Where the Nelliyampathy oranges actually grow

Every account of Nelliyampathy mentions the oranges, and a surprising number of people drive up, look at tea, and go home again without ever finding one. The trees are on a state farm a few hundred metres below the settlement, and it is open, ticketed and worth an hour.

What is actually there

Seven acres of mandarin — about seven thousand trees — which is the part everyone comes for and the smallest interesting thing about the place. Twenty-seven acres are under passion fruit. Twenty-three are under other fruit, including a planted fruit forest of fifty varieties: lychee, avocado, rambutan, longan, loquat, milk fruit, velvet apple and surinam cherry beside guava, water apple and mango. Ten hectares are winter vegetables.

The vegetables are the surprise

Cabbage, violet cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, radish, carrot, beetroot, lettuce, Chinese cabbage, capsicum, beans, green peas, butter bean and Kashmiri garlic, all of them growing in Palakkad district, because the plateau is high enough to hold a real winter. They are raised by precision farming rather than broadcast, and in the polyhouses you can see what that means: raised beds edged with timber, drip lines down every row, and gerberas standing among the greens.

And a factory

At one end of the site the passion fruit is turned into squash, jam, jelly, pickle and ready-to-drink bottles, with the jelly made from the tough outer rind that would otherwise be thrown away. That processing unit is most of the difference between what this farm was in its lean decades — withering trees, labour it could not hold, elephants in the crop — and what it is now.

Going

Entry was reported by Malayala Manorama in May 2025 at Rs 25 for adults and Rs 10 for children, free under seven, open every day. Take cash. Come in a winter morning, when both the mandarins and the vegetables are in the ground and before the cloud closes the plateau. In February the farm runs its Natura festival and the whole hill fills up. It is a few hundred metres below the settlement and about ten minutes on foot.