Brief introduction to the planting of Coffee trees

If the fruit is overripe, the beans inside will rot. If not ripe enough, the beans will not ripen themselves. So bean pickers often search the same tree several times to find ripe fruit, but they can only pick two pounds of coffee beans after several attempts, which is usually the average annual yield of a tree.

Coffee farmers who produce low-grade coffee beans prefer to harvest the beans in a labor-saving way, but this can lead to impure quality, detracting from the taste of the coffee and lowering the grade of coffee. In some parts of Africa, coffee beans are picked by shaking the coffee tree, dropping the fruit to the ground and picking it up before it rots. Most of Brazil produces low-grade coffee, which is harvested by plucking all the leaves, flowers, ripe and green fruit from the branches at once. It takes two years for the trees to recover from this damage.

Coffee trees produce delicate white flowers that smell like oranges and jasmine. Sometimes just a tree blooms alone, like a young bride, sometimes the whole coffee garden is in full bloom, like a white sea of flowers at a glance, beautiful and intoxicating. But the bloom is fleeting. Within two or three days, the petals dispersed with the wind, leaving only the fragrance swirling in the air.

After a while small piles of fruit appear, first green, then yellow, finally red or deep red, almost black and ready to be picked. In Jamaica, bats are the first to know if the fruit is ripe, and by sipping the coffee syrup at night, they're telling people that the fruit is ripe to pick. The oval fruit is tightly clustered around the branches, and the slender, smooth dark green tooth-shaped leaves are born on both sides of the branches. The leaves on the sunny side are harder, the back is softer, the edges form a fan shape, and the branches are also born from the trunk.

Coffee trees are usually bred in nurseries, grown into saplings, and moved to coffee plantations a year later, following exactly the original Arab methods of growing coffee trees. For the first four or five years of its life, coffee trees take root downwards, grow upwards into trunks, and develop into umbrella-like shapes, so that they can bear rich fruits later.