Most summers, Carrie Speltz wakes in the middle of the night to mangoes raining on her roof.
“It always sounds like bowling balls,” she said.
Speltz’s tree produced more than 2,000 mangoes last year. The tropical fragrance perfumed her house from May through July. She made hundreds of jars of mango jam and loaves of mango bread and sold them to friends and family.
This mango season, her decades-old, 30-foot-tall tree has been silent. She has seen 20, maybe 30, in her yard. Only eight were edible. The others were lost to squirrels and ants, or shattered on the ground when they fell.
Across Tampa Bay, mango growers who last year saw fruit littering streets, piling up in donation boxes and filling freezers to the brim are seeing the opposite now.
There’s a few reasons for the poor harvest, said Jeff Wasielewski, who works at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. Mango trees bloom in the winter after a cold front, he said. But this season, lots of rain after each cold front caused a fungus to form on the budding fruits.
The rain and wind also knocked mango flowers and small fruits off trees. And, last year’s excessive crop could be contributing to this year’s slow one.
“There were a lot of factors basically causing a perfect storm,” Wasielewski said.
A mango haven
Hundreds of mango varieties grow in Florida. It’s a mango haven because of the heat and humidity.
Florida produces about 60 million pounds of mangoes annually. It’s a crop worth about $20 million, per the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
While mangoes are grown commercially in Dade, Lee and Palm Beach counties, they’re also found in many yards across South Florida, according to University of Florida research.
Speltz doesn’t know what type of mango tree she has; it was in the yard when she moved into her house in 2018. She does know that they grow from the size of a key to bigger than a softball. Their color turns from green to yellow. They are juicy and full of fiber.
“It’s almost like a puree when you open it up,” she said. “It just kind of explodes in your hands.”
Jené VanButsel, who owns Jené’s Tropicals in St. Petersburg, sells around 50 mango tree varieties from around the world, including Thailand, India, Haiti, Jamaica.
A bad season does not affect the sale of her trees. But she has a 60-foot-tall Valencia Pride tree on her store’s property that has produced maybe five or 10 edible mangoes.
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Explore all your options“Normally, I have hundreds, and they hang like Christmas ornaments,” she said.
Most mangoes sold in supermarkets and grocery stores are imported from South America and the Caribbean, according to the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden in Coral Gables.
Lynne Randall, one of VanButsel’s customers, said you can’t compare homegrown and store-bought mangoes. Store-bought mangoes are stringier, have less variety and aren’t as sweet because of how they’re transported and stored, she said.
“It’s night and day,” she said. “The only way to get a homegrown mango is to grow it, or have a friend that grows it, or to go to a local fruit stand that sells homegrown mangoes.”
That’s not cheap. Lev Pasikhov works with local farmers and growers to harvest and sell fruit through the Florida Fruit Cooperative. He said prices of local mangoes already increased after the pandemic and agricultural impacts of Hurricane Ian.
A bad season hasn’t helped. Pasikhov, who sells mangoes in St. Petersburg most weekends at the Saturday Morning Market, said his prices are about 50% higher this season.
“After a year like last year, when people are giving mangoes away, it’s hard to pay $7 for a mango,” he said.
Preparing for next year’s crop
Randall has 26 mango trees in her backyard in South St. Petersburg.
She has every kind of mango you could think of. Glenn, Carrie, Angie, Fairchild, Rosigold — the list goes on. Her favorites are varieties she grows in her yard that taste like lemon meringue, pineapple or orange sherbet.
Randall, 71, moved to Hollywood from New Jersey when she was 15. Her favorite memory from those years is picking a laundry basket’s worth of mangoes from the tree every day in the summer. It’s what inspired her to cultivate her own mango grove over the past two decades.
“It becomes an obsession,” she said. “It’s hard to control.”
Over the past 10 years, she has tracked her mango production on a chart.
Her trees produced about 3,200 mangoes last year. This year? Fewer than 330.
“They’re just empty,” she said. “There’s nothing on the trees.”
Last year was the best year her mango trees have ever had, producing double what they usually do.
She hosted mango tastings and mango-themed parties for friends. She froze them, dehydrated them, sold them. And she still had enough to give away a 5-gallon bucket every day for weeks.
Randall, who is retired, normally fills her days during mango season picking the fruits, storing them and cooking with them. Now, she’s spending that time pruning and fertilizing her trees. She’s even trying to create hybrid mangoes by grafting branches of different types onto her Cogshall tree.
If her mangoes come back next year, she’ll be ready.
