Coffee Picking

The coffee trees are HEAVY with cherries and they are red ripe for picking! The baráko (Liberica, above) ones look especially daunting since their beans are way larger than Robustas and Excelsas. Those too will soon be ready for harvesting, and even though the fruits are smaller, they are just as tedious to pick as they have to be manually done (or at least, we do) and the picking requires some arbitrary, split-second decisions.

Not all cherries ripen at the same time (right), you want to pick them only when they are fully mature, with a vivid red hue or just about the time they start drying up. It is a waste to comb through a branch to short-cut collecting them since some are younger than the others, like the yellow or green fruits. When I first did this some years ago, I picked one tree just like how everyone does it but after some minutes, I started wondering just how I should be able to do this faster: maybe do a swift, piano-like glissando 

through the cherries and put a basket on the end to catch my loot. Quite predictably, my harvest had multi-colored produce (read: mixed-up ripe and wasted unripe cherries).


On the left photo is one of our staff, Diko who is picking a barako tree the proper way, just how everyone else does it: by hand, one by one. He even has on a takúyan, a hip-strung basket that is the most convenient and practical to contain the picked cherries.

From one tree alone, Diko picked practically three-fourths of a sack! And there are still some fruits left on that tree. Awesome...

Coffee

At its very core, 1784 has been and will always be a coffee farm. We grow three of the four commercially-grown varieties in the Philippines: Robusta (shown above), Excelsa, and Liberica (the other is Arabica which is best grown in high elevations).

Usually triggered by the tropical winter solstice, the coffee trees (as with a lot of other flowering and fruit-bearing plants) instinctively pro-create and flower after it experiences a profound change in weather. Apparently, the change shocks them enough to jar their complacent nature and in an inherent desire to survive, the trees willfully preserve their line by flowering.

In time, these same flowers become the cherries that are initially colored green and will become red when ripe. The cherries take anywhere between eleven to twelve months to mature before it is ready to be manually picked from the tree (Tag. pagpupúti). In fact, we don't necessarily pick an entire tree in one go as sometimes, some cherries even from the same branch mature ahead of the others so they have to be selected with keen eyes and a good sense of touch.

Liberica is another variety (shown above) with unusually-bigger cherries than Robusta and Excelsa (and Arabica). Some cherries are twice the size of the rest, thus it is locally nicknamed Barako, the Tagalog for "stud" and connoting an Alpha characteristic among a group or breed. Undoubtedly, it has a richer and more intense aroma and flavor than Robusta, at least.

Our Robusta trees are neatly planted on a grid between coconut trees. When we acquired the farm, the trees were scrawny, extremely tall and overtaken by ants. We let the season pass and after harvesting, we pruned them meantime to keep the trees low, easier to maintain, and hopefully prolific.