After a 2 hour bus ride from the Capital we arrived in a tropical paradise. You do get somewhat immune to seeing all the trash of the filthy towns no matter how big or small, but when you arrive somewhere that is clean you feel this sudden sense of calmness that you forgot you didn't have.
The tour started with a welcoming performance.
Next it was time to see how the process begins, and of course that leads us to seed germination. You know that I'm a biology freak, so this part was super fascinating. They first put the seeds in a saw dust/soil mixture and wait for the first root to appear.
We learned that the newly germinated seeds might not produce the most productive cacao tree, so they take a stem of a tree that is known to be productive and graft it to the baby tree.
After a few months here's what the grafted tree looks like...
See the V in the middle of the stem? That is the successful graft.
Now it's our turn to plant a tree! As a tree hugger, I totally appreciate the love and care that botanical people give to gardening.
Of course as the baby trees grow they'll need more room, so they'll be transplanted in an area where they are spaced 4 feet apart. Next we head into the cacao forest. The ground is covered with leaves and the crunching sound as you walk in the woods is music to a nature lover's ears.
I have seen cacao fruits, and have eaten the citrusy pulp surrounding the seeds, but I had never really noticed how the fruits great from all over the tree. As you'd expect there are fruits hanging from branches, but what is weird are the fruits hanging directly out of the trunk of the tree.
Ignoring the creepy scarecrow thing for now and look at how the cacao fruit is coming directly out of the trunk! If you look closely you can see a flower and a tiny fruit developing on some of the trunks...
Cute, huh. Now the back to the scarcrow... it's actually a scarewoodpecker. Apparently the woodpeckers like to swing by and peck a hole in the cacao fruit and then leave for a while, only to return later to the delicious bugs that have made the open fruit their home. Not an ideal situation for the farm and since it's organic, instead of chemicals, they stuff the scarecrow with newspaper and put it high up in a tree and when the breeze blows the newspaper mades noise and the woodpeckers stay away. The other way to keep unwanted birds away is to hang old CD's from a string, the reflection creeps them out and they don't land. I love when problems get solved in a chemical free way.
Another pest that causes problems is rats. Again, no poison, but you can kill them by putting salt on avocados and when the rats eat it they get all bloated, have diarrea and die.
There are different subspecies of cacao and therefore different colored fruits...
I was distracted when the tour guy chopped open the cacao fruit with his machete and so I didn't get a photo of that, but basically they chop open the fruit and take out the pulpy white seeds and transfer them to a big container.
After a bit of fermentation the seeds are ready to dry...
Before machines, the seeds were roasted on a fire and then manually cracked and pulverized.
Of course now-a-days it's a machine process.
I bought 15 chocolate bars to bring home this summer - maybe you'll be one of the lucky recipients :)
1 comment:
Dang-it! I want a chocolate bar!! I
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