Today’s post is a mish mash of miscellaneous topics. I save up articles and topics I find interesting, sometimes it’s from one of you. I look for opportunities to link them together. Every once in a while, they just don’t connect, yet I want to share and I’d like to push these off my list. In my mind, there’s usually some kind of connection to coffee, or they’re other things that live on, or can also grow in, a coffee farm.
Read on if you want to know a bit more about our one mango fruit, raw cacao, painting with coffee, coffee leaf extract possibly preventing COVID-19 infection, and … peecycling.
UH and Bea’s favorite fruit, or one of the favorite, is mango. I wrote about the Old Man and his mango and that we recently planted our newest mango variety, Rapoza. We almost lost track of that one picked fruit, but we tried it just in time before it was probably going to rot. It was small, but delicious. Smooth flesh, not stringy, nice orange color, a classic mango flavor, and a small seed. Pretty good for a potted mango tree. It’s a keeper. When we removed it from the pot in order to plant it, we were surprised that the roots weren’t all that deep or extensive. We had been more concerned that the roots would grow out the bottom, and the tree would be unhappy when we unpotted it. The tree is still faring well in the land, i.e., surviving pigs.
One ingredient I’ve liked to bake-experiment with is cacao nibs, the crumbled bits from the cacao bean. Each cacao pod has probably 30-50 cacao beans (seeds). Recall that coffee is made from the seeds of the fruit. The cacao beans/seeds are fermented, dried, and roasted. Once the thin outer shell is removed, the nibs are revealed.
We’re always on the lookout for other crops we can commercially grow. Cacao, like coffee, can be processed and stored. It’s not like perishable avocados, where you better have a market for them before they ripen. We still haven’t even planted a single cacao tree to learn from though. I see whole, pretty orange cacao pods for sale at the farmers market, and I often wonder what buyers are doing with the entire pod. In any case, this is an interesting article about raw cacao and how that term is a bit misleading. “What most people call raw cacao is not unprocessed, but is unroasted.”
My friend shared this newspaper article last month about an artist who paints with vodka-soaked coffee. If you happen to have the ability to read the San Jose Mercury News, read “Dublin artist paints with coffee and vodka.” Otherwise, I found this article on greeleytribune.net which unfortunately has a lot of ads woven in between, but the payoff is the artist’s coffee-vodka paint recipe at the end.
A research study was published in July in The International Journal of Biological Sciences about coffee leaf extract possibly helping to prevent Covid-19 infection. Someone else blogged about her summary of the published article. Further research is required to assess the validity of the study.
Today’s oddest topic … peecycling. Peeing in the yard/farm? It might not be socially acceptable, but that might change with this news. If you have access to The New York Times, “Meet the Peecyclers. Their Idea to Help Farmers Is No. 1.” Ha ha. Turns out “human urine has the very nutrients that crops need.” The article adds a lot of color to the topic, but it basically covers the work of the nonprofit, Rich Earth Institute.
Current coffee cherry. Picking will happen soon …
Informative blog post! Thanks for the nice blog! keep it up..!