Orange globes of good luck are plucked one by one from a grove in Sutter County.Destined for tabletops and entryways as symbolic tokens of the Chinese New Year, Murcott mandarins from Oak Acre Farms are in the middle of their harvest season. In all, about 17,000 tons will be picked before February's end, but many are already on their way to store shelves and people's homes after the farm began hurrying harvest last week, urging the sun to shine on its mandarins to turn them from green to orange. Recent blue skies and warm weather have been bliss for ripening, but too late to compensate for the cold spell that plagued last year's growing season and set all crops back two to three weeks. Oak Acre Farms had to push ahead with picking anyway.
"Chinese New Year can't wait," said general manager Jocelyn Carter. "The fruit could have waited another 10 to 12 days." Once picking is done for the holiday, which starts Feb. 3 and is celebrated for two weeks, any remaining fruit will hang from the trees another few weeks to finish ripening. Then harvest will begin again. Oranges and mandarins are a Chinese New Year's tradition because they are as close as one can get to gold and wealth, carrying promises of a plentiful new year, said Carter, who remembers celebrating the cultural holiday as a child. When the stem and leaf are attached, the fruit also symbolizes fertility. In her packing warehouse, crews wear soft gloves to protect their hands and the fruit as they sort for size and snip leaves and stems off with little scissors. The mandarins will be sold in San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver.
Unlike their Satsuma sisters, of which Oak Acre Farms produced 372,000 pounds this year, the Murcotts have denser cells, a thinner skin, a few seeds even though they are "seedless," and an almost tangerine-like tang. Mandarins are categorized into seven sizes; small, medium, large, mammoth, colossal and jumbo. For Chinese New Year, customers are more concerned about the aesthetics, but Canadians prefer the small-medium mandarins and those in the United States like the large and jumbo sizes. The fruit comes in from the field in large bins, after workers in the field pluck the orangest mandarins from the trees. The going is twice as slow as normal, because of the ripening delay, said operations manager Bill Hosford.
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