FIELD NOTES / NO. 005
Wade's Backyard
Various Fruit from Wade's Yard
Wade, 2026
This July, I spent time in Wade’s backyard in Nassau talking about mangoes, grafting and the food-security problem facing The Bahamas.
Wade had more than fifty-two varieties of mango growing in his yard. Seeing that diversity in one place made grafting feel like more than an agricultural technique. It became a practical model for how we might create a more stable and resilient food supply.
The mangoes were only one part of what was there. His yard also held bananas, pomegranates, pineapples, dillies, soursops, dragon fruit, passion fruit, sea grapes, several varieties of guineps and jujus, what seemed like every variety of plum, and an entire coconut grove.
Everywhere I looked, there was evidence of abundance. The backyard felt less like a garden than a living archive and a small-scale food system.
Grafting involves joining a cutting from one tree to the rooted section of another. It allows growers to preserve successful varieties, cultivate several varieties within a relatively small space, and extend the growing season by selecting mangoes that ripen at different times. It is a way of protecting both biodiversity and knowledge.
I learned budding as a teenager. Budding is a form of grafting in which a single bud is joined to a compatible rootstock. Standing with Wade brought that experience back to me.
It reminded me that this knowledge is neither foreign nor new. Many of us have encountered it through our families, our neighbors or our own yards; we may simply not have understood its larger significance.
The backyard was not simply a backdrop to our lives. It was a pantry, a place of exchange and a kind of classroom.
The Bahamas imports close to 90 percent of its food. At the same time, our economy remains heavily reliant on tourism. More than nine million visitors arrive on our shores annually, yet much of the fruit and vegetables served to them—and to Bahamians—is imported.
There is something fundamentally upside down about living on fertile land, surrounded by a climate capable of producing extraordinary food, while depending so heavily on other countries to feed us.
As a child growing up in Nassau, we had six or seven mango trees in our yard at any given time. Most of my friends had mango trees as well. Fruit was picked, eaten, shared with neighbors and carried from one household to another.
That is why it sometimes breaks my heart to walk into a grocery store in The Bahamas during mango season and struggle to find a locally grown mango. We have the trees, the climate, the knowledge and the demand. What we are missing is the infrastructure that connects those things.
Grafting alone will not solve food insecurity. But it can be an important part of a larger system: community nurseries that preserve and distribute local varieties; agricultural programs that teach young people how to graft, bud, plant, harvest and care for trees; better distribution between growers, grocery stores, restaurants and hotels; and meaningful purchasing commitments from the tourism industry.
Wade's Backyard, 2026
Imagine if every school maintained a fruit-tree nursery. Imagine if young Bahamians learned grafting and budding as ordinary life skills. Imagine if hotels and restaurants committed to buying Bahamian produce before importing it. Imagine if the fruit trees already growing in our backyards became part of an organized local food network.
As I think through the fundamentals of BASEC and what we want to build as a cultural platform, sustainability cannot be separate from culture. Culture exists in what we grow, what we eat, what we share and what one generation teaches the next.
Wade’s backyard is therefore more than a backyard. It is a living archive containing dozens of mango varieties, an extraordinary range of other fruit, and years of observation and knowledge that could help us imagine a different future.
The question is not simply whether The Bahamas can grow more food. The question is whether we can create the conditions that allow what we grow to reach our homes, schools, grocery stores, hotels and visitors.
Perhaps that future begins in the backyard—with a tree, a branch, a bud and knowledge passed carefully from one pair of hands to another.