#22 – Apple-picking in Yantai

0:08

Oh, here comes another one, OHP.

Ah, no, here it comes.

Not all the apples, yeah.

Welcome back to the Maple Dragon Podcast.

0:28

I’m Mark Robson, and I’m speaking to you from Yantai, China.

Yantai is especially famous in China for its apples.

Specifically, it’s cheese shop apples and I recently went apple picking and am going to be talking to you about that experience and comparing it to my Canadian apple picking experience.

0:56

It was actually quite an interesting experience having both something to compare to.

It all started out because my boss just took me to meet a professor of in of eco coastal ecosystems and just took me out for lunch one day and I met the professor and his wife and had a nice conversation and you know they had spent some time in the West and so on and I’m pretty sure that we broached the topic of apples maybe because they’re they grow in Yantai.

1:38

I was letting.

I told them that I actually came from a apple region in Canada by Toronto and that apple picking was something that we would do at this time of the year around Thanksgiving in Canada and and so perhaps that might have given them the idea, but I don’t think so.

2:01

I think they had already planned they apparently would go apple picking every couple of years because Michael, the professor, his cousin actually lives right in the area where the very best apples are grown, the chisha apples.

2:21

And so every two years has a family.

They they’ve been, I don’t know how long they’ve been doing it, but they go as a family and go and pick apples.

And this year was one of those years.

So after meeting Michael, I think it was only a couple weeks later I got the invitation to join them to go apple picking he and his wife and his two sons.

2:49

And so we drove.

I would say it must have been 1 to 1 1/2 hours on a Sunday and out to the area where the two shot apples are grown.

3:05

And this is hilly kind of territory.

And so we pulled up in a small village and apples everywhere and people sort of carrying them this way and that.

So right away it was like felt like this, this apple village overwhelmed with apples and we actually went to Michael’s cousins place and he had a orchard up on the hills.

3:33

It’s hilly kind of territory and we need to get up there.

So he had this three wheel kind of tractor that they have that has a box in the back, a little box and there’s there’s super loud noisy and so he use that to take us back up into the hills to his orchard.

3:55

And so that was a lot of fun, really loud.

And most people sat in the back and I sat in the front and we went up and down these, up these dirt, little dirt sort of pathways, slash roads through different apple orchards to get to where his was.

4:16

And it was interesting going right through the whole area, having picked apples in Canada, that I would not see these flashes of paper all over the place or just flashes of it like silver silvery kind of paper on the ground.

4:34

And every it was all over the place on the ground, under the apples, in every orchard.

And I had no idea what they were.

So this is one of the things that caught my eye on the way up to his orchard.

And so once we reached there and he led us to where he was picking the latest pickings, I started to ask questions as I started picking apples.

5:03

You know, what was that silver material?

And it turned out it was for reflecting the sunlight so that you could make the apples more evenly red.

And this was something I’d never seen before or even heard of in Canada, picking apples near Toronto, so completely new.

5:25

And so that was one of the kind of innovations of Chinese apple picking.

And the other thing is that they were being, these are like the very best apples in China.

And so they’re very careful with how they grow them and they want to make sure they don’t get bruised or damaged in any way.

5:47

And so there’s all sorts of precautions that we would take to make sure the apples didn’t gave any blemishes on them.

They were input in quite large baskets, so they were kind of larger than what we would use in Canada.

6:02

But you would carefully place them in.

And one of the first things they did was hand me a set of snips so I could snip back the apple stem, the little stem on the apple after I picked it, to make sure the stem didn’t stick out too far so that it would potentially, when stacked against other apples, maybe break the skin of another apple.

6:31

So we had to shorten these.

We used these little snips to cut the stem as short as possible so it didn’t protrude.

So that was another thing that was never seen this in Canada.

And but the thing that was really hit me hard was actually seeing these little pieces of Styrofoam that were put on the stems of the branches of the trees wherever an apple was leaning against a branch.

7:04

Like believe it or not they would get a little probably like 1 centimeter by 1 centimeter piece of Styrofoam and it looked like glue.

And they would glue this to the stem where the apple and put it between the stem and the apple, which had been leaning against the stem.

7:25

And as I was picking the apples, there was like dozens and on the branches I was looking at.

So I’m just guessing there must have been a a few, 100 possibly on every tree to make sure you didn’t break the skin of the apple.

