What a wonderful bumper crop we had this year!
The mandarin trees were full to bursting and we ended up having to sell the entire harvest to someone who also agreed to send the workers to pick the fruit. We had nine farm labourers picking for over two days, working their way through the terraces as they filled the crates.
The crates were then carried to the dirt road where we loaded them onto our 4x4 as the lorry couldn't get up that high.
It felt good to see the fruit packed up and go off in the large, refrigerated lorry to be washed and shipped to northern Europe.
We don't sell our mandarins through a co-operative. Instead we wait to see which 'middleman' (in our case, for the last two years running, it's been a 'middlewoman') will pay the highest price for our fruit.
Who knows... maybe you ate one of our mandarins this winter!
These mandarin trees were planted back in 2013 and 2014. They are now fully grown. We keep them a manageable size by pruning them every year. Otherwise, getting the fruit off the branches is nigh on impossible as you can't reach in to cut off the mandarins at the stem.