Growing Coffee In Containers & Our First Harvest

g'day folks it's rob here and I've got a bit of an exciting clip this week vol I think it's exciting I'm harvesting our first load of coffee seeds or coffee beans from our small little dwarf container grown coffee tree here it's been growing in a container for a couple of years so I'm pretty chuffed that we're finally getting some sort of the yield from it I'm also going to run through a couple of pointers that you folks might want to use to grow your own coffee in containers or maybe even outside depending on your climate before we get started though I really do need to thank you marvelous folks who have subscribed out there and keep coming back week after week to check out the clips thank you very much if you haven't subscribed already all you need to do is tap on that little subscribe button down there and then do the same to the Bell icon when it appears and you'll be sent notifications whenever we upload clips to our aquaponics and backyard farm YouTube channel and come along and say g'day in the comment section down below now back to the coffee so this little coffee bush here is a dwarf catuey which is a member of the aridity family of coffee coffee if you've not aware is a subtropical or tropical understory tree that originates from northern Africa you coffee connoisseurs out there probably already know this but I thought I'd throw it in the really good commercial coffee is grown above a thousand metres above sea level which is around about 2,300 feet in a temperature range between 15 and 24 degrees Celsius so that just gives it a nice flavor and apparently in dice after notes and tones as well I'm really not that much of a coffee nerd I just really like a nice strong cup of black coffee so you don't really need to live above a thousand meters Oh folks I've got to make northern New South Wales it doesn't live too far from the coast at a low altitude Dave get a mate and he has grown some awesome coffees processed it I they tasted it and it tasted fantastic to me he's actually get already given me some pointers on how I'm going to prepare these seeds before we roast them now as for climate warm temperate to tropical is pretty much all your best bit for growing these guys because I don't like dropping below five degrees Celsius so if you're in the States that's zone ten or above you can grow them down to zone seven you just got to keep in mind that they do need to be kept warm through the cooler months so whether you bring them inside or maybe on slide them into a climate controlled greenhouse to look after them and then drag them back out through summer if you are looking at bringing your coffee tree outside after winter I would recommend that you do it slowly give it a couple of hours in the sunlight at a time because as I said the leaves are sensitive so if you are in a hot temperate to tropical location it is a good idea to mimic their natural environment and grow them as an understory tree and just make sure they get the nice warm Morning Sun but they're shielded from the hot afternoon Sun that's pretty much more what the commercial growers do they have them growing under large canopy trees or they might dot some bananas or plantains in amongst the field of the coffee itself and that just gives it a little bit of extra shelter so coffees generally grown from seed but it can be grown from cutting them I do another clip on actually propagating coffee at a later date so our coffee trees actually have a fairly shallow taproot it's around about 40 to 60 centimetres which is just under a foot and a half to two foot in depth for the larger trees and these small dwarf trees have a smaller tap root again so that makes them ideal for growing into containers I think so this little tree here started off as an advanced tube stock seedling in January of 2016 we popped it into a 30 liter root pouch or seven gallon root pouch with a very rich soil mix it was three parts potting mix one part compost and it had a slow-release fertilizer pellet in there as well as I think I've popped in a small handful of the rock dust minerals now there are a fairly heavy feeder they do like a good dose of NPK that's nitrogen phosphorus and potassium and I also do require a fair amount of zinc iron magnesium and boron from what I've been reading so you might be able to make out on ours we have a little bit of an iron deficiency at the moment let's just come on since it's been fruiting so that's something I need to take care of soon with a bit of a foliar and soil feed with some chelated iron so that's something I'll get to after I harvest these guys I took about 18 months after it was planted in that smaller pouch to grow to about 60 centimetres or two foot in height and from there I decided to move it up a couple of pouch sizes and I popped it into a 56 litre or 15 gallon root pouch I was actually pleasantly surprised once I took it out of the smaller root pouch that there were no major issues with root down this that you would see in a plastic pot especially considering they've got such an active surface feeding root system so it was very pleased with that so when it comes to watering the plant through summer I like to give it a lot of water I fill up the tray regularly just let it dry out for a day or so every now and then I've found it's a fairly thirsty plant when it's putting on a lot of growth and a lot of a lot of new branches and fruit and flowers through winter though it is a good idea unlike other tropical fruits like mango Steen's to let the let the soil dry out a bit and give them what they call a bit of water stress that basically makes them think that they're going through the cooler dormancy period come the end of winter start a spring ramp up the watering again they sense that hang on it's time to flourish they put a lot of energy into new growth and also setting those flowers and fruits on all the new timber that it's created during that flush talking of flowers they generally take around about 2 to 6 years to flower if you've germinated them from seeds so it's not something where you're going to get a quicker turnover from seedling to I'm your first drink of coffee from your tree what we did is as I said bought the little tube stock gave us a little bit of a head start and it's only been 2 and a half - yeah about two and a half years since we've popped this one out - getting our first decent harvest we did get one the first year but it was like 5 berries so not really enough for a cup of coffee these are replicas trees by the way are self pollinating trees which means they have perfect flowers they've got male and female parts in the same flower I think it's the robusta and family that you need more