Native forest symbiotic pomelo, beyond organic, we invite you to support it together

By Yilan Friendly Shop

Editor's note: This article is a message from Yilan Friendly Shop. Brother He, who grows organic pomelo and honey pomelo in Dongshan, needs everyone's support and encouragement. Pomelos keep well and are rich in vitamin C, making them ideal for group buys to keep in the office or at home, peeling off a little to taste each day. The farmer's contact details are at the end of the article; please give him your support!

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Yilan pomelos ripen slowly and cannot make it in time for the Mid-Autumn Festival

The pomelo is a peculiar fruit: it must be close to the Mid-Autumn Festival before it ripens and can begin to go on the market. But once the Mid-Autumn Festival has passed, it is an out-of-season fruit that no one wants.

But did you know? The pomelo is the longest-storing fruit I have ever seen. As long as it is not bumped or damaged, it will keep perfectly well for three months at the right temperature. Yet it is limited by being merely a festival fruit: once the Mid-Autumn Festival is over, its price plummets, and the more you harvest, the more you lose, so farmers have no choice but to abandon them and let them drop all over the ground! Or dump them box by box as compost!

For this reason, pomelos must be harvested starting a month before the Mid-Autumn Festival, so inevitably drugs to hasten ripening and boost sweetness have to be applied, and beautifying agents have to be sprayed to make the surface smooth and attractive. Compared with farmers who practise friendly cultivation and insist on never using chemicals, they can only leave it to the heavens! Yilan's weather in particular is rainier, unlike the bright sunshine of central and southern Taiwan, so the ripening period is even slower. Relatively speaking, they lose out badly in market competitiveness. No wonder! Yilan's pomelo orchards are one by one gradually falling into neglect! Watching the 30- and 50-year-old old trees all over the hills quietly wither and age away!

Bifen recently visited several Yilan pomelo farmers and found they all face the same problems, which made her very sad! Because a fruit tree takes at least more than five years from planting to bearing heavily, and old trees that have already been tended for 30 or 50 years are even harder to come by. So the shop is also thinking hard about how to protect these old fruit trees, so that the old trees can continue to be cared for, so that the old farmers who tend them can also be cared for, and more importantly, so that the fruit-growing experience the old farmers have accumulated over 30 or 50 years can be preserved; the true skill of working the land for decades is simply not something technology can replicate.

Friendly Life Shop invites you to cherish our land together, and to care together for our hardworking old farmers!