Growing coffee at home
Started: 2022-10-23 11:37:34
Submitted: 2022-10-23 12:28:48
Visibility: World-readable
A coffee plant produces some coffee at home
Three years ago I got the idea to grow coffee as a house plant. It proved fairly easy to find an online store that would ship me a coffee plant in a two-gallon container. It arrived on my doorstep a week later, carefully wrapped in plastic nestled inside a cardboard box with cutouts to support the pot and the plant. It was a little wilted from its trip via FedEx, but it perked up as soon as I repotted it and watered it.
The plant arrived while I was in the middle of working with the contractors replacing our roof in Wallingford.
I put the plant next to my bed, and it grew large shiny dark green leaves. Then in 2020 my bedroom suddenly became my home office, and in the right perspective the coffee shrub might be visible over my shoulder in my video.
By the time we moved out of Seattle in the summer of 2020, the coffee plant had grown tall enough that it was too big us to move. Kiesa left the plant with her parents, and they brought it down to our mountaintop house a couple of months later. I trimmed the smaller shoots to encourage the plant to grow like a tree rather than a shrub and put it on my desk, next to my work iMac. When I got a standing desk I decided the plant was better off sitting on the ground next to me where it wouldn't be mechanically raised and lowered several times a day.
When we moved to Santa Cruz in the summer of 2021, I put the coffee plant (now very much a small tree) in the sunroom that Kiesa claimed as her home office. It thrived in the sunroom, shooting up to brush against the ceiling. I began to get anxious that it was outgrowing its pot, as the soil seemed to have been replaced by a giant mass of roots spinning around themselves, but as long as I watered it every day and fertilized it regularly it remained happy.
Then in February this year I noticed pale green buds forming on the branches of the coffee tree, clustered in groups at the nodes where the leaves (and in some cases, smaller branches) emerged from the branches.
Over the next several days these buds grew and opened up into delicate bright white flowers, which gave off a delightful floral scent, like jasmine but with a hint of bitterness lurking in the background. The flowers lasted for a day or 36 hours, then began to fade.
Over the next several months multiple waves of flowers budded, bloomed, and faded; and then, slowly, I began to see tiny green coffee cherries growing below the flowers. They grew slowly over multiple months, remaining a dull green in the same shade of the glossy green leaves next to them.
Finally in September, seven months after the first blossoms emerged, the first coffee cherries began to change color, working their way from a dull green to a pale green to a pale red towards a rich deep red, indicating the cherries were ripening and would be ready to harvest.
This meant I needed to figure out how to harvest and process my coffee cherries. I think if I'm lucky my coffee plant might have enough coffee cherries to make approximately one cup of coffee, so this is clearly in the "interesting diversion" category, below even "home gardening" level of production. (It did briefly occur to me to wonder if I can convince tech bros that it's somehow better to pay 10x as much for locally-produced greenhouse coffee, but that seemed like a stretch even for San Francisco tech money, and I'm not sure 10x would be enough to cover the costs of growing greenhouse coffee. Mostly because, if it were possible to do such a thing, someone else would have already done it so I don't have to.)
Harvesting and processing the coffee cherries into usable coffee is coming up next.
