Photos by Arif Susanto, M. Irwan, and Teguh Sudarisman
Slowly but surely, Poncokusumo is replacing Batu as the main apple-producing center in Malang, partly due to the efforts of the village's young people.
The
weather gradually got cooler as the motorcycles brought Arif and me
closer to our destination. I could feel the difference even though
I was wearing a jacket. I was carried by Dul on his bike, and Arif
was carried by Guguh. The two of them met us that morning at the Tumpang
crossroads, 24 kilometers east of Malang, to take us on a tour of the
apple orchards in their village, Poncokusumo.
It was cool because the village lies between 800 and 1100 meters above sea level; it's the last village before you enter the forest on the west side of Mount Semeru. The village also offers an alternate approach for hikers to the Semeru, the highest volcano on Java, though it is not recognized by the management of the Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park because the terrain is so difficult.
As we entered Poncokusumo, I was impressed by the village's tidiness. The roads and alleyways were all wide enough for a car to enter, and neat houses lined both sides of the road. And in front of nearly every house, there were apple trees. Some were just blossoming, while others already had fruit. This was no surprise, since 90 percent of the village's residents are apple farmers.
"The village is tidy because it used to be a Dutch hill station," explained Bambang Mulyono, the village head. He also told us that apples were introduced to the village by a Dutchman, Mr. Riben, in the early 1960s. The village itself has been there since the days of the Hindu Mataram kingdom, around 800 AD, and is where Begawan Poncokusumo taught his pupils.
Dul phoned someone and learned that there was to be an apple harvest that morning. The four of us jumped back on our bikes, and headed toward the orchard. After we passed the last houses at the eastern edge of the village, on both sides of the road there was nothing but apples, apple orchards, and more apples. And these apple trees are not like the ones you might have seen in the movie The Cider House Rules, which are so tall the fruit pickers have to use ladders; here the apple trees are only two or three meters tall, and many of the apples are on low-hanging branches not far from the ground.
The apple orchards are everywhere; they stretch from the road before you enter the village all the way to Bukit Brak on the east, from where we could clearly see the peak of Semeru. To get there, we hiked along a path through a pine forest. The village has around 500 hectares of apple orchards in all. The most popular variety is the pale green Manalagi, followed by the pink and green Rome Beauty. Other less common apple varieties also found here include Ana, Royal Red, Australia, and Yonagi.
We parked the bikes when we saw a group of people in an apple orchard
whose trees were all bare and nearly leafless. I thought they were
harvesting apples; in fact, they were performing an operation called
ngrempesi, shaking the leaves off the trees by hand to "force" the
apple trees to put out new shoots. This is usually done at the same
time they prune off the old shoots, so that all the buds in the orchard
grow at the same rate.
This ngrempesi operation, which the local people learned from the Dutch, is done after the apple harvest. It encourages the apple trees to put out new buds, blossom, and bear fruit again almost immediately. In subtropical countries, apple trees bear fruit only once a year, but in tropical countries like Indonesia, where the climate does not vary much, with the help of this technique the trees can bear fruit twice a year. For Manalagi apples, it's only around four months from ngrempesi until the next harvest; for Rome Beauties, it takes six months.
