Coffee Plant
The coffee tree averages from 5–10 m (15–30 ft.) in height. As the tree gets older, it branches less and less and bears more leaves and fruit. The tree typically begins to bear fruit 3–4 years after being planted, and continues to produce for 10–20 more years, depending on the type of plant and the area.
Coffee plants are grown in rows several feet apart. Some farmers plant fruit trees around them or plant the coffee on the sides of hills, because they need specific conditions to flourish. Ideally, Arabica coffee seeds are grown at temperatures between 15-24°C and Robusta at 24-30°C and receive between 1500-3000mm (60–120 in)of rainfall per year. Heavy rain is needed in the beginning of the season when the fruit is developing, and less later in the season as it ripens. The harvesting period can be anywhere from three weeks to three months, and in some places the harvesting period continues all year round.
Read more about this topic: Coffee Bean
Famous quotes containing the words coffee and/or plant:
“There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood “what women want” and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue.... Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)