A former colleague from the bike shop where I used to work went back to his hometown (Kumamoto Prefecture), and he has a mandarin orange orchard in front of his house.
I used to receive one box of his harvest every year, but when I started sharing them with my shop's customers, they were so popular that in recent years I've been buying three boxes.
The image above is the third box out of three boxes (10kg each) that arrived, and I took it before they were nearly all gone in no time. I've never tasted a mandarin orange sweeter than these ones. Among my customers, there's someone who said, "My wife almost never eats mandarins, but she loves these and eats them, and at this point she looks forward to them every year." If you're reading this and thinking, "Hey, that's us!" then I have to say there are actually two people who fit this exact description. In another case, when I tried to hand a customer a bag to take some mandarins home, they said "I'll just eat one here," but then ate two or more before saying, "Actually, I'm taking these home, so can I have a bag after all?"
But for some reason, the person who sends these mandarins always says every year that "this year's harvest wasn't very good," making excuses and being humble about it. Earthquakes are fair enough, but then there's talk of long rainy spells in summer, strong typhoons, and this year it was so hot that the elderly parents taking care of the orchard couldn't get out to the field much. It's like a reverse Beaujolais Nouveau. "A rare poor harvest in recent years," "worse than last year, which was the worst in the past decade," "not sweet due to lack of sunshine"—that kind of thing.
But aside from earthquakes, in years when they say the harvest is poor, the mandarin level nationwide should also drop, so relatively speaking they're still outstanding in deliciousness. If I had to nitpick, maybe about one in every ten mandarins isn't quite as sweet, whether that's due to the tree or sun exposure or whatever, but even those duds are way sweeter than the mandarins you'd buy at any regular supermarket.
Just the other day, an additional box arrived.
The reason the mandarins on top are flattened is because I flipped the box over and opened it from the bottom.
When I checked, I found I'd written about these mandarins 12 years ago too (→here).
I wrote somewhat more specific names in that article, but I'm not going to correct it.
There's no point hoarding them—they'll just rot anyway, and there's no way I can eat 30 to 40kg by myself, so I'm freely sharing them around.
It happens every year, but this year too I've had to throw out one that turned into a green mold ball. The reason I haven't put the heater on in the shop yet is because of this.
I used to receive one box of his harvest every year, but when I started sharing them with my shop's customers, they were so popular that in recent years I've been buying three boxes.
The image above is the third box out of three boxes (10kg each) that arrived, and I took it before they were nearly all gone in no time. I've never tasted a mandarin orange sweeter than these ones. Among my customers, there's someone who said, "My wife almost never eats mandarins, but she loves these and eats them, and at this point she looks forward to them every year." If you're reading this and thinking, "Hey, that's us!" then I have to say there are actually two people who fit this exact description. In another case, when I tried to hand a customer a bag to take some mandarins home, they said "I'll just eat one here," but then ate two or more before saying, "Actually, I'm taking these home, so can I have a bag after all?"
But for some reason, the person who sends these mandarins always says every year that "this year's harvest wasn't very good," making excuses and being humble about it. Earthquakes are fair enough, but then there's talk of long rainy spells in summer, strong typhoons, and this year it was so hot that the elderly parents taking care of the orchard couldn't get out to the field much. It's like a reverse Beaujolais Nouveau. "A rare poor harvest in recent years," "worse than last year, which was the worst in the past decade," "not sweet due to lack of sunshine"—that kind of thing.
But aside from earthquakes, in years when they say the harvest is poor, the mandarin level nationwide should also drop, so relatively speaking they're still outstanding in deliciousness. If I had to nitpick, maybe about one in every ten mandarins isn't quite as sweet, whether that's due to the tree or sun exposure or whatever, but even those duds are way sweeter than the mandarins you'd buy at any regular supermarket.
Just the other day, an additional box arrived.
The reason the mandarins on top are flattened is because I flipped the box over and opened it from the bottom.
When I checked, I found I'd written about these mandarins 12 years ago too (→here).
There's no point hoarding them—they'll just rot anyway, and there's no way I can eat 30 to 40kg by myself, so I'm freely sharing them around.
It happens every year, but this year too I've had to throw out one that turned into a green mold ball. The reason I haven't put the heater on in the shop yet is because of this.