than one tree so you can get the pollen moving around between different flowers and get a better yield but these were guys you can grow them singularly by themselves so I'll stop rabbiting on folks and we'll get into the harvest side of the clip I'm only harvesting the ones that are right to go today and I'll be drying them out and storing them and once we harvest all the beans off the plant I'll have a bit of a clip for you to check out on how we've um harvested processed and then roasted the coffee and um y'all have a bit of a taste test on camera and let you know well I think it tastes like so here's our little tree as you can see she's got a fair bit of hide on her she's put on about a foots worth of growth but the side branches have come right out through this season so a lot of new green wood here that will have flower was set on for next season and you can see the chlorosis between the and the veins they're from the iron deficiency so yeah I definitely do need to treat this just quickly I thought I'd give you a bit of a run down to on fest before we get into the harvest grasshoppers they love them we've had some trips that were congregating up the top here at the growth point but we've got them under control but we do have some ants farming other critters down here I don't know if they're merely bugs or whatever I think they are merely bugs so yeah they're just getting in between the berries and making little nests you can see some more of them up the back there as well so I generally just come along and just disturb them and yeah annoy them and yeah as you can see we have a load of berries that need to come off now these berries are in different stages of maturity these green and ones I'll be leaving on and these la these dark red ones I'll be taking off the reason I've left them on longer is I've seen a lot of people harvest their backyard coffee when they're nice and red and hard like this or maybe even orange like that and they're very hard to get the actual parchment covered seed out of the fruit so I've decided to leave them go a little bit longer let them develop so when we pick them out I'll just grab my little bowl all we have to do to get the seeds out of these guys is give them a bit of a squeeze a short squeeze it the other way give them a bit of a squeeze and the seed just pops out that's pretty much well while I've chosen to let them get a little bit right for on the tree I don't know if you can make it out there too but they sort of covered in a little bit of a slimy coating a lot of people will ferment that off they'll pop all these beans and a bowl together pop in some water like you'd ferment off your own tomato seeds if you were saving them and then that just removes this this sort of sticky layer I'm not going to bother about that with all of them I'm half of them I'm going to leave this layer on and the other half I will ferment off I'm just doing a bit of an experiment after Dave told me that he doesn't bother about fermenting them so as far as I know there's no right or wrong way to do these pretty much we'll just twist them off trying not to knock off any old with the green ones you know I think it might be a little bit of a I'm slow going definitely not a professional that's for sure we don't think I'd make my quota if I was working on a plantation a couple of hiding down the back here I think I'm pretty much all done and that's pretty much all it just a small little bowl of coffee berries just to show you I have left a couple like these ones here they just look a little bit too young all that one there yeah I missed him underneath oh no one can probably come off a little bit um green towards the top but squishy all the same so these ones I'm just going to leave on and as you can see we've got a load of other green berries down in there there's another dark one I've missed in the center there so yeah I think I've probably taken off about just over half of the berries that were on the bush so we should end up with at least a cup or two of coffee out of this lot like I've mentioned before I'm not going to go through and show you how I'm processing these guys now I'll just be squeezing the seeds out and I'll probably just let these guys dry with their little sticky layer on them the second batch these guys here I'll progressively harvest them and those guys I'll just ferment off in little batches and I'll show you how we're going to remove the parchment and all the roasting in another clip one thing I do want to do now though is actually a taste test one of these berries if I can find one that's nice and red now being told that they're slightly sweet but mainly bitter yeah so here we go Wow it is sweet this one here actually gave us two seed sorry good-size ones too I would say that flavor as a cross between a plum and a capsicum or a sweet pepper sorry so there you go not bad at all not try another one so those little berries are actually very tasty and I think I'm going to leave the majority of the right one to do afternoon when the Inca gets home a bit of an afternoon snack just quickly before I go a bit of spreaking we've got a website and on that website we sell a few bits and pieces like the root pouches you saw the coffee tree go into also uni seals and Venturi's for aquaponics if you're here in Australia and we also have an affiliate link to aqua gardening one of Australia's premier aquaponics hydroponics and pond suppliers and we also have a link there for our amazon influencers store if you folks over in the States on the influencer page I've got things listed like the root pouches Uni seals our aquaponic testing equipment and also the veggie pod growing system that we use as well so check them out if you're interested I also need to thank the marvelous folks over on patreon who are continuing to um support us in more ways than they know so thank you very much folks I have a list of our super contributors the guys that go above and beyond down in the description below so to be great if you could go down and check out their websites and their Facebook groups and show them a bit of love I'd really appreciate it I will pretty much we'll leave it there though and we'll pick up the coffee again once I finish processing it I do hope you have gardens of booming and your aquaponic systems too if you have one and I'll see you next clip cheers all have a top one

Channel: Rob Bob's Aquaponics & Backyard Farm

Views: 90,749

Keywords: how to grow coffee41.4, how to grow coffee in containers, coffee tree, coffee bush, growing coffee, growing coffee tree, coffea arabica (organism classification), growing coffee tree indoors, coffee t

Id: NKhIQ38K-Yo

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Sat May 26 2018