I recently had the chance to visit Dr. Alfred Villarico’s mangosteen farm in Kidapawan.
This farm is more than 80 acres with many of the trees planted decades ago.
You can see from the picture the trees are quite large and each tree produces MANY mangosteens.
It is likely that each tree is producing 1,000 to 3,000 or more mangosteens, however, it will depend on the size and age of the tree.
This is early September and this year it was closer to the end of the harvest, however, there were still quite a few mangosteens left over.
You can see from a map and the GPS image below that Kidapawan is near Mt. Apo and that we are almost 1600 feet above sea level.
In some of the pictures you can see that we marked off some trees and we are planning to collect from these same trees in the future.
By doing this we can begin to understand how the mangosteen changes during the harvest period.
In addition, we can compare the fruit year after year and see how similar or different the fruit is over time when looking at the nutrient content.
The fruit is actually not that big – you could easily fit 3 or 4 in your hand at once.
This mangosteen needs some more time to ripen up and get that rich dark purple color on the outside.
You can see there is quite a few mangosteens that can come from a tree during the harvest.
