Electricity on the Farm and the "Extra" House

We go to incredible lengths to bring you the very best coffee. The finca is quite remote. It is probably only 20 miles from Matagalpa, up into the mountains towards San Ramon, but it is about two hours by car or truck. The road is "paved" (sort of - some of it is asphalt, and some is gravel and oil) up until the last 8 km. "Paved", but still you can only travel 25mph on most parts. The bus will stop to let you off in Santa Ana, which is just a few houses in a cluster. That is where the dirt road begins.

One-lane mud road (in the rainy season)

The electricity ends in Santa Ana, too, or shortly up the dirt road. In any case, it doesn't make it anywhere near the farm. We decided to put one of our city-raised men on the farm to oversee the harvest and processing. While his wife is from the country, thus used to living without power, he is not. We were able to find a solar panel to mount on the roof of the "extra" house, so he can have some electricty.

Small soar panel on the roof of the "extra" house

The "extra" house is kind of a funny story. When we bought the finca, the overseer already lived on it. His family has lived in the mountains and farmed coffee for generations. He, his wife, and their three daughters were living in the standard mountain house: two bedrooms, dirt floor, no running water, no electricity. There isn't even a chimney. They cook over an open fire in the kitchen half of the house, then, instead of the walls being higher where the roof is higher, the walls are the same height on all sides of the house, and the gap between the roof and the walls provides ventilation for the cooking smoke to escape.

Wood-stove cooking inside the house (without a chimney)

We looked at this house with dirt floors and promptly decided that our overseer and his family should have a nicer house. We took fallen logs (plenty of giant trees were felled by Hurricane Mitch in 1998) and had a local craftsman slice them into boards for walls, then brought in "zinc" roofing panels, and finally poured concrete for the floor.

Even though we had had our overseer's wife participate in measuring off the rooms of this new house, she took one walk through the house and promptly decided that she could not live in a house with concrete floors! She and her family stayed in the house with the dirt floor, and our new man and his wife just now moved into the "extra" house.

The solar panels feed a battery which provides enough juice either to keep three lightbulbs going, or to power two bulbs and one electric outlet. It didn't take long for word to spread among the locals and before we knew it there was a line waiting to pay to use the electricity to charge cell phones. Strangely, in this community without electricity, almost everyone has a cell phone. Formerly, they had to walk 6 or 8km to the where they could pay someone to charge their cell phones.

We are hoping the local authorities will be providing real electricity soon, but in the meantime, everyone is happy for the opportunity to charge their phones.

What a Cloud Forest Looks Like (from the inside)

You may have heard of a "cloud forest," but seeing one and being inside one are an entirely different matter. Because our farm is 3600+ feet in elevation, it is squarely in the cloud forest. It is easy to lose one's sense of direction when the clouds are so thick and low because one can't even navigate to or from rises in the land.

The road leaving the farm disappears into a cloud. You can see the roof of one of the gazebos on the right, past the roof of the caretaker's house. The gazebos provide a place out of the sun for workers and the local police to enjoy lunch or a break.

On the right you can see the chute where the de-pulped coffee comes out of the de-pulper. Coffee sits in partially-full green bags.

 Even in the "dry season," there is plenty of water on the farm. We never need to irrigate the plants once they are out of the "semillero" (where the seeds sprout) and the "vivero" (the nursery where we keep the plants until they are ready to be planted in the soil on the hills). The baby plants won't survive too much sunlight or too little or too much water, so we carefully control the water for the baby plants. Once they are in the fields, mother nature takes care of the rest.

This is the road from the last town and the end of the paved road (Santa Ana) to the farm. 

One major hazard of having only a single-lane dirt road for the last 8km is that in the rainy season, the mud can make the road completely impassable to cars. Fortunately, we harvest in the dry season.

Visit to Nicaragua

We had the good fortune to get down to Nicaragua since last I posted. The next few posts will give you something of a travel log of Nicaragua.

We arrived on the 11:45am flight from Miami. Alex was, of course, there to meet us with a driver ("chofer"), since he does not like driving in Managua.

