Pingtung wax apples hit hard by heavy rain, how are the Black Pearls doing?
Text/ Liu Weiting, reporter for the Morakot Independent News Network
In late November, the heavens brought six consecutive days of rain, falling on the wax apple orchards of Pingtung, drowning the hearts of wax apple farmers who had hoped for a harvest. The rain caused the wax apples to develop fruit rot, anthracnose, and late blight, and the abundant rainfall also meant that the wax apples that escaped the fate of "getting sick" could not escape "water damage."
Walking into Xu Guangcheng's wax apple orchard, farmers were discussing their losses in Taiwanese Hokkien, "We just hauled five cartloads away to feed the ducks." "Your place is in better shape; ours is even worse!" Baskets that in the past should have been filled with deep-red "Black Pearl" wax apples were instead full of pale, unevenly colored fruit. Looking over at the adjacent open ground, rotten, blackened wax apples lay quietly on the soil, waiting for time to turn them into nutrients.
Xu Guangcheng, in the prime of his life, peeled back the protective bags to inspect the damage to the wax apples, saying, "Look, ones like this are already useless. Right now it looks like only this one has turned black, but the others are actually affected too and will slowly go bad." He explained that six consecutive days of rain brought a large amount of moisture that instead stimulated the growth of the wax apple trees, so the nutrients that should have gone to the fruit also had to supply the development of new branches, affecting the degree of color development in the fruit.
Xu Guangcheng peels back the protective bag; the wax apple inside has already turned black
"The current market prices can roughly be divided into three tiers: the best quality, the kind that goes to the fruit and vegetable market, is about eighty or ninety yuan per jin; the middle range is thirty or forty yuan; and the worst is only in the teens. In the past there was still a price of over one hundred per jin." Xu Guangcheng said that although the current wax apple harvest is poor, which should drive prices up, the poor quality of the wax apples, their unattractive appearance, and the economic downturn have left the prices for this batch of wax apples far from optimistic.
Wax apples infected with anthracnose
In Taiwan, China, the wax apple is a year-round fruit, and harvest times differ from region to region. The peak production period in the Pingtung area is roughly from October each year to about June of the following year. In addition to differences in harvest periods among regions, farmers within a region also adjust the timing of production by covering the trees with nets to force flowering. They cover the wax apple trees with black nets to reduce sunlight, putting the trees into a dormant state so that growth slows and nutrients are instead concentrated on flowering and fruiting.
Generally speaking, after pruning and netting, the leaves still need to be cleared to leave space for flowering, and then the excess flowers are removed. Next, to prevent the "whiskers" on the flowers (some call them bursting whiskers) from causing fungal growth, farmers must remove them one by one. When the fruit begins to "hang like bells" (that is, set fruit), the bagging work begins. By the time it can be harvested, more than two months have passed. Xu Guangcheng said, "These bags cost 1.2 yuan each, some 1.3 yuan. On average I might leave 150 'clusters' on a tree to bear fruit, and each cluster needs one bag, but the number of wax apples inside is not necessarily the same. Once fungus has grown like this, the bag is useless and cannot be reused."
Wax apple flowers; the round ball is what it looks like before blooming, commonly called biaozi, and the ones behind are wax apple flowers
Neighboring Xu Guangcheng's wax apple orchard are fruit farmers Su Zhongjin, 67, and his wife. Flipping open the calendar hanging on a post, November was filled with the work content for each day. The labor shed was filled with cardboard boxes for packing. Mother Su held up an unevenly colored wax apple and said, "The normal color should be the same as on the box, but after the rain this year..." Just like Xu Guangcheng's orchard, fallen fruit could be seen everywhere in Su Zhongjin's wax apple orchard, and even among the picked wax apples, many were unattractive fruit. "Look, this one is anthracnose, this one is late blight, this one is downy mildew," Su Zhongjin said as he picked up wax apples one by one.
Xu Guangcheng asked, "Do you want to go see the drainage ditch here? The ditch is full of wax apples." Following behind him to the large drainage ditch beside Zhen'an Station, bottles and cans, garbage, and maggot-infested animal carcasses floated in the water, and more than anything else, wax apples bobbed up and down. Sitting on the abandoned railway tracks, just as the village officer's broadcast rang out in Zhen'an Village, mentioning measures for agricultural loss subsidies and low-interest loans, Xu Guangcheng said, "Did you know? If we could, we wouldn't want to receive agricultural loss subsidies."
After the Morakot disaster, Pingtung's wax apples had just been getting back on their feet, and now it seems they may have to start all over again.
(This article is report (2) in the "Voices by the Water" special series, published in sync with the Morakot Independent News Network)
