For a general guide for mangoes.
Taiwan has MANY individual mango variety collectors, including myself. Most are in Tianan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung. Those more special varieties, taht actually tase good and arent poisonous, are available in lower quantities, meaning online in chinese or you know someone.
There are some commercial varieties here, mostly based off of foreign varieties such as “Ai Wen”, “yu Wen” (great), “jin Huang” <–crap, “elephant”, forgot the chinese name, “Tu Man Guo” - this one is basically a wild mango. here they use it unripe a lot as a sour mango, its not bad if you like sour. but its not a mango as you might expect, common in the south.
some things to consider:
Mango has a lot of pests, especially fly larvae. they are sprayed a LOT, even by Taiwan standards!!!
Older (=cheaper) varieties are not bagged because they are generally too tall. high value varieties are grown short and can be bagged. they are still sprayed. Same goes for most tree fruit here.
Their flowers drop so there is a lot of spraying done for that. google anthracnose
So although a mango tree might have a billion flowers, some years there might be ZERO fruit. unless sprayed. its a real bitch and why in Taiwan you probably dont see organic mango locally produced (also land price related).
There is the weather issue. In Taiwans Fruit Bowl, especially weather patterns are CRAZY now. leaning more to short heavy rains and overall lack of rain. Read twice if dont get it.
So we have massive rains which damage virtually all things, especially exotic species like mango. We also have extended dry spell in the south, which is where mango has an advantage as its ok with less rain relatively speaking. I havent irrigated my mango variety orchard in 10 years, though i setup the soil properly in the beginning. But they are solid trees. Just not solid flowers!
Lastly. there are a LOT of varieties, and each has its preferences on temps, humidity, water, soil ph and if its here or not (hence teh low quantity of decent varieties here, our weather in taiwan is very extreme).
Usually the earliest possible for mango is the Tu Mango, gren sour wild typ, November, usually January. They spray it to force early flowering and harvest though.
Most of the nice big juicy ones that taste acceptable are summer harvest. but there is a simple guide on “early, mid, late” harvest varieties.
your mango shops have to deal with all this biological, geographical and climatological (real word?) realities from the farmers perspective, check the price points. then they enter their own world of labor to harvest things (not a lot of local taiwanese are willing to work anymore, so when foreign labor is punished by the gov many agricultural crops are phucked). They also have to transport things, which is a cost and in peak season need to wait, which sometimes biology wont cooperate with). worst off they have to deal with Taiwanese agents and brokers which are in general a friggen nightmare to deal wih. Then they have to store it before sale, which for mangoes if your lucky is 2 weeks. in this last case they only sell varieties that can be picked green and stored, then artificially rippened with gas when wanting to sell it. event hen they might on average have a 50% loss that doesnt get sold, what then? that means the price has to drop 50% (or whatever) and the negotiations begin.
Agriculture sucks in taiwan because people in generally are really damn “motorcycle” and there is a very small market with a very extreme environment. That is likely why when you ask a farmer about why they dont grow organic they get a little red…
we got to work back from the customer, to fix the farming catastrophe here. Not convince the farm when every step of the way is against them.
so ya, sorry i was just writting emails to a few people about this topic and im in my “agriculture fury mode”, but thats why you dont always get your mango when you want it. Importing has a lot of disease, bad idea for a mango producing country. Thats why you dont see imported mangosteen, rambutan and a few other things here anymore.
amazing info.