Boholano Way of Harvesting Buko

It was Saturday when we had a youth activity in the church and we decided to harvest some young coconuts or Buko as we locally refer to it here in our province. If you are from the Philippines, I am pretty sure you have seen one and have eaten this multiple times already. The country is a tropical one filled with coconut trees and we here in Bohol are also blessed to have a great number of coconut trees all around the province.

In our town, we have neighbors who own numerous trees, and mid of last year, one of our neighbors offered their 20 trees in exchange for a certain amount of money, we call it prenda, sangla or pledge. We have no specific number of months or years before they'd give us back the money but as long as the money has not been returned, we have the right to the trees.

So, we hired someone to climb and harvest the young coconuts and we will be taking the water and the meat inside.

The Boholano way of harvesting the young coconuts requires knocking on the fruit. It requires experience and familiarity for one to know which is a young coconut, the perfect meat depends now on the one who's harvesting them. They say knock one out of the whole bunch and they'll all have the same meat.

Our coconut picker brought with him a long bolo, this sure looks sharp enough to cut the coconut branch and open the coconut fruit too. The bolo has a cover, thank goodness! He wrapped it around his hips as he climb on the trees, he climbed six trees and harvested more than 20 buko. He was having a hard time with some of the trees not having any steps for him to hold on so he had to make them inside on his way up.

We gathered the buko and he opened it for us. Indeed, the bolo was sharp! He could open it in just one hit! Then we brought with us containers too for the water and the meat, we also had some scrapers to easily get the buko meat out! I am quite happy to find really smooth and tender meat!

My mother on the other hand is a fan of the buko water so she kept on asking and testing each newly picked buko for a taste test. She was satisfied as the water was sweet most of the time! It took us an hour and we were back home with delicious ingredients for our snack that afternoon.