I started growing coffee, just out of interest, more than a decade ago. Coffee literally grows on trees, and the bean that we all so love is the dried fruit of that tree.
I wanted to see what the coffee tree is like to grow and understand a bit of what farmers go through to get their coffee to us. I also didn't let a lack of gardening knowledge stop me. This will become important later on in explaining the various disasters that took place.
Smarter readers will point out that the coffee tree is tropical, and Bathurst, where we live and roast, is not. This is where ignorance and optimism on my part coincided, and I bought three coffee trees from a plantation in Queensland in 2010.
I killed two of them in the first winter here. I thought a greenhouse might be enough to keep the trees safe from frost. Having learnt the hard way, I can safely say they aren't.
Coffee trees don’t like any temperature near zero. They also don’t like it too hot (over 35 °C) and love good drainage and lots of water. My solution was a big pot, placed on a trolley that I can move in and out of the warehouse depending on the temperature.
A coffee tree will also grow several metres high. If you are ever in Wollongong, there is a coffee tree in the Botanic Gardens there that is about 5 metres tall!
In plantations, the trees are pruned to around 2 metres. In addition, you can get varieties of trees that are a “dwarf” version. They are the ones that I have.
After around five years, I started to see my first flowers on the tree. Things were looking good until I left my tree outside during a really hot period, and all the flowers with their new buds got scorched. No coffee that year.
Next, I started thinking more about fertiliser. The plants flourished! So I got more fertiliser, some blood and bone. More is good, right?
Wrong.
That blood and bone, combined with water, produced the perfect breeding ground for blow flies. I had maggots in the soil of two trees! Yes, it was as gross as it sounds, and they had to go in the skip.
Finally, last year, I managed to get the right balance of climate control, a small amount of fertiliser and water at the right time so that there were lots of flowers. And what followed was lots of coffee “cherries”.
They have been picked, processed three different ways and will be roasted shortly!
Peter's coffee tree, complete with a trolley!
Here is the 2025 crop drying and awaiting roasting.
