Our first picking for this season will be starting this week or next. We didn’t have much rain in November 2022, but received almost three inches in one day the day after Thanksgiving. That caused a big flowering in the first week of December, and 210-220 days later, there’s cherry to pick. As the photo illustrates, hand picking is required to just select the red fruit, the cherries. It will still be a few months before we have coffee to roast and sell.
It has been a dreary day today from early on, lightly raining from 10am, with one drier period. The morning nature show featured two male Khalij pheasants making a lot of noise and trying to intimidate each other. Eventually one walked away, heading downhill. We figured there must be a female involved, but didn’t see one. Eventually I saw her on the coffee road, heading up, and the male was making noise, fluffing his feathers, and trotting behind her, but she was fine with keeping him some 10 feet away. I guess it’s just part of the courtship ritual. We’re really happy to see these birds on our farm. The photos are from last year, and it turns out to be around the same time of year (mid-June 2022).
Yesterday at a social event we met a young Kenyan woman who received a grant to visit several institutions relating to her field of study which has an environmental focus. She is one of 130 recipients from 70 different countries in the program. It’s her first trip to the US and she has already spent several weeks in different states, about a week at each organization. She was at the beginning of her Hawaii 10-day stay to train with Jill Wagner, who’s the founder of several non-profits, including Joseph Rock Arboretum. The program ends back in Washington DC, where the participants are to share their experiences. The young woman said her brother has recently gotten involved with Kenyan coffee farms and was currently in a barista training. She didn’t yet have the details of his work with coffee.
The above story came to mind when I was going to share this article about specialty coffee and education. I had read other articles about educating more of the coffee farmers, roasters, baristas in the developing countries so they can get more out of the specialty coffee market. But then here in the U.S., one of the headers in the article asked, “how much do consumers actually want to be educated about specialty coffee?”
To me, this blog is an opportunity to provide some education. If you’re going to pay more money for U.S.-grown coffee, how do you get the most out of that coffee? You can just store and consume your coffee however you like, of course. But maybe by learning more you can get more appreciation out of specialty coffee.
This other article I recently read was interesting to me, too:
Beautiful Birds!