As you all know mango season in Florida in many areas is looking to be a huge success. I have many trees holding fruit that had not held much in the past and some of my regular producers are holding more fruit than I have seen in past seasons. Great blessings, yes?
I was out this morning and heard a loud crack. I didn't know where it came from but was within minutes, informed by the spouse that a branch just fell off one of my mango trees.
I checked and and it wasn't one, but two, and they were small branches but major trunks; laden with mango. Both had failed at the exact same point and were laying on the ground (though still attached to the tree. I will cut them off later today.
I have paid attention to several branches, watching them, and gaging if they could hold the weight, these two were not on my radar. They were thick branches that should not break under the weight, What I didn't factor was torque. Both branches came off the main leader at the same location (it was a single branch that had split into two branches a long time ago and both had grown well) and were being twisted away from each other (not pulled down). Well, they split. For the engineers in the room, you might want to think in terms of tensile strength, compressive strength, bending, stiffness, modulus of rupture and elasticity and so on. For the rest of us , think a force applied across the grain or along the grain. Had this been the weight pulling down (bending - force perpendicular to the grain), I bet these branches laugh all the way through the season holing on to all the mango. This force unfortunately was applied along the grain, this is how you split wood because it is easier once you get it started. The torque essentially pulled the branches apart, starting from where they had split to two branches back in the day.
So I seem to not be distraught, I am not. It is a lot of mango to loose but think, perhaps nature was doing what I should have done, pruned the tree and thinned the fruit, so the rest of the fruits will be better. Now I just need to clean the wound and take care of the rest of the tree, I just wasn't planning to remove about a quarter of the canopy on that one tree..