7:44

There’s no way you would see that in Canada.

There’s nothing like that.

So these apples were Primo.

They were like, wow, we’re treating them with kids gloves.

And so this is what we did.

So we worked away, We all of us were picking some apples and it had been arranged that we were going to take a bunch home anyway for free, But we were helping to pick them.

8:11

And the other thing that struck me was how small the trees are.

So the whole thing, the whole reason is to make it easier to pick the apples.

And one thing they do to keep to keep the trees short is that they actually get bags of plastic bag and fill it with rocks and tie it to the branches of of the trees.

8:37

And this is so the branches will hang down with that weight and not grow too high.

So these are all factors to make it easier to pick the apples.

So we didn’t climb up a tree, there was no ladders, there’s no need for that.

8:54

Maybe a little step ladder, possibly for the very highest apples, but I didn’t see any round.

And anyway so we were picking away and and the trees just seem so covered in apples too, is what struck me.

9:14

And I’m not sure if there’s something special they do with that.

They just seemed especially heavily laden with apples and I don’t know, I suppose it could have been a bumper season.

I didn’t hear anything like that and it was all largely one type of apple too.

9:34

So in Canada around Toronto, we typically will have rows of different species of apples and you can just go pick whatever role you want.

And here it seemed like they were almost all Chesha, although we did try some other apples.

9:51

There was one that was kind of a yellowy green, a newer type of apple, which was good but you know and apparently they were more expensive and so but they you didn’t see many of them there.

10:07

It was mainly these chisha apples and admittedly I think those were that reflective material must have been working because I don’t think I’d ever seen apples that are so uniformly read in Canada.

10:24

We would see much more differences of you know spots where bright red and other spots where it’s quite green the apple would be greenish and and then also these apples were pretty good size.

10:40

They tended to be quite a good size and I found out later they actually sell the apples based on the size of the apple.

So the larger the apple is, the more the higher the price.

10:57

You can sell that up before.

So they actually had apple measuring devices, just a piece of wood that they would pass the apple through hole.

There’s different size holes in a piece of wood and you just passed the apple through whatever hole, the maximum hole it could go through or the minimum hole it could go through and apples would be boxed according to size.

11:24

So the larger apples could fetch a larger price, a better price and of course all these were like blemish free.

And and I did notice I don’t think I saw a single apple that had like a worm in it either.

11:42

And I didn’t.

I didn’t really get a chance to talk about that, but it did definitely seemed exceptional.

Not to have an apple with some worms in it because you do come across them definitely in Canada, but I don’t believe I came across a single one.

12:00

And the other thing I noticed in Canada, a lot of apples would fall on the ground and here it seemed like there was no apples on the ground.

And so keeping that treat, maybe the trees short.

Something else I heard was that it gets quite windy around the anti and that they make the trees smaller so the fruit doesn’t fall off, get blown off.

12:28

So that could have been it too, but there weren’t.

Yeah, I don’t remember any apples on the ground, come to think of it, Whereas in Canada you would definitely see quite a few.

So it seems that they were also doing something for that, somehow keeping them on the trees and there were, they did have noisemakers to keep birds away.

12:52

And so you’d hear as we’re picking we you’d hear these weird sounds from these noisemakers, automatic noise makers.

You know throughout the orchard was electronic and they would go off every, I don’t know 5 minutes or so individually.

13:11

So you’d hear one in the distance and I’d be like a squawking sound or it was you know some some of the sounds were pretty scary.

It was almost like Halloween ish type of sounds.

They go like this to keep the birds away And there was one near where I was picking and every once in a while if I wasn’t paying attention to go off and you know it almost give make you jump because it was there’s suddenly in this loud squawk sound would come out of it.

13:43

So they had these just spread all over the place, assuming just to keep the birds away.

I didn’t see any birds nearby that’s for sure.

Couple hours of picking that we did and they had to fill the the box of the little tractor, the three wheel tractor up with all the apples.

14:05

We picked the large baskets, so we actually had to walk back across along these pathways back to towards his house where where he could, yeah, walk all the way back to the house where he had unloaded the apples.

14:23

And so that was a pretty interesting trip just to walk through the countryside and right through other people’s orchards.

They’re all side by side, like relatively small patches, I would say.

And one thing I would notice is that there was this kind of terracing.

