My Mother grew up just outside of a small town about 50 miles south of Dallas, Texas.  Cotton was King during that time and her Father raised it on the fifty acres he rented.  I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard stories of “hoeing” cotton to remove the weeds.  However, cotton picking time was apparently the worst of all.  A summer time job, it was hot, dirty and the rows of plants, endless.

Coffee cannot be grown in Texas.  It needs a cooler climate, but if it were, Mom’s stories would have certainly been different!  This morning as I walked toward our patch of coffee trees in Boquete, Panama, the temperature was about 70 degrees, with a consistent wind to further cool things down.  At an altitude of about 4,500 feet, our coffee is high-quality and has been cared for to insure that.

It is fertilized twice a year; in April and September.  Most growers also spray for fungus and insects to keep the natural enemies at bay.  So the preparations have been completed and Mother Nature has cooperated, and it is time to pick, then process the coffee.  Unlike cotton or other food products, such as corn, coffee beans are picked individually when ready, indicated by a rich red color.  In this state of ripeness, they are called “coffee cherries” and are super rich in antioxidants.  Not edible when picked, a tea can be made to harvest the antioxidants for consumption.

The green fruit are left on the tree to ripen until another day.  In general, workers will comb the trees for cherries about four separate times, perhaps a week apart.  When the harvest is complete, hardy trees can produce about 500 pounds of coffee per acre.   We have about two-thirds of an acre planted, and will expect to pick about 300 pounds in all.

Because coffee is grown at altitude, much of the plantings have been done on steep mountain sides.  You can see this in the picture of our trees. Therefore, the workers have to be part mountain goat to labor in such fields.  Plus, they must be strong!  A gunny sack-sized bag of coffee cherries weighs about one hundred pounds.  As you can see in the picture, the picking is done with a bucket, sometimes tied around the worker’s waist to allow the beans to just be dropped instead of placing a handful at a time into a container on the ground.   However, regardless of the technique used to fill the bucket, the beans are poured into a larger sack for transportation and storage, and hauled down the mountain on the back of a picker.

Once gathered, processing of the coffee needs to be started within two or three days.  I will take today’s harvest to a friend’s set up likely tomorrow to begin the process, which kicks off with a soak.  Watch for the next installment of this series on coffee!

By the way, the worker in the picture is Ramon.  We share him with two neighbors as our “can do anything” employee.  He can weld, do plumbing, landscaping, care for coffee and much more.  He is absolutely fantastic!