Wednesday, February 11, 2009

JJNN: Beautiful Princess

Welcome again to JJNN for February 11th, 2009. Today we will be talking about expensive Japanese fruit.

I love strawberries. I used to eat tiny wild strawberries with milk. Since we got the strawberries from our front yard at the time, they were free. I sort of liked that. Sure, they were small, but free is a good thing. Looking though some news stories today I stumbled over a story (shown here) about a person named Okuda Mikio who found a way to grow huge strawberries that are suppose to be very sweet. You can see a picture of these strawberries below.



They look good, right? They should. Mr. Okuda is calling them Bijin-hime which means beautiful princess. Each one is about 80 grams (amlost 3 oz) which is almost 3 times the weight of a normal strawberry grown in that area. The name of the strawberries grown in that prefecture are no-hime which means princess of the field.

So, how did Mr. Okuda grow his new type of strawberries from the old one. Well he has been experimenting with new growing techniques for the past 30 years. He came across the idea of plucking all by a few of the first wave of strawberry flowers that bloom. That way all the nutrients that would normally be spread out among all the flowers go to the few flowers that were not plucked. This creates huge strawberries that are very sweet.

So what does this new type of strawberry cost? Well, they are not cheap. They come with a price tag of about 500USD per one strawberry. Ouch. I guess I won't be eating of of that type of strawberries. But, if you are interested in spending that much money on huge strawberries they will start shipping next year in January. Enjoy!

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