We decided, since it was basically lunch time, and we had been traveling since very early (2am in my case), to get lunch at the airport. Augusto Sandino International Airport has quite a few dining options in their food court. Both large national chicken chains (kind of like KFC) have counters there. Also, you can find a Subway, but we opted for Hilda's Comida Tipico (typical Nicaraguan cuisine).

Typical Nicaraguan cuisine: chicken breast in sauce with peppers and onions, gallo pinto (the rice/bean concoction in the middle of the plate), queso frito (fried slice of cheese in the foreground), and pico de gallo

Hilda's food was good. Priced like real Nicaraguan food and truly delicious. I can't imagine anyone wants to arrive in Nicaragua and eat grilled (or fried) chicken sandwiches with french fries, if they can have the plate above!

Also before we left the airport, I wanted to get my birthday present (early): a crocodile purse. When we were there last, I was on the fence about getting one, but then we had to catch a plane, and that was that. So, I didn't want that to happen again. There is exactly one booth at the airport that sells "bolsas de cocodrilo" (note the R is in a different syllable). They had a tremendous selection compared to our last visit, including lots of different colors. They also had quite a few purses and clutches of boa. Very tempting.

Alex had put new tires on the truck earlier in the week, because he didn't want any mishaps with the old tires while he was driving around with us. After we admired the tires, we all piled in. A song from The Matrix was playing on the radio.

The airport is on the north side of Managua, so we got out of town with relatively little trouble. On the side of the road, about half way to Matagalpa, Alex wanted to stop to see about getting his girls a parrot. Locals catch the parrots and sell them from the side of the road, or even in cages at the intersections in Managua.

I snapped this one out the windshield of the car at an intersection in Managua, later in our trip. This man has one of the same birds in his cage.

Because the entire side-of-the-road-bird-purchase event transpired so quickly, I didn't get a photo. The short of it is that Alex's girls are not getting a bird because the man selling them that day wanted $15 for them, which Alex thought was too high. Alex tells me the birds are called chocoyos or pericos.

Beautiful yellow-naped parrot, native to Nicaragua

About 8 miles from Matagalpa, the car started making an unhappy sound. We pulled over so Alex could add water (from a 2-liter bottle in the trunk) to the radiator. Catastrophe averted.

Arriving in Matagalpa, it was drizzling a bit. Matagalpa is definitely the greenest place we went on this trip. This was our first trip during "the dry season," but in Matagalpa, which is in the mountains, the dry season is not all that dry. We got a little rain every day.

My husband and I were both anxious to get to our hotel to get cleaned up.

A Fun Visit to Redding Roasters

Yesterday I had a meeting at O'Neil's, the much-loved sandwich shop in Bethel, CT. While standing at the counter, ordering green tea, the coffee delivery from Redding Roasters Coffee Company arrived. I got to chatting with the lovely lady delivering the coffee, and she invited me to come by the shop, which I am glad I did.

Bill O'Keefe, the owner, was happy to show me around. I was asking questions about how we go about getting our coffee decaffeinated. Have you ever wondered about that? Turns out there is a big plant in Canada that does (unintuituvely) Swiss water process and another big plant in Mexico that does (intuitively) Mexican water process decaffeination. I have much to learn.

Bill was kind enough to show me the difference in the beans. The Swiss water process is on the left. The Mexican water process is on the right. He said the Swiss is supposed to be the gold-standard, but he sells both. They roast up differently.

The big decision we are going to need to make is to decide whether our beans are (objectively) good enough to import and private label or whether we should just sell them as a commodity in Nicaragua to the beneficios. Bill agreed to roast some of our beans when I finally get some green beans here, and give me his objective assessment.

Chayote: Local Staples to the Nicaraguan Diet

Driving around the Matagalpa state of Nicaragua, we saw many trucks loaded with what looked like either pears or limes. They were green, but not smooth like pears.The skin looked thicker, like limes, but they didn't have the distinctive citrus skin of lemons, limes, oranges and grapefruit.

After a bit of research, we found out that these vegetables were called chayote. Chayote are described as being a cross between a cucumber and a potato. They are cooked into soups and stews or served as a side-dish by themselves. I keep reading that they have a subtle, sweet flavor, like cucumber, but, to be completely honest, they didn't taste like anything to me. I guess I would say potato is probably closest, but they are not as firm or as starchy as a potato. I would say they taste like whatever you cook them with, which is a good quality in a vegetable.

