Although the Edremit district of Van is known for its apple orchards, the beauty of the apricot trees with every shade of yellow is also worth seeing. While the apricots of Edremit decorate the gardens with their colors in the summer, they also adorn the roofs for drying towards the end of the summer.
In the Edremit district of Van, 65-year-old Lütfü İlhan, who has a fifteen-decare garden, has almost every tree species in his lush garden, which he calls “Uncle Lütfü’s Place”. İlhan, who started his career as a civil servant at the age of 20, comes to Van after retiring at the age of 42. There are approximately two hundred and fifty trees and a small trout farm in the fifteen-decare garden he built with his own hands. The trout plant is being damaged by a flood. Later, Uncle Lütfü’s Place turns into a picnic area where everyone stops by and watches the sky through the branches of the apricot trees.
“I set up the garden by myself, I planted my trees when they were saplings, I grew them with my own hands,” İlhan proudly says. Stating that he grows all apricot trees and other fruit trees in the garden from seed, İlhan said, “There are around 170 apricot trees in the garden. There are around 30-40 apple and pear trees. At the same time, sour cherries, cherries, peaches have almost all the fruits. I have around 15-20 walnut trees, but the most troublesome of them is apricot. It is a different power to collect, shake it up, dry it… Marketing it is the hardest of all. We do not have a marketplace. If we could lose two or three kilos at a time in retail, we lost it. If we couldn’t, we burn the remaining apricots in stoves for coal in winter,” he says.
‘When it turns yellow, it’s time for apricots for me’
When we asked about the start time of the apricot, “I don’t know the starting time. When it turns yellow, it’s time for apricots for me. When it’s over, it’s already over,” he says with a smile. Explaining how the apricots are dried, İlhan said, “I can’t do it because I don’t know jam and compote. Of course, families come and buy them and make jam and fruit pulp at home. I only do three types of drying here. First; I am opening. The process I call opening is drying without seeds. The second process is drying, which we do with seeds to be used in compote making. The third is fruit pulp. We are trying to evaluate the crushed apricots so that they are not wasted, we make fruit pulp. Open apricots are sweeter apricots. It doesn’t matter if it’s sour or sweet,” he says.
Stating that they do not spray the trees, İlhan said, “We grow our trees with very natural methods. We are afraid of using chemical drugs, as it can cause many diseases. We grow our apricots completely organically without giving anything away,” he says.
‘The apricots we collect do not meet the wages of the workers’
Stating that the trees in the garden are 18-year-old trees, İlhan says, “This is what I’ve been doing since the day I planted these trees.” He says that about 6-7 people work in the garden, and that this number sometimes decreases to four and sometimes increases to eight to nine. “Of course, my garden is more troublesome because it is both a picnic area and an orchard. When there is a picnic area, we have to collect apricots daily. So that those who come to the picnic do not crush them, so that they do not get wasted. Employees range from nine to four,” he adds.
“Unfortunately, the apricots we collect do not even cover the wages of the workers,” he says, regretfully. Complaining about the lack of a market place to sell apricots, İlhan said, “Since we do not have a market anyway, we are slowly selling dried apricots to families by kilo. However, if we had a cooperative or a fruit juice factory, our fruits would not have been wasted so much, and the wages of the workers would have been covered,” he says.
‘I water fifteen acres of garden with a hose’
İlhan states that before, because the trees were young, they could not get this much yield, and that’s why their sales were more comfortable. “But right now the trees are in full yield period, but unfortunately there is no sale. We don’t have a market, we don’t have a cooperative. What we sell now is through the middleman,” İlhan says.
Explaining the growing and harvesting processes of apricots a little tiredly but with pleasure, İlhan states that they have problems with irrigation. He explains the irrigation problems as follows: “Our water comes from Gürpınar. There are hundreds of villages from Gürpınar to Edremit. Water flows here five days a week, and the others, and of course, water goes to Van from here. Therefore, they give most of our water from hydroelectricity to the dam, to the lake, so our irrigation is restricted. I have fifteen acres of garden, and I water these fifteen acres with a hose.”
Serhat News
Translator :Akif Coşkun
