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In Tokyo, there is an "apple that doesn't rot" that circulates in the city, and the father of this magical apple is Akira Kimura, who we are talking about.
Many Japanese people have a wish to eat Kimura's apples in this lifetime, so much so that they have to buy them by lottery.
But only 2,000 people get their wish every year, and those who win the lottery are so excited that they even launch the dish "Mr. Kimura's Apple Soup"
Reservations must wait at least half a year.
Even the chef was amazed that this apple actually did not rot, it may have gathered the soul of the producer...
Thousands of e-mails and letters were sent to the TV station expressing the wish that I could eat Mr. Kimura's apple, and I was afraid that it would be better if I only had one time.
After Kimura's story became widely spread in Japan, a young man who wanted to commit suicide changed his mind after seeing Kimura's interview program and finally had the courage to continue living.
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Akira Kimura, who grows the "miracle apple", touched thousands of people with his spirit
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Usually, the apple is cut open and left for a while, and it will soon be oxidized and then begin to rot. However, this apple will not rot after two years, it will only shrink and become smaller and smaller like "withering", and finally become a dried fruit with a faint red color, emitting a sweet fragrance like dried fruit.
Apples "don't rot", what is the secret hidden in it? The answer, of course, is to be found in Kimura's apple orchard.
The use of pesticides, or even any organic fertilizers, is the secret that Kimura apples will not rot.
Born in 1949 in Aomori Prefecture, where apples are produced, Akira Kimura is the second son of a fruit farmer family, and when he became an adult, he went to Tokyo to work like many young people. Originally, he did not intend to engage in agriculture, but at the age of 22, he met Michiko, who was also a fruit farmer, and the two ran an orchard together after marriage.
Stills from "The Apple of Miracles"
Foolishly looking for answers.
Kimura explores whether to grow apples without pesticides or from his wife's allergy.
Kimura found that every time she sprayed the fruit tree with pesticides, her skin would be burned, and her wife would lie down due to allergies after each spray of pesticides. By chance, Kimura came into contact with a book called "Natural Farming Law", which wrote about "agricultural life without doing anything and not using pesticides and fertilizers."
In order to verify this truth, he studied with extraordinary patience, and even had no income for many years, and the family of seven held it
During this decade, he was poor, unable to hold on several times, and the only rice field was taken to pay off his debts. He had to work in the city several times. So much so that his daughter wrote in her essay: My father was a farmer, but I never ate the fruit grown at home.
In the first year of stopping pesticides, apple leaves fell yellow one by one, and apple orchards became bare and dry forests.
The following year, the fruit trees were overgrown with bugs. The poor apple tree was caught in the grip of pests and diseases, desperately struggling, and the grain was not harvested all year round.
"In that era when apples were used as cash cows, only that person had to go out to work in the winter."
At this time, Kimura, who was in financial distress, was forced to sell all his cars and agricultural machinery to offset the debts he had borrowed from agricultural inputs. Because he had no money to pay taxes, even the apple trees in his home were labeled with red stripes from the tax office.
In this way, Kimura, who has both old and young, has successfully plunged his family into poverty. For the sake of his family's livelihood, he had to drag his thin body into the city to work, and at the age of 50, his teeth were almost lost due to overwork.
Fortunately, Kimura's father-in-law, wife, and children did not support his experiment, so although it was difficult, Kimura, who did not accept defeat, was able to continue his experiment.
In the third year, the apples did not bloom at all, and Kimura heard that milk and muddy water were effective, so he began to spray milk and muddy water on the trees. But countless pests appeared in the orchard, and the surrounding growers asked him to fix the grass, but he stubbornly refused to nod. The local grower gave Kimura a terrible nickname: "Extinguish the stove", which means that the fire of the stove is extinguished. For the farmers, this is the greatest insult.
So, in the fourth and fifth years, Kimura began to lie on the ground with a magnifying glass every day to study bugs.
Initially, the foods that could be found in the kitchen: vinegar, wine, and oil were tested by Kimura to see if they could replace pesticides to help apple trees resist germs that cause leaf fallen. In order to catch bugs, Kimura is often a family that catches bugs and eggs from apple trees. However, no matter how to catch it, the next day the tree still continued to emerge with insects, and there was no reduction at all. Apple trees also do not bloom at all.
Once, when Kimura's wife went to the orchard, she saw him talking to herself from a distance. Kimura later said that he was apologizing and pleading with the apple trees one by one, apologizing for not taking medicine and causing the fruit trees to suffer, please don't bear fruit, but don't die.
Gradually, in the eyes of outsiders, he became a mentally abnormal person. People began to sympathize with him as a "madman".
