Grow Coffee At Home (Seed to Cup Series)

How to grow coffee. Episode 1 of the 'Seed to Cup' series. Growing coffee, selecting seed, nurturing coffee seedlings, planting out are all covered to kick things off. Then, fertilizing, pruning, pests and diseases of coffee, flowering and fruiting are described. Given the right conditions, coffee is a very hardy, easy to grow, small tree. Commercial growers favor a daily temperature between about 18-28C, about 1500+ mm of rainfall, and full sun. If you don't get that much rain or have a long dry season, then some extra water might be needed. If your winters are frosty, then grow in pots and bring them inside. Up into the thirties, like I get here, and they'll want some afternoon shade, plenty of moisture and plenty of mulch. Into the forties, even with shade and plenty of water, they will struggle. Yet, once established, coffee is a pretty tough plant and well worth a go even in marginal conditions. Plant seed from ripe cherries. Coffee seeds tend to lose their viability within a few months. Otherwise, seedlings are readily available online, and you often see them at nurseries or markets. Once you've established a few, propagating more from your own seed is very easy. Remove the skin, separate the two beans. To save seed soak for 24 hours to ferment off most of the thin fleshy layer. Rinse it away, then let them dry in the shade for a few days. Even fresh seed can take 6-8 weeks to germinate. Plant out at 6-12 months or when they've grown several pairs of true leaves. Plant about 2 m apart. For maximum fruit production, full sun is better. If you have hot summers, some afternoon shade will probably result in a better crop, and they also prefer shelter from strong winds. Have you heard the saying; If you buy a $10 plant, you need to dig a $20 hole – well, that especially applies to coffee. So, tip #1, don't scrimp on the planting hole. Fertilize regularly and add heaps of mulch to keep them vigorous. Struggling trees start to shed their lower leaves and branches. From healthy seedling to first fruit is usually only 2 or 3 years. Then to maximum production, only 4 or 5. They are long-lived: 50 years plus, and they will eventually grow too tall, 4-5-6 8m or more if you let them. So expect to prune them and for really small spaces or pots, maybe go for dwarf varieties. K7 variety trees start flowering here in South East Queensland in early spring, with extra flushes on into early summer. Then, soon after, the little green fruit appears - commonly referred to as cherries. When the cherries ripen they turns a deep crimson colour. Here, this usually starts early winter to spring, with some late cherries ripening well into summer. Each tree needs to be picked several times in a season as the fruit ripens in turn. You really want to get coffee off to a good start and keep them growing vigorously because struggling plants, like older plants, tend to start losing lower leaves and stems sooner. And that means you lose the low-hanging, easy to pick fruit too. So, tip #2, take extra care when they're young and in hot, dry weather, to retain as much of that lower foliage as possible because picking from the ground is just way easier than picking from up a ladder. Sooner or later, you will need to prune them down to size, and there are a few ways to go. One method is to just keep them lopped off at head-height and trim off the new shoots to keep them there. Another way, and this really needs to be done to every coffee tree eventually to renew their growth and vigour, is to prune them off hard at about knee height. Called stumping. They readily re-shoot and you just rub off the new shoots, leaving 2-3 strong leaders to regrow. Two years later, and they're producing fruit again. So, in most years, after the harvest, I'll take the tallest few trees and stump them down to size. Also, prune out the bare branches and water shoots to keep them from getting too congested. A few cherries are lost to pests, but for me, too few to worry about, and in my climate with the K7 variety, in 10 years, I've seen zero disease. So how many coffee trees would you need to be 100% self-sufficient in coffee? I started with just 7 seedlings and expanded by propagating a few from seed and a few just by transplanting some that germinated underneath the first seven. That's built up to about thirty. So here, for two people drinking two cups each per day – that's about 80gms per day – you need about 25-30 trees. I have about thirty trees, but ten are recently stumped and so they're not producing. Last year, I produced 35kgs, so plenty for us and enough to give some away. Growing 35kgs of amazing coffee is a very satisfying and rewarding hobby, and I truly hope you are inspired by this series to plant a few of these amazing plants and have a go. If not to become fully self-sufficient, then at least for the satisfaction and the amazing fresh flavour of growing your own. #coffee #diycoffee #coffeebrewing #coffeeaddict