Planting Our Coffee Orchard

Our first trees are in the ground! It's been a long road to get here. For the last few months, we've been grubbing the areas where we will plant coffee. Grubbing is when a bulldozer clears all of the grasses and brush from the land. Our bulldozer also smoothed the top soil and moved some of our rocks to prevent soil erosion. 

Once the grubbing was done, our water catchment guy (Corey from Pacific Blue Catchment -he is great!) installed two 25,000 gallon water catchment tanks that we will use to irrigate the coffee when it's installed. Then, the backhoe came back to dig irrigation canals for the coffee. When that was all in place, we were ready for the coffee to go in the ground.

Last Friday, when everything was ready, our coffee consultant, George, called us to plant the first row of trees. It was so exciting! Finally, everything we had been working for started to fall into place. Everyone on the farm came out to watch the planting of the first tree and to help plant the rest of the row. 

After we planted the first row, George and his team started to plant the rest. When it is all done, we will have about 5,000 trees over eight acres! 

The trees are a little over a year old right now (they have been in the nursery for a year at George's farm). We will likely have coffee to harvest in two years so we will have the next two years to learn more about coffee processing, roasting and marketing. 

*All pictures by the very talented Natasha Wilson