Picking coffee

The morning started at 6am so we could leave together with the other pickers - ok, we didn’t really leave together as the newbies needed an instruction first.

In teams of two we got a basket to pick the ripe cherries in and a bag to put the discarded. The goal is to pick overripe or damaged berries as well and not drop them to the floor where they could attract the coffee insect Broca and lead to infecting a whole harvest.

The green and pinker cherries stay on the branches for another picking in 1-2 weeks. The cherries get picked individually, not striped, as to not damage the stem - because the next seasons cherry will grow from that stem.

By the end of the pre-breakfast shift we had gotten pretty decent at not picking the wrong stuff - although our speed is still a joke compared to the workers…

After breakfast we failed to find where we had picked on the first go and walked right past 🙄😂 finally there our skills had definetely improved. 😜 By the end of our shift at 11:00 the ten of us had collected 52 kg or 4.25 measurement buckets. That is about half as a worker 6-15:00 will pick 😂🤣Read more