One of the powerful unique selling points of our home in Sind Society are definitely the two large mango trees in our wonderful garden. The mangoes started to fall down a few weeks ago, resulting in a lot of squashed mangoes in our garden, a heavens playground for the surrounding birds. I like regional and seasonal products. There is no real use in eating strawberry’s in wintertime and back home – in the Netherlands – I always look forward in buying the first fresh lambs of the season, somewhere during spring. Another thing back home is the asparagus season, which starts somewhere in April and only lasts for two months. Dutch asparagus is amazing! I also noticed some seasonal food in India and mangoes are a very good example of this. They started to arrive a few weeks back, at the beginning of April. A lot of people already prepared me with this happy event: ‘try to eat the Alphonso mangoes, they are the best’. And yes, I tried some mangoes and I’m hooked. It is a wonderful product of nature. In addition to that: I never knew that there are so many varieties in mangoes, I thought that there only were mangoes, ripe or raw. That is in fact not true, because you will see a lot of them. The Alphonso mangoes are of course famous, but they also come in some varieties (Ratnagiri, Badami). But there is more, the Kesar-mango is also very famous, and don’t forget the Daseri, grown and popular in North-India Also very interesting to observe and understand: the mango-value chain. You will – of course – find your mangoes at your super market and at the local vegetable or fruit vendors in the streets. They offer melons, banana’s, apples and during mango season they also sell….mango’s. But I was surprised to see special mango-outlets everywhere. It’s usually not larger than a tent, packed with boxes of fresh mangoes, in some cases in various varieties but more often just in one. The mango is definitely on our menu for the upcoming weeks. And until our own mango tree will start to harvest; we will source our mangoes from the streets of Pune!