by Amanda Rose Newton
Despite the bounty of how-to guides for growing your own tropical fruit living on the internet, in books, and in fact sheets, information on when exactly you are supposed to pick it doesn’t surface as easily.
When you pick fruit DOES matter, and it’s not the same for each type. Some fruit you can get away with picking early and letting it ripen on your kitchen counter with great success. Others will never meet their full potential if picked too soon.
Bananas, mangos, avocados, and papayas are some of the best sellers in garden centers throughout Florida for good reason. Plant a seedling once and you will likely have more than you can eat in a single season. Here, we discuss the best time to harvest each to make sure you enjoy your fruit at its absolute peak.
Bananas
Bananas (and another member of this club, the papaya) are not actually trees but large herbaceous plants. They have suckers that continuously pop up with the oldest sucker replacing the flowering banana once it dies.
Bananas, which are actually berries, take about 80 days to ripen once you see the flower. The nice thing about bananas is that you do not have to wait for them to all ripen to harvest them. What you want to look for is plumpness and no remaining flower remnants. Usually, the bananas towards the top will turn yellow before the rest of the bunch.
Speaking from experience, you may want to not wear your Sunday best when cutting banana clusters down from the plant. They release a lot of sap, so be prepared!
Papayas
The other nontree that gets called a tree, the papaya, is notorious for being tricky to figure out if it’s ready yet. A papaya plant takes 6 or so months to mature, maybe more if you are further north in the county. Once mature, the flower will pop up in early spring and will go on to produce up to 100 (100!!!) fruits through the summer.
Papayas start off green, so once you start noticing your fruit turn a little orange/red/yellow the time is coming! As soon as the color is about 3/4ths of the surface of the fruit, that is the perfect time to harvest for the best, sweet taste.
Harvesting is straightforward for papayas. You just need decent pruners, and maybe a ladder if your tree is tall. Snip it close to the fruit and you are good to go.
Mangoes
Move over, citrus! Mangoes are quickly becoming the fruit of Florida. With its plentiful production and that it can double as a beautiful shade tree, there are lots of reasons to celebrate mangoes.
Different varieties have their origins in different parts of the world, so consult our mango info sheet to check out when the variety you have is in season. May-September is the time for mangoes!
As for harvesting, personal preference plays a role here. The ideal time to pick them is when they are firm and mature. Mature, if you are a mango, means the pointy end and the part near the stem have filled out. Color is also a tell, almost all mangoes are green when immature, and when ripe, they will be yellow or even have a slight blush.
The go-to method for picking mangoes is to pull on them gently. If it snaps off easily, then you are picking a ripe one. If it won’t release, it is not time yet. Mangoes are also on the sappy side like bananas, so to avoid that hassle, make sure you leave some of the stem intact.
Most mangoes benefit from sitting on the counter a few days after picking to get softer, however, to each their own mango.
Avocados
Like mangoes, avocados make for a gorgeous shade tree. Avocados were saved for last as they are perhaps the trickiest of the tropical bunch to know if they are ripe or not.
It also depends on which kind of avocado we are talking about. Unlike the others on the list, avocados are best picked when NOT ripe. Hanging out in your kitchen does them good, and you are able to consume them at the firmness you like.
In some ways, picking them before ripened makes harvesting a little simpler. The ideal scenario is to keep an eye on your tree and pick the larger ones first. However, the longer the fruit is left on the tree, the greater the oil content and thus, the richer the taste. If you leave the fruit on the tree too long, the oils will become rancid making for one bowl of guacamole that is not getting touched at your next get-together.
Picking them when they are under-ripe is also problematic for the same reason. They will not have time to develop the oily deliciousness that makes avocados heaven. So, again, the ideal scenario is to watch your avocados and pick them when full and mature. If you can’t harvest immediately, they can hang out on the tree awhile, but don’t let awhile turn into rancid oil.
If you have a 60-foot avocado tree, invest in a fruit picker. Worth it.
Summer is made better by the taste of the tropics. Celebrate by growing your own tropical fruit and harvesting it at its peak.
