Gadenin日本語Get the appThree harvests from one shrub
Japanese pepper is picked at three quite different stages, and knowing which one you are aiming at decides what you do in a given week. Young leaves come first, in spring, from any plant of either sex. The flower clusters follow immediately, again from either sex, and are picked as whole sprays while still tight. The berries themselves come only from a pollinated female, swelling through early summer and ripening in autumn.
That last point is the one that catches almost everyone out. Male and female flowers are borne on separate plants, so a single shrub bought on its own will flower every spring and never set a single peppercorn. There is nothing wrong with such a plant; it simply cannot fruit without a male within pollinating distance, roughly fifty feet (15 m) or closer, flowering at the same time. If your plant has flowered for three years without fruiting, this is the reason, not the soil and not the feeding.
A young plant should be left to build itself before it is picked hard. Take a handful of leaves in the first two years and nothing else. From the third year on, a healthy shrub tolerates having a quarter of its new leaf growth removed across a season without checking.
| Harvest | When | What to look for | How much to take |
|---|---|---|---|
| Young leaves | Spring, as shoots extend | Soft, fully unfolded leaflets, bright and pliable | Up to a quarter of new growth over the season |
| Flower sprays | Spring, at the very start of flowering | Whole clusters still tight, before the flowers open fully | A few sprays from a female; freely from a male |
| Green berries | Early to mid summer | Pea-sized, firm, uniformly green, seed inside still soft | Whole clusters, cut with a short stalk |
| Ripe husks | Autumn | Husks turned red-brown and starting to split open | Whole clusters, once splitting has begun |
Picking leaves without spoiling the shrub
Leaves are at their best when the shoot has just finished extending and the leaflets are fully open but still soft enough to fold without cracking. Older leaves later in the season get leathery and lose the bright top note. A second flush of usable young leaves usually follows any light trimming you do in early summer, which is a good reason to shape the plant then rather than never.
Take individual leaves or short leafy tips, spread across the whole plant rather than stripping one branch bare. Stripping a branch removes the buds that would have made next year's wood and leaves a bald arm you will be looking at for years. Leave the shoot tips on any branch you want to extend.
Leaves keep for only a few days fresh, wrapped loosely and kept cool. They freeze reasonably well laid flat in a bag. Drying them is a poor option, since most of what makes them worth picking disappears with the moisture.
Green berries: the short window
Green berries are the harvest with the tightest timing. Pick them while the whole cluster is uniformly green and firm, at roughly the size of a small pea, when the seed inside is still soft and pale rather than hard and black. Squeeze one between finger and thumb; if it gives slightly and the inside is white, you are on time. Once you can feel a hard bead inside, the window has passed and the berries are heading for the autumn harvest instead.
Cut whole clusters with a short length of stalk rather than pulling individual berries, which tears the fine wood behind them. Strip the berries off the stalks afterwards, sitting down, in one go. Stalks left among the berries are woody and unpleasant.
Green berries do not keep. Use them within a day or two, or blanch them briefly and freeze them in small portions. Freezing is genuinely good here, and a season's worth takes very little space.
- Test one berry before you pick the lot Cut a single berry in half. A soft, pale, undeveloped seed means pick now; a firm dark seed means leave the cluster for the autumn husk harvest.
- Cut clusters, do not pull berries Use snips and take the cluster with a stub of stalk. Pulling strips bark from the thin fruiting wood and costs you next year's crop on that branch.
- Destalk the same day The clusters are easy to break up while fresh and much fiddlier once they have wilted. Discard every piece of green stalk.
- Freeze in small portions Spread them on a tray to freeze loose, then bag them. Portions the size of a spoonful are far more useful than one solid block.
The autumn husk: what you keep and what you throw away
The spice everyone means by the name is the husk, not the seed. As the berries ripen through autumn they turn from green to a dull red-brown, and each one eventually splits along a seam to reveal a single shiny black seed sitting inside. That seed is hard, oily and bitter, and it is discarded. What you keep is the split, papery husk around it.
Pick whole clusters once a good proportion of the berries on them have started to split, not before. Underripe husks are thin and disappointing. Spread the clusters in a single layer somewhere warm, dry and airy, out of direct sun, for several days to a week. As they dry the husks open the rest of the way and the seeds fall free or shake out easily.
Separating them is a job for a bowl and a dry day. Rub the dried clusters between your palms over a bowl, then tip the mixture from one bowl to another in front of a fan or a light breeze: the light husk fragments blow to the side and the heavy black seeds drop straight down. Sieve out the last of the stalk fragments. Store the finished husks whole in a sealed jar in the dark and grind them only as you need them, since ground husk fades within weeks.
Do not skip the drying stage in the hope of separating fresh berries. Fresh husk and fresh seed are stuck together and neither will separate cleanly; a week of drying does the work for you.
Yields, records and reading a poor year
A well-grown female shrub of five or six years might give a few ounces (100 grams or so) of dried husk in a good year, and considerably less in a bad one. Yield swings hard from year to year, mostly because a late frost during flowering wipes out the pollination window and occasionally because the male plant flowered a week out of step.
Note down the date you first picked leaves, the date you took green berries and the date the husks first split, and note the weight of the dried husk. Three years of those four numbers will tell you more about your own conditions than any general guide, and they let you tell a genuinely poor season from a plant that is failing.
If a female plant sets fruit that then drops while still small and green, suspect incomplete pollination or a dry spell during the swelling period. If it sets nothing at all, year after year, look for the missing male rather than at the plant in front of you.