mbarker | Nashi, aka Japanese pear

The news recently visited a nashi batake (梨畑　なしばたけ), what we would call a pear orchard. The name literally means a field of Japanese pears. What I was surprised about were the ages of the trees.

Nashi, Japanese pear, are round, not shaped like American pears. Maybe 15 centimeters across, about 6 inches across. The skin is pretty similar to an American pear, but the fruit inside is white and juicy. Wonderfully sweet, during the season. Also fairly expensive!

Actually, let me start by mentioning the news man and the farmer, both bent over under a canopy of trees. Apparently the trees are deliberately trained so that the field looks like a wide open space full of tree trunks, spaced quite a ways apart, but the branches form a relatively solid ceiling that is deliberately kept low. So everybody has to bend over underneath them. Incidentally, some of the pictures showed a framework of pipe -- fairly hefty metal pipe -- that is used to help train and support the trees.

Anyway, they started by showing us a young tree, with just a few branches and some fruit on it. The farmer explained that this was a five-year-old tree, which is really just starting to bear fruit. It had about 30 nashi this year, I think.

Then he took us to another tree. He explained that this one is a good tree. It was 40 years old! And he said they get about 300 nashi from a tree like this each year.

He did show us another tree, about 60 years old. He said that's when they start not yielding.

Incidentally, he also showed us the care that they take for each fruit. First of all, they put it in a paper bag. He didn't explain why, but it could be either to control fertilization, keep bugs off, or maybe to control the sunshine? But the part that was amazing to me is he showed us that they make little nets around the fruit with plastic twine. He explained that the fruit gets too heavy, and would fall off the branch if left alone. However, they make these small net bags to help support it.

I was thinking about carefully tying up 300 fruit on one tree. I don't think they said how many trees he had, but it looked like a large orchard.

So someone who is raising nashi like this farmer starts out by training the tree, and after say 10 years, starts to get reasonable yields from the tree. And each year, he carefully takes care of each and every fruit on that tree? So that when it's 40 years old, he can get 300 fruits from one tree.

I begin to understand why those delicious nashi in the supermarket are so expensive!

But they do taste good.