Windfalls and Long Narrow Orchards

I only recently discovered that the big tree in my yard was a mango.  I know the trees of the temperate zones. The tropics are more often a mystery to me. The presence of mangoes is a dead giveaway, however.

Mangoes are attractive trees and evidently well suited to the Brasilia climate, since they don’t seem to provide them with any particular care. I wonder what will happen to all that fruit.They sell mangoes in the stores, but people could just as easily pick their own on the way home. I have also seen bananas, dates and other sorts of productive trees and herbs. There are also lots of fruits I don’t recognize. For example, I have no idea about that tree is pictured at the bottom. It is almost like a joke, like somebody hung some footballs on the tree. I don’t know whether or not they are edible. The mango tree in my yard would seem to have enough fruit to satisfy my needs plus those of a dozen other people. Of course, I don’t really like mangoes very much.  What I need is a Coke Zero tree or maybe a Hershey tree. 

When the mangoes will be ready or how long the season will last, I don’t know. About mangoes in general, I don’t know much. Maybe it is like applies, zucchini or tomatoes back home.  For a couple months you just have much more than you can possibly use and then nothing again for eight months.

The historian Arnold Toynbee used to talk about how civilizations originated at the sweet spot where there was challenge enough to make hard work necessary but not so much that it didn’t pay off. I bet you could mostly feed yourself from a garden, if you liked tropical fruit and vegetables. It would take some work, but not too much. I planted some watermelons and tomatoes and I will see how that goes. You could probably live the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, well at least the gatherer part, just by walking around. I think about that as I walk back from the store, past all the fruit that just falls on the ground.

The pictures show the mango tree in my yard and the trees on the median. Below are lizards trying to absorb the warmth of the sun through the clouds. There are lots of lizards around. I don’t know what they eat or much about them at all.  Maybe they eat fruit. This is about as big as they get.