Coffee fruit

Oh, look at this! The coffee crop is ripening, so it won't be long and the Phactor will have to bring in a bus load of students to pick the crop. Hopefully there will be enough for my class to harvest, process, and roast their own. These are coffee "cherries", a two-seeded berry. Each of the two seeds is a coffee "bean", which is not a legume no matter what they are called. The leaves are dark green and glossy, and the fruits so bright, so why don't we have some nice seasonal decorations fashioned after coffee? This is the first really decent coffee crop since some moron broke into the glass house and stole a coffee tree if full fruit in freezing weather. The trail of leaves and berries could even be followed by one of our campus police, but the tree did not survive it's winter outing. The replacement trees were small and have taken awhile to mature, so this is pretty exciting. Or maybe it's just the caffeine talking.

Fair trade Lincolnland coffee

For a number of years our teaching greenhouse had a very nice coffee tree that produced several handfulls of coffee beans each year, then some moron decided to break in and steal the plant, in the winter with temperatures well below freezing, in the process killing the poor tree and leaving a trail of leaves and berries even our campus cops could follow. The replacements were really small cuttings and it has taken several years to get coffee production going again, so it was very pleasant to see that this year our coffee trees were bearing a modest crop, and suffice it to say that if you have never seen coffee in fruit, the red berries among the glossy green foliage, it's pretty! The crop will be harvested and processed by my very own non-immigrant labor force, students, because it does them good to know where the stuff you put in your mush comes from, and too few people know and appreciate such things. In a class of 24, even here in Lincolnland, a couple of them would have no idea what kind of plant a tomato grows on never having seen one grown! So the Phactor gets some very exclusive coffee and the students learn something at the same time. That's a fair trade!