By Rui Hu, EDITOR

The end of Liqiu ushered in the annual bamboo shoot harvesting season in Jinfo Mountain, a world natural heritage site, where square bamboo shoots flourish. Due to their tender and fleshy quality, delicious flavor, and rich nutrition, they are known as the “King of Bamboo Shoots.” Bamboo shoot collectors have flocked to the dense forest to harvest this gift of nature.

Harvesting bamboo shoots is tough and requires specific methods. Normally, pickers will spend about 40 days in small wooden huts with severe conditions deep in the bamboo grove.

Generally, pickers cut down old bamboo trees to make the bamboo grove sparse and store fertilizers. For sustainable development, they leave the small and short ones to keep growing.

Lucky pickers can harvest more than 6,000 pieces of square bamboo shoots per day and earn an additional 7,000 to 10,000 yuan throughout the season.

There are more than 66.6 square kilometers of the square bamboo grove in Nanchuan District of Chongqing. That attracts more than 10,000 pickers every year during the harvesting season. Harvesting bamboo shoots have become a characteristic agricultural industry for the rural areas to get rid of poverty and become better off.

Source: CQCB
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