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Published: March 28th 2008
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Quickly following Mary's trail, Steve's sister Christy, her husband Brett, and their darling baby Charlotte came to visit us for a short but full week.
Seeing the baby, our niece and cousin, for the first time was a really big deal for us. We had left Seattle for Antigua just a couple of weeks prior to her birth, and that was especially hard on Steve, who loves his sister mightily and had wanted to be there for the big day. (Of course we ALL love her big, but you know what I mean.) But at the time we purchased our plane tickets, we didn't know about due dates or anything, so on to Guatemala we went, not getting to meet dear Charlotte until she came to visit us here.
We just loved meeting our new little niece and cousin - she is the picture of cuteness and is a real contender for most Gerber-baby sweetness you've ever seen. She hardly ever cries, and when she does, is just excellent at comforting herself with her two middle fingers in her mouth (as dad Brett narrates: "Calgon, take me away!")
After spending a day basically fawning all
Drying deck on Maria's coffee farm
with Agua volanco in the background over Charlotte, we went to see the coffee farms very closely associated with our friend Christine Wilson. The first one belongs to her dear friend (and growing-up friend of her mother) Maria Zelaya. Christine was nice enough to ask Maria if she wouldn't mind us visiting the farm, even though Maria, who lives in the city, was unable to be there. She didn't mind, so Christine got to take us to her favorite coffee farm in the world, the one she spent her childhood visiting and running all over the massive farm.
Coffee farms are of particular interest to Brett, who works for Starbucks and, as they say, has drunk the Kool-Aid (or would that be "drunk the latte") of the company. He just loves the coffee experience and really gets into understanding the whole process of how it's grown and brought to the consumer.
So off we went to Maria's coffee farm, just barely outside of Antigua, on a spectacularly beautiful day. Christine, who happens to be in the coffee business (she owns the other farm we saw that day!), gave us a world-class tour of Maria's farm (Finca Santa Clara), which won Starbucks Special
Worker spreading out the coffee to dry
this happens every day with a new batch, and every lot is carefully tracked Reserve Award for 2003. So hey, this is the real deal.
As we understand it, coffee is a fairly recent entry to Guatemala. Much of the earlier farming was done for the dyes in textiles, but with the advent of synthetic dyes produced in big European factories, the market here plunged and Guatemala needed to find something else. It turns out that coffee, a plant that was brought over as an ornamental plant by some Spanish priest, flourishes in these temperate highlands. The rest is history; coffee is now one of Guatemala's major exports.
As we drove up we got a sense of why her farm produces such quality coffee; the soil is dark and beautiful, the elevation high and cool, and she uses a variety of shade trees (we are most familiar with gravileas), and her operation is world-class. She even runs a tree nursery to sell baby coffee trees to other coffee farmers.
The farm extends quite a distance; after viewing the coffee operation and the gardens, we drove up to a high point to see the vista of Antigua, spread out in front of us on this beautiful day.
Walking along Maria's farm
towards her own little chapel As we came back down the mountain we made a brief stop at Maria's farm house, which features a salon with all sorts of Mayan artifacts found on the coffee land, worthy of any museum.
We then went to see Christine's coffee farm, a smaller but really leading-edge operation. Her farm, Finca El Pintado, is a pioneer in sustainable organic farming. She has gone through the arduous process of having it certified, and has an impressive record at dealing with bugs, fertilizer and such in really simple, original ways. For example, she has a huge "worm hotel" where about 30 million worms (who counted?!) happily eat and poop wonderful, lucsioius fertilizer for her plants. (They also pee good stuff too, which is collected and sprayed on the leaves.) What do they eat, you ask? They eat the waste products from the coffee bean peeling process! That is, the fat, red, grape-like beans go in one end of a massive, cast-iron contraption (built in the USA in the late 1800s and still going strong!) and out come peeled green coffee beans, stripped of their outer layer called pulpe. Turns out, instead of tossing the messy pulpe in the waste
The path up to Maria's own chapel
There are leaves and rose pedals on the ground since one of the farm workers had recently gotten married there. stream, she gives it to her worms, who just love it!
Also, there is a little coffee pest called "broca" which is a real pain to coffee farmers. It turns out some Guatemalan scientist discovered if you paint a used 2-liter plastic Coke bottle orange, poke some small holes in it and toss in a little methanol in it, the broca will flock inside, get drunk, and drown. Hey presto, problem solved and no insecticides!
Finca El Pintado is a fairly small farm, and will produce about 15,000 pounds of coffee this year, which is to be expected since she pruned her plants massively 3 years ago and they are now just coming back in force. Next year she hopes to get around 30,000 pounds. Christine has sold most of this year's crop to Whole Foods, under the label Finca El Pintado, so look for it on the shelves in a few months!
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