Following a long experience in the universities as professors and researchers, we, as husband and wife, changed sectors to realize our goal of producing agricultural products. We will share our story of establishing the orchard in the coming days.
We started this journey in 2013 by searching for a piece of land in the Aegean region of Turkey. We traveled to various towns in the region. From Dikili in the north to Milas and Bodrum in the south. Finally we found our current land in 2015 just southeast of İzmir, between Torbalı and Bayındır.
This is picture of the land when we bought it. It already had some fifty year-old olive trees on it. But we wanted to try something new in addition to olives. Thus, the long search started for the right fruit based on the soil tests, weather conditions, etc. And finally we tasted hosui pear at a nursery and said “yes, this is the one”. We currently have about 12 acres of Asian pears of three different varieties- hosui, kosui and chojuro. We chose to name them ELMUT because they have the shape of an apple and texture of pears. ELMUT comes from combining elma (apple in Turkish) and armut (pear in Turkish). However, they do not taste like any variety of apples or pears, and they are not hybrid.
But of course,the main task is to introduce them to the Turkish market. How are we going sell a fruit no one really knows in Turkey? We searched for other producers in Turkey, talked to them and finally decided to take the chance. Our trees are three and half years old; we had fruits from them last year and this year. The market started to learn about them, albeit slower than we wished. .
Spring is in the air, trees are blossoming which is how the orchard looks now
In this website, we will continue to share our story as time goes by.
So long for now,
