The world-famous Devgad and Ratnagiri alphonso mango on table is a real treat. Its beautiful slice, aroma and divine taste one cherishes for years. This fruit is a produce of konkan region in Maharashtra. Ratnagiri and Devgad are the two places from where this alphonso mango best variety comes from. While this mango variety is unique and known as king of mangoes, it requires lot of efforts and expenses throughout year to maintain healthy orchards.
A local geography and climate along with soil condition plays important role while it comes to the natural parameters. The cultivation on the fertile land gives good yield to the farmers and for infertile land they need to dress the layer to a required depth and put bed of fertile soil. This is sometimes alternate year activity to add fertile soil along with manure.
The graft saplings which are around couple of years old are planted in a pit and refilled with soil mixed of organic manure. While manures are added, the water intake (shimpane)also to be balanced. Organic manures such as cow dung and urine, seafood, beach vines are good source of nutrients. Thus, the pit is full enough to provide nutritional values to mango tree. This activity is done every year to provide manure to the tree. The small trench is dug around the tree and all these organic manures are spread and mixed. In summer time for initial 2 to 3 years manual watering is required to these plants. Once plants are grown, the manure are given just before monsoon especially before the heavy rain spell period.
The monsoon rains and winds are so heavy in konkan that, the plants are supported with the support sticks to avoid any bending. Once they stand on their own firmly then external supports can be removed. Once the trees grown big enough to yield alphonso, the branches are supported to take additional weight of mangoes.
During winter, when it flowers bloom, lot of harmful insects are attracted towards flowers and destroy them. So, it’s important to avoid such attacks to save the fruits. The special herbs smoke, fly traps is a well followed method to address this issue. Further for heavy attack of insects, the natural pesticide sprays such as cow urine mixed with herbs extract to keep flies away. The spray cycles are depending upon intensity of attacks of pests. Friends of farmer – Birds, red ants and few lizards are also helping farmers to control the pests attack in alphonso mango orchards.
As not all flowers are being converted into fruits, it’s necessary to look for the branches which will have the optimum yield. The branches shook so that unwanted and weak flowers and immature tiny weak fruit sets are fallen down. This is essential as it also consumes nutrients which otherwise a deficit for the quality fruit to grow to its full size. At the harvest time, tonic boosters like buttermilk water are spread over trees and if its excess summer heat sometimes watering is done whenever needed to avoid thermal shock to the trees.
It’s a year-round maintenance schedule for any Devgad or Ratnagiri alphonso mango orchard and we take rigours efforts in our orchards since 1890.Our alphonso mango fruits are available in summer season from March to June every year and you can order them on www.alphonsomangoes.online
