Sweet Maria's Home Coffee Roasting
Growing Coffea Arabica at Home

The green coffee we sell for home roasting is a processed (de-hulled) dried seed. For all the processing entails (from wet-milling, depulping, drying, stripping the parchment, and even polishing sometimes) the embryo that makes this a "live" seed is often intact. It is located at one end of the seed lengthwise, near the crease.

You can test this by soaking 20 seeds in an inch of water overnight: in 12-24 hours you should see the embryo emerge from about 5-8 seeds. This appears as a white protrusion about 1/8" long from the end of the seed.


Unripe green coffee cherry on the tree, from my trip to Huehuetenango, Guatemala in April 2000

Mostly ripe coffee cherry on the branch
 From these "live" seeds with the embryo out, you can attempt to grow a plant. I warn you, I tried about 50 times and only had one success! The problem is that from germination to a sprout takes 60 days! And there's a high chance your seed will simply rot in the meantime. But it is possible.

The coffee cherry from under-ripe, to green, to very ripe (crimson) to overripe.

To have great success growing your own coffee from seed, you need a whole, ripe coffee cherry. Alas, I can't help you much with this. On my trips I bring back 1-2 specimens from specific cultivars to grow, but I don't think Customs really allows this. You could get seeds from Hawaii or Puerto Rico, so I recommend you remember to gather a few coffee cherries on your next vacation (hint-hint). I have best results from planting crimson to overripe cherry

It is best to strip the seeds, covered with sticky fruity muscilage, out of the fruit skin and plant them individually. This way, the root doesn't have to fight its way out of the skin, and growth is speeded.

Plant the seed 1.5" deep in a deep pot. Coffee needs lots of depth for the taproot. Don't use a little seedtray -use a real pot. Keep moist but don't oversaturate.

After a long 2 month wait, here's what you get, the gooseneck.

When you plant a whole cherry you get 2 plants, since there are 2 seeds in a cherry. In this case, I didn't strip the skin of the cherry, so the seed has emerged and is lifting it's burden, the whole cherry, into an upright position.

When this seedling is strong enough, I strip off the outer seed layer, the skin, which I should have done when planting.
After 3-4 months you have this comical Dr. Seuss-like plant, basically a seedling with a bean stuck on top. The bean softens and expands to for the first leaves
At 4 months you have a plant, but it doesn't resemble coffee very much: the first primary leaves are an unusual lilly pad shape. These will fall off as the plant develops regular leaves
At 9 months, the plant is really looking like coffee (although it has not yet dropped the lilly pad leaves yet). You may need to re-pot ... it is best to allow the plant a lot of room for deep roots than confine its growth in a small pot.
Here is a plant at about 2 years old, maybe a little less. Actually this photo is old and this same plant is about 3 feet tall, and 5 years of age.

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