Anthracnose, and the wet spring
A mango in Central Florida has one recurring enemy and it arrives with rain during flowering. Anthracnose blackens the flower panicles, the fruit drops at marble size, and you get nothing from a tree that looked like it was going to give you fifty mangoes. Some years it is the weather and there is nothing to be done. Most years there is quite a lot.
Plant it where air moves, not in a sheltered corner against a fence. Never water a mango overhead while it is in flower, which is the one irrigation mistake that reliably costs a crop. Thin the interior so the canopy dries after a storm. And choose a variety with some resistance: Glenn and Carrie both hold up better than most, which is part of why we grow them.
Keep it small, and prune at the right moment
An unpruned seedling mango reaches forty feet and fruits where you will never get to it. A grafted dwarf such as Pickering or Cogshall, topped at eight to ten feet and kept there, gives you the same fruit within reach of the ground.
The timing matters more than the technique. Prune immediately after harvest, in July or August. That gives the tree time to push a new flush and harden it before winter, and that flush is what carries next spring's flowers. Prune in autumn and you get soft growth going into a freeze; prune in winter or spring and you cut off the crop.
Feeding and the September rule
Three or four feeds across the warm half of the year, and then stop. September is the last one. A mango fed in October puts out a flush of soft growth in November that a December freeze burns straight off, and that damage is self-inflicted.
Young grafted trees want protecting for their first two or three winters, particularly at the graft union. After that, a mature mango in Lake County will take a light frost on the leaves and carry on.
