We’re in the heat of coffee production. Yesterday my husband and I picked approximately 30 gallons of cherry in 5 hours. We were super grateful it was overcast, otherwise it would’ve been painful. A few months ago I wrote about starting the season, and how I was “excited” about picking and it being a meditation practice in its own way. Yeah, well that feeling is OVER. Even back then I knew that “excited feeling” would pass. We currently have about 50 trees and have started a new field with 75 more. While they won’t be ready for a few years, in the midst of our picking, my husband and I questioned our reasoning (and our sanity) behind planting more coffee. We do plan on doing this in our retirement, but we’re not retiring in the next two years. We just keep telling ourselves, “it’s a season, it’s not all year round, we can do this”. Yes, it’s awesome to have your own coffee, but it is a lot of work. Yesterday we also packaged some of our roasted coffee, the first of our coffee this season. This is also the first of our coffee in two years.
In the 30 gallons of coffee beans, I only saw 4 beans that had a sign of coffee borer beetle. 4 beans!! We are so happy. We will continue to organically manage the pest the best we can, and hope we are able to sustain our efforts in combatting this bug.
So that 30 pounds of cherry we picked yesterday … well that was only one of our fields, we have another field to do today. To be completely honest, I’m not looking forward to it. But this weekend looks to be the peak of our season. We picked a lot of coffee on the trees, so we won’t be picking as much in the coming weeks. Although we did spot some new flowers growing on a few of the trees …
I will admit all this hard work has had its benefits, because for the first in a while, we enjoyed a cup of our very own “Kalopa Makai Farms Estate Coffee” yesterday. There’s nothing better than that.
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