10 questions for David Wiseman

David Wiseman, a British research scientist in Dallas, Texas, is the owner of Zaide Reuven’s Esrog Farm.

How did you get started?

I was in a gemara shiur on Hoshana Rabbah, and since everyone had bentsched lulav and esrog, someone said, “Let’s taste it.” I saw seeds and asked if I can take them home to plant. I forgot all about it, but a few months later, I went to clean out my garage and there are these little trees. I started selling esrog trees as houseplants, along with a book I wrote about esrogim.

When did you go commercial?

About 15 years ago, I got a call from a lady in Newark who wanted esrogim for her church for Halloween. Pardon? Halloween is a pagan celebration of the fall festival, and her church decided to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles — Succos — because they wanted to do something wholesome, keep the kids off the streets. I asked a sh’eilah before I started selling her posul esrogim. And then it was, why not sell kosher ones? We now supply the major shuls in Dallas and we have a steady and growing clientele on the internet. It’s an interesting story, to say a church choir leader launched this.

Have you had issues with arba minim shipments from suppliers?

Most of our esrogim come from the Kirkpatrick citrus farm in California. Rabbi Yaakov Shlomo Rothberg is a partner there, and we get a smaller number — Yanover, Moroccan, and Israeli — from other suppliers. Every few years there might be a problem with one of the minim — poor crop, quality, whatever. One year the hadassim didn’t look too good, we had a whole team of kollel men, rabbanim, and others opening each package and checking every stem. Aravos are the most sensitive to temperature and storage, and the year of 9/11, with all the plane travel issues, they arrived in a very poor state. We didn’t want to have that again, so now we grow our own as well, as a backup and for hoshanos; we can supply the whole of Dallas if need be. And lulavim we used to get from Egypt but recently it’s from California.