Coffee lovers discover that you can grow your own coffee beans at home and provide for your own coffee drinking needs. This task is about gardening, raising perspective, and providing the freshest coffee beans for consumption. Each plant will offer a few coffee beans, so it may be too large a task to replace store-bought coffee beans, but it can be an enjoyable process that is worth doing just to accomplish it.
Gathering Supplies
You will need many supplies, beginning with green coffee beans or bean cherries. These should be rinsed off and placed within damp sand or vermiculite in a small container. Later, their transfer to the soil will require another plant pot or container, soil, and fertilizer. Alternatively, you can plant a cutting off of a coffee plant to grow a new plant without using seeds. Simply select a stem and plant it regularly in a growth medium such as soil and water. If you are having trouble figuring out how to choose the best coffee beans, you can always use the internet as a resource for discovering places that sell quality starter beans.
Planting Coffee
Begin with the raw beans or the seeds, rinsing them and placing them within sand or vermiculite. They should be watered twice each day to keep them damp, and they will germinate and begin to sprout after a few months. Somewhere between two and six months, you should begin to see growth. Once growth has started, transfer them to the pot of soil and add fertilizer. Watering them once each day will keep the soil damp without allowing it to become too wet, and they will require sunlight or access to lights when planted indoors. It is necessary to keep the temperature warm, and they will not thrive outside in cooler temperatures as they are a tropical plant. The plant should flower in two or three years and will pollinate itself, allowing flowers and seeds to grow. Once you see cherries have grown, you can harvest them for the coffee beans that are inside or plant them to grow more. Water once weekly during the winter and return to regular watering a few months later to replicate spring, and this will encourage them to begin to flower.
Harvesting Coffee Beans
Once they have completed developing, remove the berries from the plant and open them. Allow the seeds to dry and roast them to taste. Beans are harvested by firmly but gently removing the berries from the plant, just as other berries are picked, and they can be rinsed in preparation for processing.
Next Steps
Once your plant has grown to its full high in about three years, it will be ready to flower. Water it regularly and ensure it is warm and has a source of light to keep it healthy and growing. It will flower once each year and allow you to harvest another set of berries with the bean within.
