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.

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.