidable waste, we are happy that our mango tree not only keeps us happy but other creations of God too.
We stopped buying jam and pickles as we started to make these with the mangoes from our garden. The greatest joy for us was in giving our friends and relatives these organic mangoes.
Though the benefits from our solitary mango tree are innumerable, it has a dark side too. The fallen leaves litter our garden every summer. The wind carries them across the fence into the neighbour’s garden, inviting occasional reproach. The greatest problem we faced year after year was in plucking the ripe fruits. When they fall on the ground, they become unfit for consumption. This means that the fruits should be carefully plucked one by one without allowing them to fall.
What I wished was a method to pluck the fruits one by one. My son living in the U.S. gave a good solution. He bought for us a small metal basket used for plucking apples. I tied this to a long PVC pole and started to pluck even those fruits at a great height. All my efforts to get one like this for my friends here failed as I did not see any such simple device in our hardware stores.
Having such fruit-bearing trees at home is a blessing indeed. They give us organic fruits at no cost and little effort. The biggest joy is in eating the fruits from your own home garden. With a couple of trees at home like this, one can fully use the time productively in the garden. A fruit-bearing tree is a special gift which really has no parallel.
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