Fejø Frugt - the fruit sellers from Fejø 2022

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Fruit sellers from Fejø come to Nyhavn every Autumn to sell their freshly-harvested pears, apples and plums on the quayside. They also have fruit juice, plum marmelade and fruit vinegar from the island and they are more than happy to let you taste the fruit and to answer questions about their orchards and about the fruit they produce.

All the fruit is fantastic but, in particular, it’s the Clara pears that that seem to me to epitomise all that is distinct and best about Danish seasonal food They are a distinct, almost luminous green and are crisp with plenty of juice and are good as an easy snack or with cheese. I can’t remember ever seeing them in England and they are seen here in Denmark only at this time of year.

The boats and the fruit sellers are in Nyhavn from today and through to Sunday 11 September 2022.

Frugten fra Fejø

 

fruit from Fejø

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This morning two sailing ships came into the harbour loaded with boxes of fruit from Fejø.

Each year in September, immediately after the main harvest, growers from the island bring their fruit into Copenhagen with boxes of pears, apples and plums, and with several different varieties of each, to sell from the quayside of Nyhavn.

They have docked above the bridge, just where Lille Strandstræde comes into Nyhavn, so they are close, appropriately, to the house of the 18th-century sugar merchant Ludvig Ferdinand Rømer who imported raw sugar from the West Indies to be refined in his sugar works in the yard behind the house.

The arrival of the Fejø fruit growers gives a sense of what the harbour must have been like in the 18th and 19th century when citizens would have heard rumours about which ships had returned and would have come down to see the cargo they carried.

The growers from Fejø will be selling their fruit from the quayside in Nyhavn everyday through to Sunday 12 September.

 

this year there will be no fruit from Fejø in Nyhavn

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With Coronavirus still an ominous threat, more events are being postponed or cancelled.

Fruit growers from Fejø have decided to cancel their annual visit to Nyhavn which would have seen their old sailing boat set up at the quay of Nyhavn as an open-air market stall for a week in September.

Irma - part of the COOP group - has punnets of the small green pears that come from the island but somehow buying them from a supermarket is not the same …. I missed chatting to the growers and missed the chance to try different fruits and missed heading home loaded down with brown paper bags overflowing with plums and pears and apples.

Fruit from Fejø

fruit from Fejø

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Walking home in the early evening at the end of the week, I had to wait as the bridge over the centre of Nyhavn was just being raised for a two-masted boat to come through to reach the upper harbour. It was piled high with what looked like traditional fruit or vegetable boxes.

This was the fruit growers from the island of Fejø who come into the city for a week at the beginning of every September - after the harvest - and unload their produce to sell from the quay.

Wandering along later in the weekend there were boxes of pears, huge plums, several varieties of apples and other farm produce including apple juice.

Everyone was more than happy to chat - they are rightly proud of what they produce - and they explained that the small island - only about 8 kilometres east to west and around 5 kilometres across - is in the sound off the south coast of Sjælland but closer to the north shore of Lolland.

The clay soil is fertile but it’s the micro climate that is important with, generally, a slightly late onset of Spring - so after the frost that could damage the apple blossom - but summers have more sunshine than anywhere else in Denmark … or that was what I was told.

The fruit was, of course, incredibly fresh and all with distinct and strong flavours - I’m eating one of the apples right now.

When it comes to planning or thinking about the quality of day to day life in the city, this is exactly what the planners and the city and port authority should be encouraging.

Why not more trade on the harbour? In the past, with large and heavily loaded commercial shipping coming in and out of the main harbour there might have been a conflict but now why not much more produce delivered or sold from the harbour quays? Why can’t the port authority build transit stations at the north and south end of the harbour with some storage facilities so food and goods can be transferred from lorries to boats?

the fruit sellers of Fejø will be on the the quay on the north side of Nyhavn
until the 15 September