14:44

There would be areas where it would suddenly drop maybe, I don’t know, it would, you know, it was a fair distance, maybe 5 feet, literally 5 feet would drop down and there be like stone built up holding up the side of the terrace and it would step down maybe 5 feet to the next level because we were on the side of a hill.

15:10

And then as I looked into the distance, you could make out that these there seemed to be terracing everywhere.

So it doesn’t stand out.

It’s not like the really dramatic rice terraces that you see.

15:25

But you realize a lot of China and the agricultural areas are terrorists where there’s where there’s hills.

And so it’s far more extensive than what first appears.

But you could make it out in the distant hills, all these different terraces.

15:44

So that’s what really hits you is like when you look at the Stonewall, maybe 5 feet high and it goes for, you know, a long way maybe as far as the eye you can see.

You can imagine the kind of work involved in creating those terraces over thousands of years.

16:05

Oh my gosh, like huge.

And so I guess just to make the most of the terrain.

So the other thing I’d say, yeah, it’s more uniform in terms of the species they’re picking.

So it seems like everyone’s really getting the chisha apples.

16:22

And when you see them all stacked up in the village, they all look like the same kind of apple.

Whereas if you go apple picking and and at least around Toronto they’ll have a whole row of one kind of apple.

16:38

Could be Macintosh and this row, Spartan in this row, Delicious in that row, Golden Delicious in that row.

So we’ll have all these different varieties and they didn’t seem to have that in China.

They seemed that it is all this chisha.

16:57

But we did see, I did try another apple that they wanted me to try that was kind of a yellowy green apple and it was supposed to be more expensive, especially costly apple.

17:13

It wasn’t red and but I didn’t see, you know, whole trees aren’t There must have been at least some trees, but I don’t know where they were.

It wasn’t clear.

You didn’t see much of that.

I think it could be just the his cousin was growing this because I didn’t see it.

17:32

It didn’t seem to be that widespread and certainly in the village I didn’t see sort of whole baskets of the greeny, yellowy apples at all.

So it did seem pretty uniform, the species that they’re picking.

17:48

And so that was something.

And then the other thing I didn’t mention before is that how common is Apple picking in China?

Like to me is a normal thing to do growing up around Toronto.

And so, um, so I really identified with this and with this family that goes apple picking.

18:11

But from what I understand, it’s just because he has a cousin who is an apple farmer who has an orchard in the Primo area and they don’t go every year to pick.

They he said every second year.

18:28

So it’s not really an annual ritual.

And he told me that this is Michael, the professor.

He said most people don’t go picking apples like that in China.

They just go to the store to get you can order these apples online.

18:45

They’re all over China When it’s fall time.

These are the apples that everyone knows.

All of China knows the anti apples.

So to think of the work Shandong, this is the I think it’s actually the agricultural province of China.

19:05

It’s very big agriculture.

Some of the first agricultural books in the world were written by people from Shandong.

So this is, we’re talking early agriculture, so this is the place.

19:22

And so they’ve been doing it for a heck of a long time and they know what they’re doing.

So and yeah, and then I later heard about that whole idea that they make fruit trees.

The student told me this is that they make the trees really short because it gets very windy and I haven’t really fully witnessed the wind, but just yesterday it got quite cold.

19:52

It’s it’s cooled off quite a bit here and actually felt yesterday felt what I would call a little wintry you know there’s like a bite in the wind in the air and it was very windy all day long so and I just heard.

20:09

Tonight talking with the students that um Yantai is known for, its the large amount of snowfall it gets in the winter.

It doesn’t get really cold here, we’re right by the ocean.

But it sounds like it can get some pretty good dumps of snow.

20:29

And apparently what this one student was saying the first year students are I think expected to shovel the snow in the morning.

So got a witnesses see what happens so that this is what they do.

20:45

They use the first year students of Fair Bet.

Like tonight when I left the teaching building, they were cleaning the floor and it was all students going around with mops going over the floor.

So it wasn’t like a janitor or something like that that I’m used to in the West.

21:05

It’s like, no, it’s student.

There’s all sorts of students with with mops going over the floor and and I understand when there’s a snowfall, they’re expected to clear all the sidewalks of snow.

21:21

So we’ll see what happens.

Because I was sharing some of the stories of what we do in the winter time with the students.

I was telling them about toboggans, for instance, sleds, and they don’t really know that.

So not in this region of China anyway.

