Happy Mother’s Day
Beautiful, jasmine-scented coffee flowers for all the mothers out there in celebration of Mother’s (Earth) Day! As a company, we made the decision to celebrate only universal holidays; and we can’t help but feel that Mother’s Day is essential on the principal that mothers are special and need our attention. We work to celebrate mothers today and every day, and coffee flowers (+ an environmental coffee message) are our way of showing that we care.
Learn More About Coffee Flowers and How Coffee Grows
Good green coffee thrives naturally in biodiverse forests because coffee grows on trees! Well, technically coffee trees are an evergreen shrub that grow amoung the dappled shade of other tropical trees and serve as an under-story canopy layer in tropical forests.
“Coffea Arabica” (the Latin name for coffee trees) produce one harvest of coffee beans per year (sometimes two, depending on the location and the season). Leading up to harvest season the trees burst into flower, which smells incredible and fills an entire growing region with the sweet scent of jasmine. Coffee flowers are self-pollinating by nature (which means they don’t require insect pollination with other coffee trees’ flowers); however, studies show that when pollination does occur (from bees, birds, and bat activity) coffee trees produce more cherries of a higher quality.
After flowering the trees produce fruit, known as “coffee cherries”, and inside of each cherry are two seeds. These seeds are coffee beans! And (fun fact) the average coffee tree on a farm yields approximately 1,500 cherries; which equates to 3,000 beans; which is about 1lb of coffee beans per year. This makes it easy to figure out how many coffee trees it takes to provide the average household with coffee for a year, and the answer is thirty. Thirty coffee trees means tens of thousands of coffee flowers. This is a side of coffee that we don’t often think about or have the pleasure of seeing, but one which connects us to where coffee grows, the people who grow it, and inevitably to the most important mother of all … Nature.