Today I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Takahashi, who grows lotus root in our area. I went to visit him with my friend Chio and her sister. And with a fresh face to impress, he took us out to the field and showed us how the harvest is done. It was fascinating.
The field is a shallow pond in the local grey clay mud. It was probably once a rice field, though I didn’t ask. Now it contains thousands of plants with a harvest value of about 3 million yen. It’s not a lot, but it’s kept him going for fifteen years.
After suiting up in tall waders and gloves, he grabbed a sled and a pipe connector and headed over to the inlet. A short slog into the knee deep water brought him to where he wants to dig. He dropped to his knees for stability and to protect his back, then started searching.
The hose slung over his shoulder is what he uses for shifting the mud and finding the roots. Every lotus stem above water is attached to a pod below the mud, but since the roots grow in long chains, the trick is to find the parent root, and then trace along that to get the whole family with its branches of children and grandchildren
He is very good at this!
After grabbing some lovely specimens- each one lighting up his face with a big smile – he waded back in to us and answered all our questions about lotus structure, economics and beyond.
Mounted over the pond is a container that he’s fitted out as a prep station. He cuts the long chains, trims off the stems and roots, gives them a wash and polish and drops them in a crate to take back to home base where they are packaged for the markets.
Lotus are strongly impacted by the mud they grow in, and in the fine clay silt Takahashi-san’s are the whitest and sweetest in town. We watched as he grated a bit and put it in a handheld refractometer. The result showed as 17, the same as a pear. These are “salad renkon” and are delicious to eat raw.
Before growing lotus, Takahashi-san was a tour bus operator. That shines through in his desire to educate his visitors. Thank you so much for the tour.
If anyone wants a job doing lotus harvesting, he’s looking for help.
