Day three of mango grafting. What the trees are telling us.
Three days into the second economic-tree planting cohort at Mankrong, two patterns in the soil have already made themselves plain. Neither of them is a surprise to the farmers here. Both of them are the reason we plant.
The first is loss. Where cassava has been mono-cropped for four seasons running, the topsoil reads like sand washed thin — pale, loose, and quick to give up its water to the afternoon sun. You do not need an instrument to see it. You need only to press your thumb into the ground and feel how little of it holds together.
What we are watching: sapling mortality at week six, and soil-moisture levels at the edge of the swale where the land begins to fall away.
The second pattern is memory. On the two farms where an older intercrop was never fully abandoned — a maize-and-bean stand kept going out of habit more than design — the ground is darker, and it holds. These are not large plots. But they are a quiet argument, made in soil, for everything we are here to advocate.
The mango graft itself is durable. Keitt is a forgiving variety, and the grafting hands here are steady. The tree is not the question. The land underneath it is the question, and it is the question we will keep returning to through week eight, when the cover-crop trial begins.
We will report what the ground tells us.