21:37

Maybe further north, but not here.

So yeah, they didn’t know toboggan or sled or anything like that.

Yeah.

So we’ll see what happens.

And so we walked our way back, we picked a few berries and learned about some other plants that were growing in the area and we got back to the to his cousins place.

22:05

So it was like a big garage where they had all the apples and then there was a couple girls there and they were the ones that were holding these pieces of wood that we’re measuring the size of the apples.

So they’d have holes cut in them and they’d figure out, OK, what size is this apple, according to the hole, and they’d start packaging them that way.

22:29

And even the packaging was like over the top.

They’re treating the apples almost like gold.

They had for the largest apples, which they’re already charging the most money for, they’re actually packaging them in one layer.

22:47

That’s what would fit in a box.

So it was like the box was just deep enough for one large apple.

And they put the apple inside a kind of sleeve, a sort of sock, a kind of Styrofoam sock, I guess a flexible Styrofoam sock.

23:06

And that was actually double bagged in these Styrofoam kind of socks.

And so they would put each apple in the box.

And I would, I’m not sure maybe 15-18 apples would fit in one of the boxes and beautifully wrapped and so almost like that’s what they were.

23:27

They were gifts to give to people.

So beautiful box and you hand this gift to someone and they’re charging extra money for that too.

So yeah, so it was very interesting all to measuring the apples at the different sizes fetched at different price, which is not something we do in Canada.

23:48

We just weigh them.

It’s just the weight.

And so if anyone wants to market to Chinese, you can listen to all these tips and make sure the apples look really good.

So the the way they look is is certainly very important.

24:05

They have to look really good and can’t have any blemishes.

And so they’re carefully wrapped in Styrofoam.

As I said, definitely the look of the apple was a big part of the of the deal, how they look.

24:21

And so a uniformly read and definitely no punctures from stems penetrating the, you know, adjacent apples.

And yeah, and So what struck me is that I never did hear exactly an explanation as to why I didn’t see a single worm in an apple like a hole in an apple.

24:45

If you’re picking apples in Canada, you’re definitely going to come across some that will have a hole in it.

So where some insect is burrowing in and heating the apple.

But I don’t recall a single one as I was picking.

25:02

And it was one of those things that doesn’t hit you right away.

It was after I finished picking and I was walking back.

I’m going, hang on.

I don’t recall seeing us, you know, any kind of holes in an apple, like a single hole.

25:19

It seemed like they were all perfect.

You know, not a single one had a hole in them.

And I think I did ask someone about it, but I didn’t really get a a, you know, a clear answer as to why they do.

25:34

You know why there wasn’t it was it was something to them that didn’t seem to stand out that much.

And but for me it definitely having picked apples and Canada, it was definitely something I noticed quite a difference.

25:51

And and before we left of course this is like a farming community and they started digging up these big sort of cabbages and there was a Chinese radish that I’d never tried before but they were giving us all sorts of food before we had to depart and return to the university where we were.

26:18

So it’s just his family.

His cousin was giving us all sorts of vegetables And so I had this Chinese radish which is huge like all their vegetables are just massive compared to what we’re used to in Canada.

26:35

So he had this thing like a Chinese radish and it was just like a massive carrot so long elongated.

It was green hard like carrot.

And while radishes in Canada are hard, but they’re just little, they’re just sort of are black and they’re small.

26:57

They’re only like a couple inches at most and red.

And so I got some of those, so a few of those, the Chinese radishes.

Then I got Chinese cabbage and one and of course a whole bunch of apples.

27:15

But I tried the, you know, when I brought it home, I cooked up the radish.

And, you know, I asked friends online, how do I cook this?

And it turns out you just boil it for a short like 5 minutes or something, slice it up, put it in water, boil it up and then let it cool off.

27:36

And then you put vinegar.

I think it’s vinegar, mainly vinegar, and just sort of store the radish and vinegar and you can have it with carrots too.

It was quite good, actually.

It wasn’t that hot like the radishes I was used to, but it still had the radish flavor to it.

27:57

But yeah, it was good, sort of a a good sort of cooling thing to eat, especially with the vinegar on it.

It was a really fantastic afternoon.

Really kindly people learn tons about apple picking and the differences and it was just a fun time in the countryside and bringing back lots of vegetables that I still have in my fridge and so much so I’m not sure how I’m going to cook at all.