We noticed chayote growing in farms along the sides of the roads. Chayote grows on a trellis, and the fruits hang down from trellis. All the farms we passed had the chayote fields in full sun.

Chayote field in full sun.

Because we grow coffee in filtered sunlight (a.k.a. shade), and because we didn't want to take down any of our old-growth trees, and because it's actually against the law to cut down any tree bigger than a certain size, even if you are only planning to use it for a structure on your own farm, and because our agronomist told us to plant our chayote field where he did, we had a pretty lousy chayote crop this year.

Old-growth trees that give our coffee a shade canopy.

Putting in the trellis for the chayote

Chayote hanging from the trellis.

You have probably figured out already what the problem was that we had. We planted the chayote in filtered sunlight, and, as a result, the crop was pretty bad. We are currently in the process of moving the trellises to a sunnier spot. Yes, we noticed that all the other chayote fields were in full sun before we planted ours, but we were deferring to the experts. This time next year, we'll all be eating fried chayote!

Growing Coffee from Seed

As I mentioned in a previous post, we wound up starting about 100,000 plants from seeds last year. I get pretty excited when I see the "viveros" (nurseries).  It is better to wait until the rainy season to start seeds, so you don't have to do a lot of manual watering.

What we found out is that it really is best if you can start seeds in your own soil. The plants do better if you start them in the same type of soil as they are going to live in later.

You have to start the seeds in the local soil, after the rainy season begins, which in our region (Matagalpa state) starts in April.

Starting plants from seeds.

In the photo above, you can see the seeds sitting on top of the tiny green stem of the plant. In some cases, you can see the seed shell coming off the first set of leaves. When the seedling gets to be about 4" tall above the level of the soil, with two leaves, it is transplanted.   It is important to make sure you only keep the plants which have ONE root (a "bifurcated", or double root, is not a plant that will grow well).  You can see the date in that photo above is 7/30/2010. We should have started these sooner, but last year is the year that we bought 100,000 plants and lost 60,000 to fungus. It takes about 4-5 weeks for the plants to be ready for transplantation.

The seedlings are out of the common bed of soil, ready to go into their own individual bags of soil.

The seedlings after they have been transplanted into their own bags. You can see the row of bags in the back of the photos has the most immature plants.

This is a vivero of very young plants. They thrive in filtered sunlight with daily waterings from Mother Nature, and from us, if it doesn't rain on time.

These plants are bigger. They have four leaves on them.

If you are patient, and lucky, and the weather is good, and about a billion other things go right, your plants eventually look like this:

Coffee plants ready to be transplanted.

Can you see why I get excited?  Below you can see how the plants look once they have been transferred to the soil of the farm. 

You can see one of our young coffee plants next to the scarecrow that one of our workers has carved with a machete into this tree stump. The scarecrows are carved to scare away the devil. The wood is infiltrated with a particular type of fungus that makes it soft that makes it look black and furry. You can also see some young coffee plants behind the scarecrow, under the older trees.

We have yellow coffee cherries!

Right in the middle of our debate about whether to plant the beans (which are actually seeds, not beans) from the mature coffee plants on the farm, our business manager in Nicaragua, Alex, sent us some photos of the other types of mature coffee on the farm: the plants that produce yellow coffee cherries! I had never seen yellow coffee cherries before.

Yellow (yes, these are RIPE) coffee cherries on one of our plants!

Alex said he was not sure of the variety, but a short Google search found me this:

The closest thing I could find to our yellow coffee cherries (from http://www.coffeeresearch.org/agriculture/varietals.htm).

The beans in the bottom photo are called Amarello, and they are a mutation on the Brazillian Bourbon bean. I was able to find quite a few sites selling "sweet yellow bourbon beans." So ... that might be what we have. We will probably have to send a sample somewhere to have it tested.

This, of course, complicates our decision about what seeds to start next. We will have about 1000lbs of coffee from the yellow cherries, so we could plant this year's crop of plants from the yellow beans. We just need to figure out which plant give us the highest quality coffee on our soil at our elevation.