How To Grow a Coffee Tree
From: "Coffee"
Published By: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987, pages 174-175
By: Kenneth Davids
The more enthusiastic among our readers may decide to begin growing their own coffee if prices keep rising; unfortunately, this is a dream few of us are in a position to realize. A true devotee of the bean would need a commercial-size greenhouse or a good-sized back yard in or near the tropics to remain well disposed every morning the year round. First one needs a frost-free environment; this eliminates most back yards in the United States. Then figure one mature tree trimmed to about six feet should produce an average of two to four pounds of coffee a year. Including the decaffeinated coffee I consume, it would take six to eight such trees to keep me jolly. Better grow vegetables.
However, if you want just a small specimen with a few leaves to stroke in the morning and make thankful offerings to, you will have no problem.
The Coffea arabica is easy to grow indoors, and makes a very attractive houseplant. If it likes you enough it will even reward you with flowers and a few berries. You can start your coffee plant three ways. The easiest is to buy a seedling. Though it's not an extremely popular houseplant, most indoor nurseries carry the arabica at least occasionally. The next easiest method is to take a clipping from a friend's plant and root it. Finally, you can plant some green coffee beans, and wait . . . and wait. . . . Fresh beans sprout in about three or four weeks, but obviously the green beans that reach you through your corner coffee store will be at least a couple of months old. But if you're patient, and you plant a lot of beans (most won't germinate at all, ever), you might eventually have yourself a plantation.
Beans should be planted a little over a half- inch deep, in good, well-drained potting soil, and kept moist at all times, but not wet. When you have something that looks like a plant, treat it as you would a camellia: rich, well-drained soil, always moist but never wet, with plenty of bright indirect, or diffused sunlight. Fertilize every other month.
If something goes wrong, look up camellia in a good gardening manual for the appropriate advice. if you do live in a totally frost-free area you might well want to plant some arabica in your yard. Temperatures should not be lower than 60 degrees normally, and lower than 50 degrees for short periods only.
Parts of Hawaii are unsurpassed for coffee, and it has long been held that coffee could be successfully grown commercially along the California coast, but never tried because of high labor costs. Remember, however, that you need to duplicate the conditions of the Ethiopian rain forest: moist, fertile, well-drained soil and partial shade; this last would be especially important during the long summers in southern California. For more advice on growing, pruning (very important if you wish your tree to produce more coffee), and caring for coffee trees, read A. E. Haarer's Coffee Growing in the Oxford Tropical Handbooks series, Oxford University Press.