Coffee country

The second day’s activity from Salento was to visit a small, family owned coffee farm. We learned so much! It all starts with a bean:

The red bean on the right is a ripe coffee “cherry”. It is placed in a hole in sandy soil…

… allowed to grow for a couple of months, and then transferred to plastic bags to continue to grow bigger…

… before being transferred to a hillside…

… to grow and produce for 21 years. They are then cut down and replaced with new bushes.

This picture shows a hillside with a variety of ages of coffee bushes…

… but also banana trees. Other crops are grown alongside coffee for additional revenue, as well as to provide some shade for the coffee plants -

Can you see the man on the hillside? He’s picking some of the early ripening beans. With him on the hillside, you can use him for scale (and this is “just” a small family farm). The majority of the coffee ripens in April and May. The beans start from these flowers -

… and grow along the branches.

The ripe red ones are picked by hand. On the tour, they had us walk down the hillside some (it was pretty steep) to collect any red cherries we could find. There were tons of tiny mosquitos, but amazingly the bug cream I had on completely protected me, while Steve was just eaten alive on his arms and face.

Once the red cherries are collected, they are brought to this “huller” that removes the red skins from the actual bean inside, neatly separating them into separate buckets -

The beans are then dried in the sun for 24 -72 hours…

… before the final layer of “parchment” is peeled away -

The “grey” beans in that group above are the coffee beans before roasting, and are called ‘almonds’.

This grinder was made in 1898, and still works fine, so they see no need to replace it!

I just can’t leave you without sharing some bird pictures… :)

Every morning I communed with these Blue and White Sparrows as they zoomed around the area in front of our balcony.

My thrilling achievement was getting a couple of decent pictures of an Andean Motmot…

… on the trail through the jungle behind the lodge, that we would take as a shortcut to get into town.

I’ll leave you with morning light in the valley…