Pickering Mango Grow Guide

Whenever a family member or friend asks me what their first mango tree should be, I almost always respond with “Pickering.” That is because the Pickering Mango is very productive early in its life, is easy to keep small, and has a delicious classic mango flavor.

Whether you are buying your first mango tree (or maybe looking to add mango number 9 to your yard 😉), a Pickering Mango is a great choice that checks a lot of boxes.

With that being said, this grow guide will cover everything that you need to know about Pickering Mango:

Table of Contents

• Pickering Mango Tree Growth Habit & Fruit Production
• Pickering Mango Flavor Profile
• Pickering Mango Season (And When To Pick)
• Pickering Mango Disease Resistance
• Pickering Mango History
• Pickering Mango Tree For Sale (Where To Find)
• Conclusion

Pickering Mango Tree Growth Habit & Fruit Production

The Pickering Mango is considered a small-sized mango tree.

Pickering Mango Trees have a low vigor & spreading growth habit that produces a very compact and dense canopy. As a result, Pickering can realistically be kept between 5 – 10 feet tall with annual pruning. With that being said, Pickering would do very well long-term in containers and would be considered a “condo” mango.

In fact, I often associate mango container growing with Pickering Mango 😊 That is because Pickering Mango is considered a true dwarf mango cultivar and is very easy to keep at a manageable height.

Similar to Rosigold, despite being a smaller mango tree, Pickering is very productive from an early age. More specifically, Pickering’s fruit production consistently ranges from average to good. This consistent level of good fruit production makes Pickering Mango a great choice for those who want a lot of mangos from their tree ASAP!

The mangos themselves are medium-sized fruits that typically weigh between 1 – 2 lbs.

Pickering Mango Flavor Profile

Pickering Mangos are considered a Coconut Flavored Mango.

Pickering has the ability to either be a beautiful or ugly fruit. The ones that I have purchased usually will have ‘sap tears’ on a backdrop of yellow skin. However, these ‘sap tears’ are only skin deep and have no negative impacts on the fruit’s overall flavor.

The fruit’s deep yellow (borderline orange) flesh has a fiberless, smooth, and creamy texture. To be honest, it’s almost perfect because it’s deliciously creamy when eaten out of hand, yet it’s firm enough for various culinary uses, including baking.

From a flavor perspective, Pickering Mango has a very classic mango flavor. The fruit is very sweet, with each bite resembling a sweet mango candy, and it carries hints of coconut towards the end. The flavor doesn’t feature any other distinct notes like citrus, although my wife sometimes perceives a peach or apricot aftertaste rather than a coconut one.

Overall, Pickering has a predominantly mango flavor with sweetness similar to Carrie or Julie. While I personally prefer mangos with more complex flavor profiles vs the straightforward ‘mango flavor’ that dominates Pickering, I recently purchased one and plan to grow it in a container as a kind of ‘demonstration tree’ to encourage others to grow their own food 😄

Finally, it’s worth noting that Pickering Mangos produce monoembryonic seeds, which means that planting a seed from a Pickering Mango won’t yield another Pickering Mango Tree.

Pickering Mango Season (And When To Pick)

Pickering Mangos are considered a mid-season mango (June – July).

With that being said, the best time to pick Pickering Mangos are when they are mature and beginning to ripen on the tree. From a color perspective, this is when the fruit is beginning to show signs of yellow color break. Pickering is perfectly ripe when the majority of the fruit transitions to a golden yellow color.

Pickering can also develop a slight pink blush on the top of the fruit. However, it’s important to remember that the red blush on the top of the mango has nothing to do with the fruit’s ripeness. In fact, the amount of red blush that a fruit will have is dependent on the fruit’s exposure to the sun. More Sun = More Red, Less Sun = Less Red.

Aside from color, here are some additional tips to know when Pickering Mango is ready to pick (that sentence sounded like a tongue twister 😄):

• Has the fruit fattened up?
• Are there lenticels (little dots) present on the fruit?
• Is the fruit beginning to soften?
• How does the stem look? It’s it drying up near where it connects to the fruit?
• Are there beads of sap present on the fruit?
• Is the fruit’s skin beginning to stretch?

Lastly, Pickering Mango has thicker skin. This means that if the tree is kept at a manageable height through annual pruning, the fruits are less likely to get easily bruised or damaged due to fruit drop.

Pickering Mango Disease Resistance

Pickering Mango is moderately resistant to most diseases including Anthracnose and Bacterial Black Spot.

Pickering Mango History

Below is an excerpt on the history of Pickering Mango from Walter Zill’s Autobiography:

Beginning about thirty feet west of a Carrie tree in Dads Boyn-ton grove, beneath an Irwin tree, it grew unnoticed as a chance seeding until the Freeze of 1983 when it was the sole mango plant that remained with green leaves, all other trees turned brown due to temperatures below the freezing point.

…

When was about three feet high, branched, with a trunk diameter about one inch thick, my attention was again drawn to it by the many fruit it had set, they weighed perhaps 4 to 6 ounces. Fruit quality for eating was promising if they would grow larger, but I was primarily interested to learn if it would endure freezing temperature better than other varieties.

…

With that thought, and knowing the grove would be sold soon, I transplanted the seedling to the grove west of the FEC railway to observe it in coming years. Once established there the fruit grew larger, up to over 2 pounds, when less were holding relative to tree size. The name by which it is now identified came from Mr. Wayne Pickering who wanted a mango variety bearing his name. After sampling the fruit he pronounced it, “My baby”.

…

On a spreading tree with dense foliage it generously produces firm, rich tasting, fruit that many persons think resembles the Julie mango in having a hint of coconut flavor. Additional years of encountering freezing temperatures have shown no more hardiness to cold than other dense growing varieties.

Walter Zill, Maturing With Mangoes

Pickering Mango Tree For Sale (Where To Find)

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Conclusion

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If you have any questions regarding anything mentioned in this grow guide, please comment them below! This way, others can also benefit from the answer to the same question. For any other questions or growing tips that you think may be helpful, feel free to use the contact form and drop me a line.

Thank you for reading! 🙂

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