Phoenix Garden Yuzu

Our Story

The farmer who had never seen a yuzu tree

Phoenix Garden Yuzu is a first-generation farm. It began with a glass of juice on a bad day at a desk in the city.

Before the farm

Kochi Prefecture grows more yuzu than anywhere else in Japan. I was born there, but my family were not farmers, and as a child I never thought about it: yuzu was simply always nearby.

University and then work took me away to the city. On the hard days — and there were many — I drank yuzu juice to get myself through. The hours grew longer, the meals came from convenience stores, and eventually my body gave out. Recovering, and rebuilding the way I ate, I remembered the juice.

I realised I had never once seen yuzu growing on a tree. I asked a friend if I could join a harvest. I went for a day out of curiosity, and came back having decided to grow yuzu and sell it — struck by how beautiful the fruit was, and by how much I enjoyed picking it.

From that day to this

  1. 2019

    Back to Kochi

    After years in the city, I returned to Kochi Prefecture — the region that grows more yuzu than anywhere else in Japan.

  2. 2020

    The first 400 trees

    In March, around 400 yuzu saplings went into 0.7 hectares of ground. I had grown other crops for a year; citrus was new ground.

  3. 2021–2025

    Groves handed over

    As older growers in the valley scale back or retire, their groves are placed in my care one by one.

  4. 2026

    Two hectares, one thousand trees

    The farm now works about 2 hectares — roughly 1,000 yuzu trees, all grown by one person, with friends and travellers helping through the harvest.

Bundles of bare-root yuzu saplings, their roots wrapped in straw, delivered onto freshly levelled ground.
Where it began — the ground ready at last, and the first yuzu saplings just delivered, roots wrapped in straw, waiting to be planted.

What the first year taught

The first year was the hardest of the six. That 0.7-hectare field felt enormous to me — I had never farmed citrus, and I planted 400 trees into it knowing almost nothing about the crop. I drove an excavator for the first time with no practice, on the day I needed it.

The ground had been compacted by machinery long before I arrived, and the young trees began to die — a few at a time, slowly, in front of me. Some trees are still lost each year. These days the machine work is simply part of farming, and the effort goes into the ground itself: opening the soil so that roots can move, watering through dry spells, and feeding with plant- and animal-based fertiliser so that I am growing the soil and not only the tree.

I use both on purpose: soil fed on one thing alone grows weak — against heat, heavy rain, drought and disease. Balance below the ground is what steadies the tree above it.

Waterlogged, compacted bare ground with stones, where rainwater sits in pools instead of draining.
The ground as I found it: packed hard by the machines, holding water where roots needed air.
A small excavator standing in a bare field in falling snow, with forested mountains behind.
Six years after learning the controls the hard way, I bought an excavator of my own — December 2025. My partner.

Groves handed over

Kochi is ageing faster than most of Japan. Around me, growers in their seventies and eighties began cutting back their groves, and then stopping altogether. One by one, those groves were put into my hands.

The farm now covers about 2 hectares — roughly 1,000 trees, and I grow all of them. Through harvest and other busy weeks, friends and travellers from overseas come to pick alongside me, and my family help with the cartons. The grading I do alone.

Old yuzu trunks covered in moss, cut back, with frost on the ground and morning light on the hills behind.
An old grove passed into my care — trees past their best, felled to clear the ground for replanting.
A single white yuzu blossom with yellow stamens, open against dark green leaves.
Young yuzu fruit on the branch, each one wrapped in a white cloth bag.

One fruit in a hundred

Yuzu sets fruit without pollination, and about 90% of what sets falls from the tree on its own. Leaving all of the remaining 10% to ripen would exhaust the tree: the following year, or the year after, it would carry almost nothing.

So roughly 30% of that 10% is thinned by hand. Where the fruit sits on the branch, and how many are left together, changes how hard the tree has to work — so every tree on the farm is walked twice a year for this alone.

Fruit chosen for the finest grade is then bagged: a black-and-white cloth sleeve tied over each one, shading it from sunburn and shielding it from the winds that come with the typhoon season. Yuzu trees carry long thorns, and a typhoon can make a tree scar its own fruit. What comes through all of it — unblemished, unmarked, free of disease — is about one fruit in a hundred.

Those are the ones that go to Singapore.

An open palm holding a small misshapen green yuzu next to a sound one, with the grove blurred behind.
The judgement, made fruit by fruit: the misshapen one is thinned away; the sound one stays.

Cold nights, and what they are for

The groves are scattered across the hills, the lowest of them at about 180 metres. Kochi is a warm part of Japan — summer afternoons can reach 40°C, the heat now hangs on into autumn, and hail has come down on the trees more than once. Yet the annual average low is around 3°C, snow falls two or three times a winter, and a few centimetres will settle before it goes.

That swing is hard on the tree and hard on the fruit. Growers here will tell you it is also what builds the aroma. So what do you do with a thing that hurts the tree and makes the fruit at the same time? The answer has not been to shelter the trees from it, but to make them strong enough to take it: water in the dry months, compost worked into the soil, and time.

Frost-whitened grass in front of yuzu trees carrying golden fruit at harvest time.

Visitors

Word has travelled further than the fruit has. Growers, buyers and the simply curious have come to walk the groves from Canada, Russia, the United States, Germany and Taiwan.

Not every visitor can be turned into a customer — export rules, the size of a single farm's harvest, and price all get in the way. Those are problems to be solved one at a time, and they are being solved one at a time.

A terraced field covered edge to edge in silver mulch, with rows of young yuzu trees and green hills behind.
The field planted in 2022 — silver mulch from edge to edge, a lesson carried forward from the first two years.

Why Phoenix Garden

Difficulty comes more than once in a lifetime. The name is a promise about what happens next: to rise again however many times it takes, to fly as high as the work will carry it, and to put this fruit into the hands of people all over the world.

And Garden, because this was never meant to be only a place where a crop is grown. It is meant to be a place where people gather.

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