NUTS & BOLTS : The Juicy Details of an Exotic Love Affair

There’s a little stand on the plaza at the end of Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles that sells mangoes on a stick.

The owner sells all kinds of other fruit, too--really great fruit like fresh pineapple and plates of assorted melon slices--but he won me as a lifelong customer with the mango on a stick.

I usually eat myself into shock when I go to Olvera Street, pounding down gallons of tomatillo salsa with maybe a side trip to Philippe’s for a beef dip and two lemonades, but I always leave room for the mango on a stick, even if I have to eat it on the train back to Santa Ana.

Mangoes are surely the world’s juiciest fruit, and they provide enough sucrose to make you forswear Snickers bars for eternity. And you don’t nibble them. You chomp them down lustily. If you do it right, there should be a fine mist of mango juice radiating around your face. You can get compulsive about it.

It would be a juicier, sweeter life if only people could walk out their back door and find that the Mango Fairy had left them a bumper crop.

Meet Jessica Leaf, the Mango Fairy.

Actually, Leaf doesn’t limit her magic only to mangoes. She owns a business in Vista called the Exotica Seed Company and Rare Fruit Nursery and she can sell you not only mangoes, but a tropical fruit that she says tastes like chocolate mousse.

She can also sell you the fruit that made up the entire contents of that El Stupendo fruit basket you won in that lambada contest in Cancun. Guavas, papayas, pineapples, passion fruit, figs, kiwis, Asian pears, Satsuma tangerines, litchi--the kind of succulent chow you have fed to you in lagoon-side cabanas by the Laker Girls.

But Leaf doesn’t just sell you the fruit. She also sells you the attached tree or bush or other parent plant so that you can take it home and produce your own bumper crop of exotic fruit in your back yard, atrium or balcony. Because the best news of all is that you don’t have to shell out for an exhausting week at Club Med to get this stuff. In Orange County, we have enough different microclimates to grow anything from Andean papayas to--yes!--mangoes.

Leaf, who has been in the exotic fruit business for 50 years, said she has a “big customer base” in Orange County, partly as a result of a hankering many members of the Asian community get for the tropical fruit of their homelands. Elsewhere in the county, said Leaf, exotic fruit as a back-yard crop is not as well-known.

“I think people don’t know that they can grow them,” Leaf said. “Also, there’s a whole body of ornamentals that people use in landscaping but they don’t use (exotic fruits) because unless they’ve traveled and seen them, they don’t think they can grow here.”

But, she said, you can grow a sapote plant about as easily as you can cultivate a lemon tree. It’s one of her most popular plants, she says, and she has no trouble working up enthusiasm for it.

“In the beach communities where you don’t have a frost problem, there’s a whole wonderful world of sapotes you can have,” she said. “The only thing is, you don’t want to grow them over a sidewalk, because they produce a tremendous amount of fruit and you don’t want it dropping on the sidewalk.”

(This sounds like a manifestation of the Falling Mango Effect. I observed it--smelled it, actually--after driving into a huge grove of mangoes on Kauai in July, when the fruit had ripened and many had dropped from the tree. Split mangoes in tropical weather start fermenting almost instantly and the result is an olfactory nightmare.)

The sapotes come in several varieties, said Leaf. The white ones have “a kind of peach-like custard flavor.” The black ones taste like “chocolate mousse in a cup.”

If that doesn’t sound appealing, you can go for various varieties of pineapple, some 25 different kinds of bananas (one is known by the name ice cream, another is called Java blue, and there are others, like the Iho Lena and the Raja Puri, that make you want to start flying west instantly), almost the same number of different figs and guavas, several kinds of papayas (including the babaco papaya that grows in the Andes), Surinam cherries, kiwis, mulberries, star fruit, purple passion fruit and--yes!--mangoes.

But let’s say you’re not the exotic type. Or let’s say you’ve just returned from your yearly three-week Gaugin-a-thon in Tahiti and if you look at another passion fruit you’re going to need tropical-strength Pepto-Bismol in the large economy size. An apple, though, sounds like just the thing. Leaf can sell you more than 10 varieties, including my pick for the apple hall of fame, the Arkansas Black.

Leaf sells the fruit in 1- and 5-gallon specimen boxes and you can buy, for instance, a young babaco papaya plant for about $15 and wait a few months for the fruit or you can have a more mature one, already bearing fruit, for $50 to $75, said Leaf.

“It depends on whether you want instant fruit or if you want to wait a bit,” she said.

These plants, said Leaf, don’t have to be hovered over like hothouse orchids. Mangoes, for example, “do well in containers. They’re slow growing and they’re great patio plants for cold areas. When it gets too cold outside, you can wheel them inside. They’re beautiful trees and they will grow in the same conditions avocados will grow.”

This will be good news to people who live in the north-central part of the county, where avocados have been grown in large quantities. And, naturally, it’s great news to us mango fans. Now, if we can find a way to get them to grow prepeeled and on a stick--we can call it the Olvera Mango--I’ll die happy.