We grew kiwis at home for over a decade, yet never realized their true worth
My home is in Songbai, in the mountains of the mysterious Xiangxi! Songbai is located in the southeast of Yongshun County, Xiangxi, at the foot of Yangfeng Mountain, surrounded by mountains on three sides, in the Wuling Mountain range, a high-altitude cold mountain area. The people who live here make their homes along the mountains. Apart from farming a few mu of rice paddies, they grow corn and potatoes on the mountain slopes, and there is no other income. Every day they live by rising at sunrise and resting at sunset.
I remember back in middle school, after the teachers took us to cut down the pear and peach trees in the school's thousand-mu orchard, we began planting kiwis instead. At that time, the only tools were hoes and shovels! Slowly, in this way, surrounding farmers were encouraged to plant kiwis on a large scale.
Kiwis are commonly known locally as yangtaozi. At that time, almost no one followed suit in planting them, because transportation in the mountains was inconvenient. Even with a bumper harvest, outside merchants would only pick out what they considered the best and finest fruit and buy a small amount. The rest of the fruit could not be shipped out, and in the end it could only rot and be dumped in the fields as fertilizer!
Slowly, as time passed! This cash crop seemed to fall asleep here. We also gradually grew up. For the sake of our future, we graduated from middle school, went to high school, went to university, and finally graduated. To make a living, we each went our separate ways! Almost no one thought of the kiwis we had once cultivated.
Until one day, a middle school classmate discovered while buying fruit in a supermarket that kiwis outside Xiangxi were actually worth so much, while the kiwis back home were ignored by everyone. Working hard away from home, after deducting rent and basic living expenses, it was basically impossible to save much money in a year to supplement the household. The elderly left at home had no one to care for them, with no one to rely on in old age; children became left-behind children, with no one to tutor their studies! Every time they returned home, they silently shed tears. So the classmate and his wife decided to return to their hometown of Songbai to start a business again - planting kiwis, thus shaking awake this long-sleeping kiwi!
[Songbai Town] Presale Songbai Kiwi (shipped in early September) ￥58