Have you ever thought how fruits get to our supermarkets and then end up in our houses? Well getting fruits delivered to a supermarket is only one of the many things that happens in this process. (Easiest way to grow fruit trees.) In the Western Cape in South Africa, the many people that live there are very familiar with the long process, They specialize in growing plums.
In the Franschoek Valley they have summers much cooler than that of the surrounding areas, which makes it a perfect place to grow plums. Mother nature and its weather play one of the biggest roles, all throughout the harvesting plums need cooler temperatures but if it rains many of the tress wont grow plums and if it is too dry than plums grow out to be smaller. The plums that do get picked are put in a cooler room to cool down for a day then get packed up and shipped off overseas. Because of this the growers have to make sure the plums are picked just right. They cant pick them too early and they cant pick them too late or else when they get to their destination they wont be right. What most people don't know is that this fruit has become a large and important part of South Africa's economy. The plums have sold more than their peaches and apricots. In 2013-2014 16 million cartons of fruits were sold, 10.5 million of them being plums. As you can see the plums are most popular, and for South Africa to be taking advantage of this business is really good. In the long run they could possibly take over the farming industry and make it a lot bigger and better.
This article is interesting. It reminds me of an article that we read up on in Grotini's class about the mud some parts of Africa and how it takes a special type of treatment to harvest anything from the soil. The soil is natural and the farmers refused to use non conventional methods to grow anything from because it strayed away from tradition like in "Things Fall Apart" and the yam harvest. But there have recently been solutions to this problem that won interfere with tradition and that will restore some of Africa's economy since so much comes from the soil that is crucial to the quality of life of many villagers.
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