🥬 A few years ago, nobody would have believed that vegetables could be grown here. Today, all of Kyoto comes for them.
Today we are writing to you from the beautiful Ohara area, a region to the north-east of Kyoto. Once a village in its own right, Ohara was gradually “swallowed up” by the city as it expanded — yet it has kept its rural charm intact. It is a superb hilly area, surrounded by Japanese cedars (Cryptomeria japonica — Japan’s emblematic tree), which quietly watch over the valleys.
🥬 A few years ago, nobody would have believed that vegetables could be grown here. But sometimes all it takes is one “crazy horticulturist” willing to break the mould — and today Ohara is recognised, visited and sought after precisely for its vegetables. 🌱
🌿 Here, organic farming is not just a label. Even if not every product comes with a certification behind it, the local people have the principles of agroecology ingrained in the way they work. Certification is hard to obtain, and many do not own their land but rent it year by year, yet this does not stop them from respecting nature at every step. ♻️
🌾 Ohara is blessed by the hills that surround it — a true forest shelterbelt protecting the whole valley. The land is light and terraced, with channels carrying clean water from the mountains straight to the crops. 💧 Here, rice paddies are rotated every year with vegetable plots, exactly as good crop rotation requires.
🍚 What is grown? Rice — including a purple rice, a real delicacy that beautifully colours the Japanese “daily bread”. A single teaspoon is enough to brighten up a bowl of rice and enrich it with antioxidants. 💜
🌶️🍅 Besides rice, we came across crops of beans, cherry tomatoes, sweet peppers, chilli peppers, taro, aubergines, okra (lots of okra! 😄), sweet corn, perilla, bitter gourd, lemon cucumber, sweet potatoes (purple and ordinary), spring onions, basella (Malabar spinach), Okinawa spinach, courgettes and pumpkin. 🌽🍆🍠
🏪 They also have their own farm shop — Sato-no-Eki Ohara — visited by Kyoto’s finest, including professional chefs 👨🍳 in search of fresh vegetables.
🌿 One detail that charmed us: here, taro is sold with its shoots still attached, not just the root, as we usually find in supermarkets. A small gesture that says a lot about their respect for the plant and for the consumer.
🌍 We strolled among the hills and gardens and exchanged ideas with researchers from India 🇮🇳, New Zealand 🇳🇿, the USA 🇺🇸 and Australia 🇦🇺 — because horticulture, in the end, is a language we all speak, wherever we come from. 🌱🤝
🇷🇴🇯🇵 Warm regards from Kyoto! 🌿
