Five Senses Coffee Blog

Bali Coffee Seedling Nursery

For anyone who followed our nursery building adventures in Bali back in June I’m sure you’ve spent many sleepless nights wondering how our little seedlings are going. Well the news is all good!! The nursery looks great and preparations are well underway to move to phase 2. This is the transfer of the seedlings into poly bags and then to a bigger shade enclosure where they will mature until February 2012 when the farmers will undertake the mammoth task of getting the “10000 ish” seedlings into the ground.

The S795 seedlings have been the star performers with the USDA seedlings showing the fickleness of this variety even at this very early stage. The performance of the USDA is a reminder that what is best for us is not always the best for the farmer. The USDA coffee wins blind cuppings but seems to be tricky to manage at every step of the process.

When livelihoods are at risk its best to go with the more reliable option, so future nurseries will be S795 and we still hope to get some Selection 9 from India to trial from next year’s harvest. India shares similar conditions to Bali so the Selection 9 should work well here. The S795 is also widely grown in India.

Each farmer has been allocated some seedlings and they’ve been busy digging the holes required. Each hole needs to be 60 cms deep by 30 cms diameter so there’s plenty of hard work to be done. We’ll be back in February to help the farmers and keep assisting them with their journey. There is some concern amongst the Subak members whether investing so heavily in coffee is sensible which is expected. This is a major departure from their previous activities where cloves where the major source of income. They will retain the clove production but coffee will be a big part of their life once they plant out the full 24 hectares over the next couple of years.

Rest assured we’ll be with them every step of the way and so will you!!

Garden Bed

Seedlings

Seedling

Seedling

Bears Fighting Unicorns

In our online ordering system, we have a fairly standard feature where our customers are able to put in any special requests that they have for the order. More often than not, this is a simple request to the delivery company saying things like “Please put behind the gate” or “Please leave the order behind the planter” or similar. Occasionally, however, we get something a little more complex.

One customer, perhaps spurred on by a trend occurring with online pizza ordering in the US, decided to test the artistic skills of our Operations department the other day. They put “Please draw a picture on the packaging of a Unicorn fighting a bear ”. Not one to shirk a challenge, Emma took out her sharpie and drew a masterpiece.

A Bear fighting a Unicorn

Close-up