El Gringoqueño

Published Friday, September 7th, 2007 in Culture, Family

Laura and I celebrated our thirteenth wedding anniversary this Monday. Actually we celebrated it on Tuesday, because that was our date visiting a coffee farm, or rather a collective of coffee farms and a processing facility. Here’s a pic:

Those rows in the distance are coffee plants.  Breathtaking how beautiful it was up there in the mountains in Ciales, Puerto Rico.  I spit on the city, ptooie, I’m moving here.

And here’s our little campecino farmer guy delivering his load of fruit for the day.

Look, it’s the Puerto Rican Juan Valdez, maybe here he’d be Juan Sanchez.

Guy really fit the part, is all I’m sayin’.

The next one is of the little coffee plant that grows next to the processing facility. The manager joked that they use it to gauge the ripeness of the fields. It’s like their little ripeness trigger plant or something.

Those are coffee beans. The flesh is juicy and somewhat sweet. I popped one in my mouth and tasted it. It was like a cherry with a hint of tartness and no coffee-like flavor. In fact, the coffee flavor comes from the roasting. This fruit, unroasted and ripe, would make a great pie. Seriously. I’ve got to try it at some point. I’d probably just follow my mom’s recipe for cherry pie.

Here’s the last pic. This one is from one of the farms on the mountain-side. These are small young coffee plants. They will yield fruit after two years, and are considered mature after four. If well cared for, the plants will continue to bear for many years. The farmer joking told us, "… and if they are not well cared for, they die quickly."

Coffee plants don’t like too much sun. They don’t like too much shade. They like to be up high, not down low. Do they seem fussy to you? Many times coffee in Puerto Rico is planted next to the plantain or orange or lemon trees. The neighboring vegetation helps regulate the sunlight.

I liked the scene above because the whole high country was frothing with hazy mist, like big steaming cups of hot bubbly java.

mmmmm.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 9:57 am and is filed under Culture, Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.