Either you love the wonderful smell of a durian or you hate it because of the pungent smelling fruit that smell like a gas leak.
I had the opportunity to get to pick durian in a small orchard owned by a relative. It’s not a commercial growing durian orchard for business purpose but a small orchard enough for own consumption. Best of all it’s pesticide free durians!
Picking durians is no easy task and it is a back breaking job. You don’t have to climb up a tree to pick but instead you just have to wait the fruit to drop to the ground. Durians usually drop randomly during early in the morning or late in the evening. Only naturally dropped durians are ripe enough to be eaten.
Unfortunately these trees are not grown in a orderly fashion and located on a sloping hill, so only manual labour is the only way to go. The older the durian trees are, the better tasting and drier meat it produced. Drier meat in a sense that the meat does not taste soggy when you bite on it.
Monkeys loves durian too and they come in a group. Setting of some fire crackers to scare them away.
In Malaysia we have dry season, wet season and ‘durian season’ which starts in June and ends in September where durians are abundant during these months. So there’s about 3 more months to go before I can get my hands on them again!