How to Grow Your Own Organic Coffee Beans

Organic coffee beans can be grown in your own home, greenhouse or sunroom, and make a beautiful houseplant that releases large amounts of oxygen with lovely large leaves and white flowers along with organic coffee beans. You don't even need large areas of sunlight, as coffee is an understory plant in the rainforest and prefers diffused sunlight. You can harvest organic coffee beans yourself, then roast and brew a delicious hot drink. This eHow shows you how to grow organic coffee beans as a fun project.

Instructions

1. Choose the location. To produce organic coffee beans, you'll need a location with twelve hours daily of diffused sunlight, consistent humidity, warm daytime temperatures and night temperatures that don't go below 60 degrees F. A greenhouse, sunroom or indoor hot tub area can more easily provide the correct humidity. But if growing your coffee as a houseplant, you'll have to water it more to make up for lack of humidity in the air (see steps below). A translucent curtain or trellis can provide the type of diffused light needed, and a soft grow light can make up for shorter hours of daylight in winter.

2. Choose and order the type of organic coffee beans you want to grow. Most commercial coffee types are either "arabica" or "robusta." Both make delicious organic coffee beans, but arabica is self-fertile, so it only needs one plant to pollinate itself, whereas robusta needs several plants. A small percentage of robusta, however, is what's added to expresso coffee to create the golden "crema" found in this type of coffee. Order your chosen variety of young coffee plants. Sources include Logee's Tropical Plants and CoffeeSearch. Each plant can produce two pounds of organic coffee beans.

3. Prepare the pots. When your coffee plants arrive, they'll be small, and you can repot them to larger containers as they grow until their final planting in a large sized pot available at any garden or home store. Organic coffee beans, need, of course, organic soil to grow in. Garden stores sell organic potting soil already mixed. These work well for growing organic coffee beans because the plants need fertile and very well drained soil, and that's just what potting soil provides. Coffee also needs a little more nitrogen than what some mixes provide, so while at the home or garden store, also purchase alfalfa meal and mix in about a cup to every gallon of mix. If you can get used coffee grounds from organic coffee beans, this can be blended into the soil as well.

4. Care for your organic coffee beans "plantation." Water twice a week. One day a week, water the coffee until water drains at the bottom of the pot, then use a liquid organic fertilizer to water again until more water drains. For the second watering, just add a little water so the soil moistens but doesn't drain out. Use a mister on the plants during the week if they're growing in the house without extra humidity in the air, and water a touch more if this is the case. Once the plants are a couple years old, water them less for about two and a half months in the winter. This will encourage them to start flowering. The plants can grow to twenty feet or more, but they'll do just fine with you pruning and trimming them to the size you need for your location.

5. Harvest your organic coffee beans. Coffee trees produce flowers when they're two to four years old. If you're growing robusta organic coffee beans, help them pollinate by touching the inside of the flowers with a Q-tip. The flowers will turn into mature coffee fruits in about nine months. They'll grow from green to yellow to red when ripe. When very soft and ripe, harvest them and remove the two organic coffee beans inside each fruit. Dry the beans in an airy, dry location, roast with a coffee roaster, grind with a coffee grinder, and enjoy a cup made from your own organic coffee beans, appreciating fair trade coffee even more, and wondering, "What next, a cow in my backyard for my own organic cream?"

Tips & Warnings

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