You twisted my arm

(View from the front of our house. The tree is an easy 20' tall)

Unfortunately, I don't really eat mangoes. Maybe one or two here and there, but I'm certainly not a connoisseur. However, we happen to have a ginormous Mango tree in our backyard. The tree is very nice, and provides fantastic shade. For the last 2 years, it has produced a combined total of about 12 mangoes. For the last 2 years, we've been hearing legends about how productive and tasty this tree is.

We did 2 things this year that seemed to change things. First, we pruned the tree. Second, we installed gutters along the roofline under the tree. Basically, we pissed the tree off, and then we taunted it.

First came the flowers. They were tiny, but they were everywhere. Imagine what a big black trash bag 1/2 full of wet Grape Nuts feels like and you'll kind of understand what I had to climb on the roof and clean out of the brand new gutters for about a month.

The mangoes appeared slowly, and the anticipation built. We watched them get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, but they still weren't getting ripe yet. It took weeks before that started happening. Once it did, we realized that there were still new ones growing every day. It got to a point that, no matter how many fell, the tree looked a little more full each day. At the pinnacle of production (about 3 weeks ago) we would have about 5-10 mangoes fall down every hour. I never appreciated just how much fruit weighs. We couldn't load the trash or green waste cans more than about a foot deep or else they were simply too heavy to roll to the curb!

Fortunately we have the best-tasting mangoes that apparently everyone has ever tasted. This helped us offload the hundreds upon hundreds of them. I hate to see good food go to waste, so they got distributed at work, to family friends, to the kids' teachers and classmates, and door-to-door to all of our neighbor's houses. If it wasn't rotten or split open, someone probably took it off our hands.

The gutters look like they've been in a demolition derby. Having softball-sized fruit fall or roll into them will do that. *sigh*



(This is about 1 day's worth of mangoes, not counting the others on the roof and/or in the gutters)