Miracle Apples

Chapter 23

In the autumn of that year, Kimura harvested a great mountain of apples the size of ping pong balls. Thinning out the blossom to produce a smaller number of fruit is essential for growing larger apples. The blossom thinning, though, had been half-hearted. Five individual flowers form each blossom cluster. Four of these must be pinched out, leaving one flower. He’d got that far, but that is not enough by itself. There’s also the job of assessing the strength of the tree, and deciding how much fruit it should bear, and then pinching out more blossoms. He hadn’t done this. For nine years at least.

In his desperation he’d seen apple blossom in his dreams, so now his hands shook when pinching them out – it seemed so wasteful. Unless you pinch the blossoms out, however, you won’t get bigger fruit. He couldn’t bring himself to do something he knew was obvious. The reason he didn’t do the thinning completely was not only to do with the issue of how he felt, there was also an excuse, one particular to Kimura, who’d put up with diseases and insects for so many years.

It was not simply a matter of being pleased at the blossoming and fruit being produced. Once the vinegar started working, the outbreak of disease could be contained to a significant extent.

The diseases were not fully controlled, and the numbers of pests remained the same, too. Overall, in fact, the number of pests increased along with the healthier leaves. Leaf rollers, for example, ate the inner flower parts of the blossoms as well as the leaves. He continued removing them by hand, but this didn’t entirely prevent the damage from feeding. Some of the blossom was eaten by the leaf rollers. A certain amount of the fruit itself would be affected by insects and disease. Even if you use pesticides, not all the remaining blossoms will come to fruition. You’ll always get a certain yield, and this was why the yield in Kimura’s orchards, where pesticides were not used, was rather low. In fact he had no clue as to what sort of yield to expect. This was the first time he’d seen blossom in full bloom in orchards that were pesticide and fertilizer free. He thought he’d try keeping pinching out to a minimum and see how much fruit he’d still have come the autumn.

But the disease and pest damage didn’t turn out to be as bad as he’d thought. When the blossom came out, the entire Kimura family worked hard at removing insects, but it was the strength of the apple trees which more than anything conquered diseases and pests. The yield turned out to be far greater than Kimura imagined, and there was a lot of fruit on the trees in the autumn. But not enough nutrients were getting through to the fruit, so the apples were only growing to the size of ping pong balls.

Of course, there are only a few people who will buy such small apples from you. His were eventually taken by an apple dealer for processing. Although they were small, their sugar content was high so they could be used for juice. If you packed the boxes used for the crop to the top, you would normally get, at most, seventy normal apples in, but they packed in about two hundred and sixty of the apples Kimura produced that year. The apples were small enough to have fallen through the holes in the mesh on the sides of the plastic cases belonging to the dealer. Twenty kilos of apples went into one box, and for this he was paid one hundred and sixty yen. A pittance you’d normally get for throw-out apples. The entire apple harvest hardly made ten thousand yen.

‘Having not had a crop for ages, just producing one was a cause for celebration. Thinking calmly about it, though, that by itself didn’t mean anything. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: we had to make a living selling the apples we grew. The following year I thinned out the blossom properly, and the apples were slightly larger, but nothing to compared to apples grown using pesticides. The orchards were still not settled. People were surprised. “You call this an apple?” I took them to various markets, but no-one was interested.

So I began to wonder about ways I could sell them. We could only really say that the apples were grown without pesticides once we could make a living from them. If we couldn’t make a living from them, no-one else would think of following us. I wasn’t going to settle for being content with feeling self-satisfied at growing them. To be honest, I’d thought so for a long time before the apples started looking after themselves. I reckoned customers buying apples direct from us would be the best thing.