Baby banana trees just planted, and if you look closely, you can see the baby coffee trees under them. The bananas provide shade for the trees which they need to be healthy.
A baby coffee tree, just planted at about 9 mos old, it will produce in another 3 years probably.
Coffee tree branch ripe with fruit (cerezas) and ready for picking! Only pick the red ones and be sure to twist the cereza just right so that no stems come off. Blossoms are already growing on the stems, so if you break them they won't have fruit next year.
Coffee tree-this was my Christmas color for the season!
Jasmina with an Esperanza in her hand. She was a fellow cortero (picker) with me for a few weeks. She always brought 2 or 3 kids with her and babysat them while picking long days. She was amazing.
Gorgeous stream through the coffee field.
2 of these buckets equal about 1 lata; I picked 8 of these buckets on my best day-and it was a short day of only 7.5 hours! 4 lata earns 140 cordobas, which is about 7 US dollars.
Picking in the rain.
Juana, picking with me.
I just don't have good animal pics, but here are a few. In one day I saw several frogs, a lizard that was a foot long with his tail who turned from green to brown in front of us, another smaller lizard, the Esperanza bug, stinging caterpillars (these are the worst!), in addition to an infinite number of other smaller bugs!!!
It has a blue belly!
=)
Esperanza
Washing coffee. After we pick it, we depulp it (take off the fruit), wash it, then dry it, next sell it, and then the coop finishes up with the toasting, marketing, and selling. Though we saved the worst coffee to toast for our own consumption.
Andres, the cook's 2.5 year old son who always tried to help. We're picking out the bad coffee here as it is drying before we turn it in to the coop.
Ranae, picking through coffee on our patio.
Ranae, toasting coffee to send home with me.
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