We’ve reached an important milestone for our farm — as of mid-January, the whole farm has now been stumped. It’s a harsh pruning method, but now that we know that the trees recover, it is also a good way to tame a “feral” coffee farm.
Yay! Celebrate!
We’ve reclaimed the coffee farm. The days of a jungle coffee farm are behind us!
October 2016 
2016, when this area wasn’t receiving enough attention. 
Just below the 3 macnut trees. Vines are starting to take over coffee trees.
See (1) my very first post and (2) this post from last year for more background on pruning. Because of our terrain, it didn’t make sense to stump by rows, but by blocks. When we started in 2018, it was the plan to stump a block a year, meaning 1/3 of our farm is growing leaves and not producing fruit every year. No fruit means no housing for coffee borer beetles.
The Stump Class of 2020
As of a few weeks ago, with this block, all of our coffee trees have now been stumped.
The last block as seen from our neighbor’s house on our north. (He’s making some salted, preserved lemons). 
We can see some of the little rock wall sections Grandpa had originally formed. 
Just a few weeks later, there are signs of life from these old trees.
The Stump Class of 2019
This block did not contribute any fruit to the past season’s coffee harvest. They got to concentrate on growing, without having to produce fruit.
This blog post is from about a year ago:
This article looked at those 2019 stumps a few months later, in June:
The Stump Class of 2018
The trees in the first block to be stumped in 2018 have mostly survived. Yet it’s very interesting how some trees have thrived (they’re currently 9′-12′ tall), and some are only 3′ tall. It’s probably not the pruning, though. Some trees have very small trunks — they weren’t big to start with. Maybe the nutrients or water flow away there, or the roots have hit bedrock, whereas other trees’ roots have tapped into the good stuff.
The trees by the bananas are about 2-3 times taller than those to the left of the pale green road. 
This tree is about 3 feet tall. Note its skinny trunk. Yet it’s able to produce a lot of fruit. 
These trees close to the bananas were stumped at the same time, yet they are about 9-12 feet tall. 
More of the 9-12′ best students from the class of 2018. 
This blog post was written five months after stumping Block 1, class of 2018:
There are always more problems to solve and more to be done, and it sometimes weighs heavily on me. But we do have to try and reflect upon and linger on what we have accomplished. For my own encouragement, this is a meatier post I’ll have to refer back to every once in a while.
Enjoyed seeing how all your tree cohorts are doing!