By Hannah Zwartz
Photography by Helen Wall
& Karli Mitchell
Featured in Capital #90
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Snow looks awfully close on the Tararua range, and down in Neville Chun’s citrus orchard near Levin, yuzu harvest is in full swing.
Though most citrus trees hate the cold, yuzu grow in mountainous parts of Korea and Japan where winter temperatures regularly drop to minus 15 degrees. This year, Neville hopes to harvest two to three tonnes of the fruit, which retail for over $2 each.
The yuzu story is about skill, hard work and perseverance, with a good measure of excellent timing. When Neville first planted yuzu, nobody in New Zealand knew what it was, he says: “It was like a swear word – up your yuzu.” Now, his harvest is largely pre-sold to specialist food and beverage makers, who use the intensely flavoured juice and rind in oils, beer and spirits.
The idea came from Junko, Neville’s beloved late wife. From a trip home to see family in Japan, she returned with a few yuzu seeds. In Japan, the fruit are prized for their juice and zest. They are made into condiments, and even floated in a hot bath for fragrant stress relief. Yuzu zest is sprinkled onto salads or noodles, or used in drinks or baking, while whole fruit are made into a syrup, yuzu cha, for desserts or drinks.
The seeds Junko brought back didn’t sprout, but they set Neville (then working in the family business, Zenith Garden Centre) on a hunt for yuzu trees. He found them in the catalogue of a citrus supplier, who didn’t know what they were. “He had them listed in the ornamental section; he was going to dump them, because nobody wanted them, they were so thorny and sour.” Neville bought all 80 plants, which became his mother-stock for propagation.
Horticulture clearly runs in Neville’s veins. The family history, as recounted by Neville’s uncle Stan Chun in his 2020 memoir Newtown Boy, tracks from a Lambton Quay fruit shop in 1895, to market gardens, and eventually the Zenith Garden Centres. Neville still has a large home nursery and a side hustle selling fruit trees (as well as a flourishing sourdough operation – one rule of farming is to never depend on one crop to pay all your bills, he tells me). He grows all types of fruit trees, but has a special love for citrus. “They have it all really – form, fragrance and fruit.”
The citrus family is notoriously promiscuous, he says, cross-fertilising readily to make endless variations between mandarin, grapefruit, lime, orange, tangelo, pomelo, and lemon. Neville grows many of them, including Australian finger limes (“they’re more of a garnish fruit, really”) and large Ponderosa lemons weighing 2kg each. Yuzu stand out from the crowd, however, as a distinctive species; their flavour has notes of lemon, lime, mandarin and grapefruit, but some of the oils they contain are found nowhere else in nature.
Yuzu fruit have a lumpy, soft rind with big oil glands, like a bad case of acne, and the pith and seeds are large relative to the amount of flesh. Leaves look like the makrut (“kaffir”) lime, and branches are covered with long, sharp thorns.
Having propagated the yuzu trees, Neville and Junko looked for land, and found the one-hectare Levin block about 16 years ago. “We were looking up here because of the high price of land closer to Wellington, but it’s also very good land, a good growing environment and beautiful loamy soil.” Originally a sheep and horse paddock, it’s now planted with rows of yuzu alongside specimens of walnut and chestnut trees, persimmons and cider apples, other citrus, and a few rows of feijoas. There’s also a secondary crop, in early summer, of ume
(a Japanese apricot used as a health food, pickled, or in alcohol.)
In recent years Neville has helped set up three other yuzu orchards, including what he believes to be the country’s southernmost citrus orchard, attached to a hop farm in Murchison.
In Japan, Neville says, yuzu orchards are family operations, with grandparents and children involved in caring for the trees. The fruit’s soft skin is easily damaged by the long thorns. In Japan, families carefully prune thorns away to create space around each fruit, to preserve perfectly unblemished skin; in New Zealand, he says, labour costs make this impossible. Besides, a few lesions on the skin are not such a big deal when the fruit are mainly processed for rind and juice.
One thing he won’t allow on the skins, however, is chemical residue, “because the peel is the part of the fruit you eat.” The orchard has been certified with Organic Farms NZ for four or five years, meaning strict controls on pesticides and weedkillers. “That’s important to us, though it sometimes makes life harder,” says Neville. They use fish-based liquid fertiliser, interplant trees with comfrey and marigolds, and add biological innoculants for a healthy soil biome.
Picking is done in two stages, starting in April for the green fruit (which helps thin out the crop). Green rind is used in yuzu kosho, a specialty Japanese condiment fermented for several months from chillies, salt, and green yuzu peel. Aromatic, spicy, and intensely citrusy, it can be added to soups or mixed with tamari to make Ponzu dipping sauce.
The second pick is in May when fruit are yellow but still with a green tinge. It’s a slow-motion operation, resembling some sort of steady-hand test, or a tai chi move executed wearing elbow-length leather gauntlets. You have to spot the fruit, plan your move, and backtrack the path of your hand exactly to get it out from amongst the thorns, says Neville. “The thorns are long and sharp and if the tip breaks off under your skin, which they tend to do, it will be festering for weeks.” Neville, and his son William, have the scars to prove it. Because of this hazard, trees are hard-pruned to an open vase shape. Easier picking, without ladders, is a good trade-off for the smaller crop.
With no business plan, but good timing, Neville has created a local market for the fruit. Their best sales connection came about by chance. A customer picking up an online order from Neville’s home nursery noticed the yuzu trees.
“‘Give me a call if you ever have any yuzu fruit to sell,’ he said, ‘I brew beer in my garage.’ Yeah right, I thought.” A few years on, Peter Gillespie of Garage Project brewery bought the entire inaugural yuzu crop and turned it into award-winning WabiSabi Sour beer. Neville continues to supply Garage Project, along with gin maker Dr Beak, and an olive grower who crushes the peel with olives to create another award winner.
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