(Torreilles) “This is my jewel! »: Fred Morlot is proud to unveil a variety of sugar cane from Réunion that he pampers in his greenhouses at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains.
With his partner Lili Blandin, this 51-year-old nurseryman embarked on the acclimatization of fruits, vegetables and herbs from the Indian Ocean island to the Mediterranean climate of the Perpignan region in 2017.
Near Toulouse, Violaine Percie de Sert and her husband Bruno Celsi, for their part, began to produce aloe arborescens, a plant native to South Africa highly prized for its medicinal properties. Until then, this couple had limited themselves to marketing, as a dietary supplement, leaves from the Canaries.
In the era of climate change, these pioneers are convinced of the need to “produce organic and local” and “invent” the short circuit for exotic products.
“We said to ourselves that it was more coherent, when we offer an organic product, to produce locally rather than have leaves come by plane every week”, explains Bruno, former employee of aeronautics like his. spouse.
Aloe arborescens, “cousin of aloe vera”, contains “20 times more active products”, specifies Violaine, explaining that followers mix the leaves to make juice.
Organic, therefore local
Lili and Fred took the turn after a trip to Reunion. She was then a “retraining nurse” and he was a “nurseryman with thirty years of work” in Torreilles, a neighboring village of Barcarès.
“By chance in 2013, a friend asked me to do the garden of his new restaurant in Réunion,” says Fred. On the island, the couple is amazed by the wealth of market stalls and the flavors of Creole cuisine.
“I had an enlightenment for this island, for the people,” says Lili. She then brought back a bunch of bananas in her luggage. “While tasting a fruit, my son said to me: ‘This is the real taste of bananas! ”… Our decision was made to embark on this project. ”
Violaine and Bruno took the plunge when their producer retired from Tenerife in 2015. They became farmers. It still took them “two or three years” of trial and error to successfully acclimatize the plant in a greenhouse in the Toulouse region.
Flavors of the islands
In the Pyrénées-Orientales, Lili and Fred have succeeded in recreating the climate of Réunion in eleven greenhouses and today cultivate more than sixty tropical products there.
“Plants communicate with each other. They develop pest control strategies, ”enthuses Fred, who advocates“ the benefits of polyculture ”while surveying his plantations of ginger, mangoes, herbs, and so on.
Asked about the ability of his banana trees to withstand negative temperatures in unheated greenhouses, he simply replies that it is his “secret”. It is limited to evoking “soil preparation” so that the plant has what it “needs to fight against stress on its own”.
This new farmer prefers to talk about the richness of flavors, shows “apples in the air”, a kind of potatoes that grow on the surface, talks about “jambrosades, small fruits that exhale a scent of rose” and affirms that he is essential to pick “at maturity”.
“As in Reunion, we pollinate the dragon fruit by hand at night because here we do not have the bat that does the job”, jokes the ex-nurse in front of the magnificent red fruit of a thread-like cactus .
Lionel Giraud, one of the starred chefs who supplies himself there, considers that it is a luxury to have “exotic fruits in short supply”.
They allow this great chef from Narbonne, anxious to work only with local products of excellence, to broaden his palette of flavors.
“I practice ‘living cuisine’ made up day by day, with what nature offers us,” he explains, referring to “a passion fruit bellows” or “a guava soup”.
One downside: these demanding customers would like “more products”. To which Lili and Fred answer that they are preparing “something” for 2024. But it’s still a secret …