Mango Guild

A tropical food forest for frost-free climates, USDA zones 10 to 11, built the way the wet tropics build them: fast, layered and fed by chop and drop. Mango is the centrepiece. Gliricidia is the secondary, a nitrogen-fixing tree cut back hard three or four times a year so its leaves feed everything below it; pigeon pea does the same job at shrub height. Banana fills the gaps while the mango is young and gives its own crop and mulch. Katuk and moringa are the perennial greens, turmeric and ginger the rhizosphere, and lemongrass rings the outer edge as a pest barrier. Passion fruit climbs the gliricidia, pineapple takes the sunny margin, and gotu kola and peanut close the ground, one shading the soil and the other fixing nitrogen. Nothing here is ever left bare.