Harvesting Coffee at Home
Those who have followed our years-long effort to try growing coffee should be pretty excited to know that our first coffee beans are ripening. We will harvest them, dry them and roast them into our first pot of organic home-grown coffee this week. More importantly: every part of this experiment has been fun.
The plants themselves are beautiful. Their thick, glossy leaves and the trees’ interesting shapes are pleasant to look at. They are pest-resistant plants that are very easy to care for. They don’t need a ton of light, and need to avoid direct Sun, because their native habitat is the shade of the rain forest. The only thing challenging about them is that they do everything very slowly.
The trees themselves do not begin to flower until they are several years old. Then, once you get flowers that turn to beans, the beans take another 8 - 10 months to ripen. So, growing your own coffee is a long-term project. We are super-excited to be getting ready to sample our first home-grown coffee!
(Side note: as we prepare to move to Vermont in the Spring, two of our largest coffee trees will be needing new homes. If you are interested, drop us a note.)