Saturday, November 19, 2016

Coffee Pickin' Time

Just a quick note....it's coffee time again. For some reason, the coffee cherries are ripening more evenly on certain trees, but not others. Not sure why. In the past the harvest period was more spread out.


But it surely looks pretty seeing the whole branch loaded with almost all bright red cherries. 


Above is one of the trees located in full, deep shade. As a result the tree growth is very open, sprawling, and leggy. But it still produces quite a bit of cherries, and as you can see. Almost all are ready to pick at the same time. This surely makes harvesting easy this time around. 

A while ago someone asked me why I planted so many coffee trees in the deep shade rather than a spot with more sun, since after all the sun-planted trees would produce twice a much coffee. My reason is twofold. First, I prefer the flavor of shade coffee. Second, it's a way to utilize the shady locations on my farm. There's a limited selection of crops that will grow in the shade, and coffee is one of them. 


2 comments:

  1. Do you make use of the berries? At one time I was making use of a product that was flavored with the berries and it was great.
    I hope you share the processing of your coffee in another blog.

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    Replies
    1. Presently I don't use the fleshy cherries for human food. At one time I used them to make an iced tea drink, but I got out of the habit. It was nice enough, but I tend to reach for mamaki leaves instead. Nowadays I simply add the spent cherries into the chicken feed cook pot, adding it to the rest of their daily stew.

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