Linda and Ian Burow

Farmer rating (pending assessment by the PFA): AA
Supplying Food Connect since: 2006
Farm visited by Food Connect: Yes

Linda and Ian Burow live at Mount Cotton in the Redlandshire – making him one of our closest farmers of all. He is a fifth generation farmer and takes pride growing delicious avocados, mangoes, lychees and sprouts for us. Check out this ABC interview with Ian to learn more about his farm and the issues facing farmers in Australia today.

The 2009 – 2010 Lychee Season

Ian hates getting his photo taken, so when we finally snapped him, we thought we would make his picture extra large on the website! ha ha!

One of the best (and sometimes one of the hardest) parts of belonging to a CSA is waiting for the things that you love to come into season. Waiting for lychees this season was even more special as we got to watch Ian and Linda Burow’s fruit grow up stage by stage until they were ready to be picked, packed into your boxes and eaten!

From flowers to tiny fruit – Ian and Linda were kept busy at this stage protecting their baby lychees from fruit flies and making sure that the bush turkeys didn’t expose the delicate roots of the giant lychee trees to air. Just a few hours of exposure can kill the roots, so Ian checks them every day to make sure the thick layer of leaf litter under the trees is undisturbed.

Around Christmas time Ian covered the trees in big nets to keep the fruit bats from eating the ripening fruit. The nets stay up until the fruit is ready for picking, then come down so that the pickers can get to the fruit.

Picking lychees is a very precise task as any tiny cracks in the hard outer shell can cause the fruit to ferment within a couple of hours. Once they are picked they were taken to the shed and carefully checked for damage and sorted for size.

It was a great year for lychees, especially considering that some years the trees just don’t produce fruit at all, like the year before.