Visiting my parents property in Central Florida, they have some enormous mango trees. My mother grew up in South America, and her love of mangoes was passed down to her children. Unfortunately, we don’t know which mango is which, but we know that they are large and without strings, the two things that matter when picking a mango tree.
My dad also loved mangoes, taught me as a fairly young child about air layering and grafting mango trees. He also showed me how to graft orange trees and we had a ball in the yard putting different varieties on one tree. I’d spend hours in the yard just starting oranges from scratch and putting other oranges on them… but I digress.
Grafting and air-layering are different, but produce similar results.
- Grafting is taking a bud from a delicious mango tree, and grafting it onto a mango seedling, to ensure the mango it produces is a good one.
- Air-layering is when you gently trim the bark of a cutting size limb of a tree, wrap it with wet sphagnum moss and plastic wrap, and tie the ends of it tightly to keep the moisture in the wrap so that roots will grow on the limb before cutting off the limb and planting it.
The reason you would want to graft a tree, is so that the fruit you know and love would definitely be produced from the tree you spent time caring and feeding. For many varieties of plants and trees, you don’t know what kind of fruit you will get from a seedling, and this ensures you get what you want. So I wanted the large, string-less mangoes, and I had mango seedlings to graft them onto when I was visiting.
The reason you would air-layer a plant is that you can actually cut off a part of the tree, and there would be roots to give that cutting a good start when potted. So I also air-layered a few limbs of the mango tree, as my dad had taught me to do.
On a previous visit, I noticed a large tree, with smaller mangoes on it, that had several young trees growing under it, likely due to the mangoes falling and no one there to hear them. It is nice to have so many plants on a single property to test on with old grafting and air-layering skills, and since my siblings aren’t overly concerned with mango seedlings, they don’t have an issue with me grafting.
Definitely need to go visit again so I can see if any of these ‘took’.