Fruit in season - but when are the seasons?

Sorry about the long absence, I was thinking about a cracking subject to re-install my presence on the blog, but you can guess from the title that it only goes so far....

Fruit. All of us eat it, all of us love it and all of us are keen to get a bargain price. In the early days, only the fruit in season was available, then globalisation took off and now you can get pineapples, oranges and dragon fruit any day of the year in your local Marks & Spencer. The campaign of only buying fruit in season in Europe is only successful to a certain extent and that is manly price-related (unfortunately). Having farmer's roots, I pride myself with roughly knowing when apples, cherries, strawberries and blackberries are in season. But since our arrival in China I had to re-evaluate my knowledge: Fruit is very much seasonal here, and even in the expensive Western supermarket with the glorious names of Jenny Lou and April Gourmet you won't find a watermelon in January. Fruit is sold according to seasons and comes from all over China. But what are the seasons here? That's exactly the point: China is so huge that we get "winter strawberries" which ripe in Yunnan (south of China) between December and March, watermelons from May to November, pineapples from November to March, Lychees from June to September......

Outside of work a little fruit stall has established itself which makes a killing selling fruit to diplomats. I paid about 2 Euros for a bag of Mangos (from Sichuan), an apple (no idea where it came from), two bananas from Hainan, lots of oranges from Yunnan and a bag of strawberries from Guilin. The sales girl happily explains to me on a daily basis where the fruit comes from and ends up giving me free fruit on top of my purchases (a clear sign that I'm paying too much). But the availability of fruit changes with the seasons. Great, isn't it?! You can look forward to the first strawberry of the year, when you see the pineapple sellers in the street it's nearly Christmas and the lychees announce the hot summer months.

Watermelon being my favourite favourite fruit of all times I'm pleased to announce that Mark already spotted the small kind yesterday. Ssummer is only around the corner.....