It is that time again that every ounce of effort goes into our mango harvest. There are over 300 mango trees on our farm , and because everything is organically grown and we are a small scale mango farm, there are no harvesting equipment as you could expect to find on larger farms, so everything is done manual by myself and two farm workers.
During the past week and a half the three of us managed to collect just over 4 tons of green fruit; trust me, easier said than done!!

Every year the majority of our fruit is picked green and taken to the local market for the production of achar, and all a taken into account this year was a relatively good harvest. the fruit that remain on the trees will be left to mature and ripen before being picked for own consumption of friends and family as fresh fruits jams and preserves.

This year however I am trying my hand at making my won atchar:

For this I took about 2kg of fresh green fruit - the trick here is to pick the fruit very young, before the pip on the inside starts to harden.

I then diced these fruit pip and all into bite sized pieces before putting in a generous helping of achar spice (a combination of dried crushed chilies, fenukreek, danja, masala and a whole bunch of other Indian spices and seasoning) then covering the lot with red achar oil.

After standing for a few hours you could already see the color of the fruit change:

This mixture is left to stand for two weeks mixing it once or twice daily. And this should be the end result if I did this right:

The great thing about achar is because there is no cooking involved, all the nutritional value of the mangoes and spice is left in tack, and the divine side pickle dish is quite low in calories, however the sodium level is quite high, so don't eat too much - if you can!!