Will it be a healthy harvest? We’ll see… It’s coffee harvest time on our farm in Biolley, Costa Rica and our worker Ricardo has a used Jeep we bought for the farm and a new cart to haul the coffee cherries to San Vito, Costa Rica to the coffee processing plant.
He is very proud of the new cart and it is very useful he says for the farm in general. We had it built to transport the goats or a cow or two if needed as well as for hauling the coffee and other farm items. By being able to haul the coffee cherries to San Vito, rather than the company picking up the cherries, Ricardo can transport them to the plant and make more money for the cherries.
Once we are full time on the property, we will begin to slowly transform the coffee production by getting an organic label for our coffee. It is a two year process. Our coffee beans will be, fair trade (our employees have full time jobs with us and all the equipment, facilities they need. We will split profits with our two workers from the coffee beans at 50/50 once the farm expenses are covered. Our workers receive the legal wage, medical and insurance benefits as well as a pension and Christmas bonus. They have two week vacations each year.) We talk more about the workers in earlier blog entries.
Ricardo uses his old truck around the farm. It is not legal to drive on the pavement, but it works for up here in the mountains on farming roads. Ricardo is loading up Rigo with slime! No just kidding…. Rigo really does look like he has ghost buster equipment on though (see photo below).The spray is not a toxic chemical, pesticide or herbicide! It is an organic fertilizer matter that is sprayed on the leaves of the plants. The leaves need it! Ricardo and Rigo wear jeans and boots when they work. This is to keep from getting snake bites or bites from banana spiders. They also always wear hats in the sun. These guys really know how to stay safe when they work the coffee fields!
Rigo is spraying the leaves with the organic leaf fertilizer. The farmer next to us, don Roberto, makes this organic fertilizer for the coffee leaves and sells it to nearby farmers. The leaves need the nutrients! We are very happy that Don Roberto and doña Betty our farmer neighbors both have organic farms! They are right next to us on either side. Down our pasture and across from our farm is the river and to the other side at a good enough distance from the farmer there and he is not growing a crop, just pasture for cows so we are pretty sure he is not using chemicals there.
These are the coffee plants that were cut back into stumps. These coffee plants are cut back to the stump, then they grow for 6 weeks of new foliage, after that they are cut back to the stump one more time and then they are allowed to grow. As you can see from the last Costa Rica farm post, these plants are growing back healthy, hearty leaves and are very lush! Ricardo and Rigo use corn husks and rice in the coffee fields. The fields have quite a bit of mature and immature material for their natural compost. We will put sheep (in the near future) in the coffee fields to cut back on the grass and jungle between the coffee rows and to provide a natural manure to fertilize the plants. We’ll move the sheep down by the lower pasture and river banks to keep the banks clear for enjoying the river. W’ell alternate days for the coffee fields and river banks. Or we just might get enough sheep to do both at the same time.
Shade grown coffee amongst the hardwood trees. We do trim the trees back during the dry season but they grow back with abundance very quickly!
The next series of photos shows the coffee stages of growth. From the beginning of the flowering stage to the maturity of the coffee cherries, the leaves must stay healthy to provide extra nutrients to the coffee plant. The following is a sequential set of photos of our coffee plants going through the phases up to the harvest from flowering to full maturity!
1. Coffee plant flowering:
2. Immature coffee cherries:
3. Semi-mature coffee plant has immature green, maturing yellow and mature red cherries! The coffee is harvested in three stages throughout the season. Usually in Sept. Oct. and late Nov. early December.
4. Mature coffee is a brilliant cherry color. The fruit is called the coffee cherry. This plant is showing a brilliant red outcome!
Harvest time! The coffee plant loses it’s leaves when it is reaching a heightened maturity. These were the plants that Rigo and Ricardo maintained as best they could and they did great! They wanted to trim back much of these plants during the trimming season, but they just couldn’t get to them because of the shape the plants were in, it took them much longer just to get through half of the field to trim back. Next year in 2010, Rigo and Ricardo will trim these plants in the phots back and we will begin our Kona method of pruning the coffee plants the following year in 2011. I talk about this in other posts as the 1,2 3 method where every third row gets a break from producing coffee each year. The yield on the other two thirds is higher than if all three rows grew coffee. The different row levels also help to provide shade for the coffee plants.
Costa Rica is probably one of the most beautiful places on Earth! As always we send all our readers best wishes and thoughts of……..
Pura Vida!
