SOIL Staff Summer Project Bears Fruit
The SOIL team takes a lot of pride both in our lush office gardens and in the various plants that flourish throughout our composting sites. We love to encourage biodiversity by planting a wide variety of local species – whether that’s coconut trees, mango trees, or smaller flowery bushes like the beautiful bougainvillea seen throughout Haiti. In the backyards of our offices and across the country, these plants attract birds and insects and act as a peaceful oasis for many other species.
Each day SOIL transforms human waste into rich, organic compost and this summer our staff decided to take our dedication to composting a step further by committing to composting all of our personal food waste from our Port-au-Prince office as well. Last week we made a surprising discovery when visiting our composting bin in the back yard: mango trees! It’s mango season in Haiti and the pits from all of the delicious mangos we’ve been devouring have already transformed themselves into five small mango trees.
Because mango trees grow up to become huge and majestic trees, we can’t let them grow inside our compost bins for too much longer. We’ve decided to transplant them to our composting site just outside of the city. There they will have plenty of space to mature and hopefully provide us with delicious mangoes in the years to come. It’s blisteringly hot in Haiti right now, so we’ll keep our new trees in planters until winter arrives and we can safely transplant them.
We’ll watch our mango trees carefully as they grow, and we’ll see if our household composting bins produce any other surprising gifts in the future. Stay tuned!
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Susi Batstone
July 19, 2017 (10:45 am)
As well as your trees from mango seeds, if you want fruit it may be worth trying to get some cuttings from a very good tree to take root in your compost. Or perhaps graft onto your seedlings. The fruit yield and quality may vary from seed source.
My brother lives in the Virgin Islands and has a wonderful mango tree in his garden which is reputed to be the best mango tree on Tortola! When the house was unoccupied, locals would drive down the lane and stand on the roof of their car to pick the fruit overhanging the wall.
SOIL
August 3, 2017 (3:17 pm)
That sounds like quite the mango tree! I’ll pass along your idea for the seeds. Thanks, Susi!