Our part-time farming years at the organic avocado farm

Hand pollination only

16 years ago, red dragon fruit was still a newly emerging crop: "a single seedling cost 500 yuan, so we bought 120 of them, spending 60,000 yuan, which was just right to plant one fen of land." At that time, Huang Liyuan and Zheng Hongjie were strolling through an agricultural products carnival when they ran into an acquaintance selling red dragon fruit seedlings, and thought: "Red is rarely seen, so why not give it a try!" Including the iron trellis, they spent more than 100,000 yuan in total. When the first flowers bloomed, the couple saw a few small, round blossoms and thought they were so beautiful, assuming a harvest was on the way. Unexpectedly, after waiting several days there was no fruit, and a few days later the flowers had all withered and turned yellow! On one occasion, Zheng Wangzhi went to the farmers' association to handle some business and learned from other farming friends that the variety they had chosen required hand pollination.

In the first few years, every night Zheng Hongjie and his wife put on headlamps to pollinate by hand, and their eldest son, then in elementary school, would join in too. "Red dragon fruit blooms at night, so you have to go into the orchard at night to pollinate. Prepare a watercolor brush and a small lunchbox; dip the brush in pollen and put it in the lunchbox to exchange pollen between plants, and you must exchange pollen between different varieties." Huang Liyuan said that once the rainy season begins, if the sky darkens in the evening, you have to hurry and bag the little flowers, otherwise as soon as the rain falls the pollen is knocked off again. Especially during overnight rain, they didn't dare sleep; they would wait until the rain stopped in the middle of the night and then go pollinate, sometimes even waiting until dawn.

Originally published in Green Advocate monthly, August 2016, issue 155.

Further reading>>>
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Grow what you eat: mung beans, winter wheat
Hardware Organic Farm: walking a road home
The moving spirit of cooperative inheritance