Ambrosio · Lombardy
Twenty thousand trees under glass outside Milan. Six weeks of harvest a year. Fruit picked ripe and eaten within days — not shipped green from twelve thousand kilometres away.
What this is
Litchi chinensis wants a subtropical winter — cool and dry enough to set flower buds, never cold enough to freeze. Sicily and Calabria can just about offer that outdoors. The Po valley cannot: our January nights go well below zero, and an unprotected lychee would be dead in its first winter.
So the orchard lives in three glasshouses. Not a novelty — a working farm, with a real crop, a real season, and fruit that goes to Milanese kitchens the same week it is cut. As far as we know, nobody else in Italy grows lychee commercially at this latitude.
Eighty hectares of this, and six weeks to pick all of it.
The orchard
The hard part is not keeping a lychee warm. It is making it cold enough, at the right time, for exactly long enough.
From November the houses are vented down to 8–12 °C at night and held dry. Without that rest the trees put on leaf instead of flower, and there is no crop at all.
Frost protection runs on a biomass boiler and the thermal mass of the floor. We heat to survive February, not to force an early season.
Two hives per house go in as the panicles open. Lychee flowers are small, unshowy and entirely dependent on insects — no bees, no fruit.
Drip irrigation on soil-moisture sensors, fed by collected roof runoff. A closed roof turns out to be a very large rainwater catchment.
The orchard year
One crop a year, and most of the work sits either side of it. The picking itself is six weeks.
What we grow
Deep carmine deepening to purple at the stem, pebbled shell with sharp, well-defined tubercles.
Our benchmark and the bulk of the crop. Dense, crisp flesh with real acidity behind the sweetness, so it finishes clean rather than cloying. If you have only ever eaten lychee from a tin, this is the one that rearranges your idea of the fruit.
70% of the orchard — around 420 tonnes a season
also sold as No Mai Chee
Rounder and slightly squat, a duller brick red with a fine, close-set shell that feels almost leathery.
The cultivar the Chinese trade has rated above all others for centuries, and the reason is in the eating: very high sugar, almost no acid, and a chewy density closer to a fresh date than to the Kwai May. It is late, it is shy to set, and it sells for a good deal more. It closes the season.
30% of the orchard — around 180 tonnes a season
Where to find it
Lychee does not ripen after picking and does not keep. Within three days the shell browns; the fruit underneath is still good, but it no longer looks like the thing you want to put in front of a customer. That single fact decides how we sell.
So everything moves on the shortest route we can find. The bulk of the crop goes to the wholesale markets and to distributors who can get it onto a counter within forty-eight hours; the rest goes to restaurants and greengrocers around Milan, and to the farm shop during harvest. Nothing sits in a cold store waiting for a better price, and nothing leaves by air. When the six weeks are over, it is over until next June.