Later, the wife often found that her husband got up in the middle of the night, sleepwalked out of the hallway, and walked into the storage room in the courtyard in a daze. It was his most painful time, and he had wanted to give up several times. However, whenever the snow melted and spring came, he discussed with his wife whether he could let him try again for another year.
Nature does not speak, so human beings must hone their sensibility and feel nature.
This lasted for five or six years, and one year, on the day of the harvest of other growers, Kimura sat alone in the empty apple orchard of his home, and when he caught a glimpse of the thick rope used to tie the apple box to the car when he had not used it for several years, he thought of death.
He picked up the rope and walked aimlessly toward the mountain, and the beautiful night view overlooking the mountain gradually calmed his heart, and suddenly, he saw an oak tree in the wild mountain.
Kimura suddenly realized: If wild oak trees can grow so leafy in an environment full of weeds and insects without pesticides and fertilizers, why is my apple tree dying? He finally understood, the focus was on the soil, and he began to plane the soil under the oak tree, taking the soil in his mouth and tasting it. Excited that night, he came down from the mountain and decided to start a new experiment.
After humans have bred sweet and delicious cultivated varieties, apples have lost their ability to grow and maintain themselves under wild conditions, and can only grow in the direction that humans want under artificial semi-natural semi-control conditions. The so-called infestation of fruit tree diseases and insect pests is not so much a consequence of many pests and diseases as it is a consequence of the weakness of apple trees.
Kimura, who found the answer, gradually became confident. He began sprinkling soybeans in large quantities in his orchards, using the densely packed rhizobia at the roots of soybeans to improve the nitrogen content in the soil. The following year, the apple orchard seemed to become a primeval forest, with insects chirping in the grass, frogs catching insects, snakes staring behind frogs, and even wild mice and hares.
Although spotted leaf litter and leaf curl moths are still rampant, Kimura feels that the apple tree has ended its long struggle with the disease, and the orchard is gradually recovering its health.
Finally, three years later, in the spring of the eighth year when all the orchards stopped using pesticides, seven apple blossoms bloomed in the orchards.
The two apples were the entire harvest of that year, and Kimura put the apples in the Buddhist hall to worship and the whole family shared them. Those two apples were high in sugar and surprisingly delicious.
In the ninth year, Kimura's neighbors came to announce the good news, saying that his family's orchard had blossomed. Urging Kimura to hurry to the orchard to see, when he heard this good news, Kimura only responded: "Really? For a moment, he thought he was joking.
But after all, there was only a glimmer of hope in his heart, and he immediately drove his wife to the orchard.
It was a day he will never forget, and the whole orchard was full of white apple blossoms. Kimura was speechless with excitement.
Although the total income of apples in the ninth year is only about 10,000 yen (equivalent to more than 800 yuan). But there was hope. The family also worked hard to finally be able to smile and face the rest of life.
Whether he fails or is ridiculed, he doesn't care that it is nothing more than hard work, in addition to the righteousness in his heart, what can make him rush forward is the continuous flow of love and support from his relatives around him.
I think I have no credit, it is all the efforts of the apple tree itself.
After Kimura grew apples that did not rely on pesticides and fertilizers, more and more people heard his story and expressed their desire to taste the apple. But the production of eight hundred apple trees is limited, but Kimura never wanted to raise the price, Kimura said, not to make money to start growing apples, he only hopes that more people use natural farming methods to successfully cultivate apples, the public can eat at a cheaper price.
Kimura not only did not think about raising the price of apples, but also gave the credit for growing pesticide-free apples to the apple trees themselves.
In the face of many praises, Grandpa Kimura smiled shyly: "Probably because I am too stupid, the apple tree can't stand me, so I have to bear the apple." Hahaha. ”
Mr. Kimura's apples, which are produced entirely by natural cultivation methods without the use of any pesticides, fertilizers, or compost, are different from ordinary production methods, so it is not an exaggeration to call this apple a "miracle." Mr. Kimura began to adhere to this production method before the word "organic" was widely used.
Although stage plays, documentaries, bestsellers and even movies scripted by Mr. Akira Kimura's life experience have come out and had a far-reaching impact, he is indeed an ordinary farmer.
On the Japanese Wikipedia, there is a definition of "professional temperament" that says: "Pursue the progress of your craft, and be confident in it, do not distort your will or make compromises due to money and time constraints, and only do the work that you can approve of." Once you take over, even if you completely abandon your interests, you must do everything in your power to complete it. ”
Human agriculture has a history of tens of thousands, chemical agriculture is only a hundred history, but our health is getting worse and worse, I hope that everyone will support natural farming methods together.
The story of apple will continue, and man has only this only property, and this property is " hope"