You drink coffee, enjoy its taste and aroma. Have you ever wondered how a coffee tree grows? This article will help you understand this issue.
Nursery
All coffee trees growing on plantations begin life in a coffee nursery. Usually a nursery is a separate piece of land on the plantation, on which bags of coffee sprouts are displayed in rows. There are supporting structures around the perimeter of the nursery. They are used to create a canopy that protects the seedlings from rain and too much sun.
To get seedlings, you need to germinate coffee seeds. To do this, you must first collect the berries of the variety of interest, obtain a patchwork as a result of processing and dry it to a level of 20%. The patch is then placed under a thin layer of soil to germinate for about 40 days. As a result, a small stalk sprouts from the seed, which looks like a soldier in a helmet - that's why such sprouts are called "coffee soldiers".
At this point, the seedling is ready to be moved to the nursery. To feed the seedling, manure or the peel of coffee berries obtained during washed or honey processing is added to ordinary soil. The resulting humus is placed in special coffee bags, into which the seedlings themselves are planted, immersing the germinated seeds a few centimeters in depth.
He will spend the next 8-10 months in the nursery with the "soldier" bag. By this time, it will turn into a coffee tree 50-60 centimeters high. After that, it is ready to continue its life on the plantation. A hole is dug on the plantation, the bag is ripped open and the coffee tree with its entire root system and the soil surrounding the roots is placed in the hole. The hole is covered with earth. Everything - the coffee tree is now in service.
Coffee tree fruiting cycles
So, after the manger, the coffee tree is planted on the plantation.
2 years after planting in the field, the tree gives the first small harvest and then enters its first 5-year cycle. For the first, second and third years, the tree will yield more and more crops each time. And the harvest of the fourth and fifth years, on the contrary, will be less than the previous one. Graphically, this fruiting cycle is a concave parabola.
At the end of the 5-year cycle, the tree is pruned - everything that is above 50 centimeters from the ground is cut off, including the main trunk. Within a year, the tree gives a new trunk, and then the cycle repeats. You can prune a tree (in English this practice is called pruning) no more than 5-6 times. When a tree turns 30-40 years old, it gets tired so much that it stops bearing fruit at all and no longer responds to pruning.
As such, the practice of working with coffee trees is adopted in Costa Rica. In other countries, there may be other time cycles, but somewhere the trees are not pruned at all. It all depends on the climate and farming methods of specific farmers.
Coffee tree flowers
The flowers of the coffee tree are ephemeral, their life is very short. Today they have appeared, and in two days they will begin to fade and turn yellow and lose their beauty - for the reason that their existence will no longer make sense. Everything in nature has a reason. Since the fertilization of flowers has already happened, it means that they have fulfilled their function and must leave.
The fresh flower of the coffee tree produces a sweet aroma and attracts bees who come in search of nectar. Bees transfer pollen from one flower to another with their legs, contributing to the pollination of the coffee tree. Nature devotes only two days to this. When a flower withers, it loses its attractiveness to bees.
Coffee flowers have a strong jasmine aroma, which, by the way, is stronger in Liberica than in Arabica. If you pick fresh flowers and dry them, you can brew jasmine tea. But if you pick a fresh unfertilized flower, then there will be no berries in its place. And if you wait until fertilization occurs, the flower will wither and the tea will not taste good. You have to choose.
The first small berries appear in place of the flower within a week after flowering. The crop, depending on the type of coffee, is harvested in 8-14 months.
Dry and wet seasons
For a coffee tree to bloom, it needs a dry season, during which the plant accumulates resources without spending them on growth - growth will occur during the wet season, with heavy rains. Rain activates metabolism. A lot of water is also a lot of mineral salts obtained by a tree from the soil in a form dissolved in water. It is during the rainy season (wet season) that the tree forms reserves that are used for the growth of foliage and for the formation of reproductive material in seeds - in coffee beans.
The dry season, on the other hand, is conservation. Water becomes scarce, which means that the tree receives mineral salts in a smaller volume. The plant is still active, but its metabolism slows down. The nutrients produced by the leaves are not used up for growth, but only accumulate. Then one day heavy rain comes and an explosion occurs - the plant blooms.
Let's take a look at the big picture again. During the dry season, the tree stores energy without spending it on growth. Abundant rains come, they "explode" the accumulated energy - flowering begins. After the plant blooms, the weather is dry for another month or two. When the rainy season finally arrives, the tree begins to grow foliage and accumulate reproductive material in the grains.
How does this happen in a specific example in Costa Rica?
At the end of April, the wet season begins, the first rains come. By October, they reach their maximum. In November, the transition from the wet to dry season begins, which rises by mid-December. The plant begins to actively accumulate reserves. In February, heavy rains last 1-2 days come, and the trees bloom. It will be dry until April.
9 months after the heavy rains in February, in November, most of the trees will be harvested. In reality, the harvest is harvested from October to January - some trees bloom later than others and the ripening time of berries differs depending on the variety and temperature.
Pollination
Arabica is a self-pollinated plant. Only pollen from the same tree is suitable for pollination of its flowers. It is for this reason that natural crosses of Arabica are so rare, and for reproduction it requires only one individual. The seeds of the tree are the grains found inside the berries. The grains that we roast, drink, enjoy their taste and evaluate according to the SCAA system.
Robusta (and other farmed coffees such as Liberica or Eugenioidis) uses cross-pollination. For fertilization of flowers, pollen from a neighboring tree is suitable, but not from the same tree. Therefore, robusta requires two trees to reproduce. And you, the reader, if you want to grow a robusta crop at home, you will certainly need two trees growing nearby.
History knows cases of crossing not only within one species, but also between species too. Let me remind you that Arabica is nothing more than the result of the natural crossing of Robusta and Eugenioidis. And the crossing of Arabica Typica and Robusta on the island of Timor gave the world Timor, which is considered one of the varieties of Arabica. Timor became the progenitor of varieties such as catimor and sarchimor, which are characterized by increased productivity and resistance to specific types of swarm.
