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Johor, Malaysia: An hour in a queue at a durian farm, and no durian

A friend took us to an organic durian farm in Johor. We queued for an hour in the heat, left with nothing, and learned how the good durian actually gets picked.

Our friend Eddie in Johor knows how much Dileep likes durian, so he arranged a morning at an organic durian farm. Durian eaten at the farm beats durian bought anywhere else, and that was the whole plan.

We got there at 10am on a Saturday. So did several coachloads of people from Singapore and China, all of them ready to pay properly for the good stuff.

A farm worker in a yellow hard hat and yellow rubber boots wheeling a barrow piled with green durians past a queue of waiting visitors
A barrow going past the queue. Not, as it turned out, to us.

We stood in that queue for an hour and got nowhere. People started peeling off in the heat, and eventually we did the same. No durian.

What we learned standing there

The farmer explained how it works, and it explains a lot about why farm durian tastes different.

  • Durian isn’t picked. It falls, into nets strung between the trees, so nothing hits the ground.
  • Pulling one off the tree by hand isn’t allowed. Only naturally fallen fruit gets sold, which is how they keep the standard up.
  • Everything that dropped overnight is there in the morning. Turn up at 7am on a weekday and you’re eating the best of it.
  • 10am on a Saturday, which is what we did, is the worst slot there is.
Tall durian trees in an orchard in Johor with green netting strung between the trunks a few feet above the grass to catch falling fruit
The nets between the trees. That’s the whole harvesting system.

Walking the orchard was worth the trip on its own. The trees are tall, the fruit hangs a long way up, and the nets underneath make sense the moment you see them.

Durian in Malaysia

People here say durian is heating, that it warms you from the inside, and they mean it. The season is short and it turns into an event: durian festivals, families out at night, grandparents and teenagers all eating together off a plastic table.

If you want to know what you’re actually choosing between, we wrote up the durian varieties worth knowing. There’s more of the state in Johor Bahru, and the rest is on our Malaysia page.