It’s tough to find the words to describe the joy of harvesting most of our fruit from the land.  One of the benefits of being neglected for at least 3 years is that everything is organic… by definition!  From tiny thimbleberries to giant jackfruit, we just never know what we’ll find on a given day.    I woke to find this on the breakfast table one morning.

One of our most exotic fruits is the largest fruit in the world: the jackfruit.  We’ve heard it can get up to 40 pounds; our backyard tree is many years old and Tom already harvested a 10 pounder that Chris figured out how to process.  It’s got a strong odor when ripe, and lots of latex inside when it’s not quite ripe.  A 10 pounder probably yields about 4 pounds of fruit and seeds.

After Chris did the tedious job of cleaning it, trying to keep his knives and hands free of sticky latex, we turned it into some delicious jackfruit-lilikoi-banana leather, mixed it into cereal and pancakes and turned the seeds into a tasty jackfruit hummus-like dip.

We’ve got some more usual fruits on the farm too, like coffee.  Do you have any idea how much labor goes into making your cup of coffee?  No, I don’t mean the barista’s work … I mean get the beans processed and ready to roast.  First we have to pick the beans individually because they don’t ripen all at once.

After harvesting the beans, we remove the cherries by eating them.  The beans are then washed in warm water rinses for several days until they no longer ferment.  They then dry in the warm sun until they are ready to husk.  Chris painstakingly removes the husk, a thin skin, from each bean.

Tuxedo guards the coffee while it dries.

You may now understand why Tuxedo guards the drying beans.  We figure each bean is worth about 10 cents, making a pound worth about $220 (yes, that’s US dollars).

We’re not so impressed by everything we find growing here.  Last week was the quarterly metals, tires and electronics recycling drive at the dump (the dump deserves its own blog in the near future).  We contributed a few things we found buried under white ginger, hapu ferns and, of course, lots of invasive clidemia.

Game of the Week:  How Many Banana Racks?

How many banana racks can you see in this picture?  We’ll tell you how many we see in our next posting!  (Hint:  Click on the picture to view it full size and you might find them all.)  No matter how many you count, there’s one less now that Chris harvested a rack yesterday!

Which rack should I harvest?