Mangoes galore

Mango Tree by Robin Jones

We have a mango tree on the strip of grass that is our garden. We waited until they began to yellow and finally yesterday we had our first mangoes from our tree. We were ready. The day before we had been to the basket seller near J's office and bought, for the princely sum of 1USD, a mango stick.



A long bamboo pole (that this street seller is carrying, along with feather dusters, on his bicycle)that has had one end split and cut into strips and bent to form a collection basket. There is a gap on one side for the mango you are reaping to slip into. One (hopefully) quick tug gives you an unbruised freed mango.


Cambodian Green Mango Salad by Silly Jilly from Flickr

South East Asians eat green mangoes too so the wait was pretty hard for our driver and guard. By the time they were ready the whole street side (considered the public side) of the tree had already been harvested.

This is not the first time we have had a mango tree in our yard. In samoa the tree was about twice the size of our house and we had to share the mangoes with these guys



Do you need a closer look?


From here

They are actually quite cute with bearlike faces and a shy disposition and of course they are vegetarians. They launched raids on the mangoes as soon as the sun went down flying down from the hills in groups of five or six or more. We used to like lying on our backs in the pool to watch their nightly migration to our garden. We would hear them fight and squabble and then the inevitable thud as the precious cargo was dropped. In the morning the ground was usually littered with mangoes slashed with wolverine claw marks.

Cambodia has fruit bats too but they have yet to discover our tree.