The bean of life

These are coffee beans. The red ones are ready for picking. Once you take the red husk off, you will find one bean which is then washed, split and then roasted to look like the ones you get in the shop. When there is a lot of de-husking (not sure of the terminology), these red outer shells get dumped near rivers here in our neighbourhood and then they begin to smell...but it is short lived.

These plants are all over our estate. Being a former coffee plantation, there are some of us who built and some of the plots still left for use by the plantation owners. It is sad but sooner or later we will have to plant coffee in our gardens just to remind to show our kids what they look like. It is sad how quickly the fertile land in this place is being used to grow houses. But I am pretty happy to be here.

The plant is about as big as I am and if well pruned can produce coffee for quite a few years. I hear the plants used to be so important to our economy here that you needed a permit to uproot them. I am not sure if that is still the case.

So next cup-a-joe you you get, perhaps the beans came from here. I hear that our coffee is so good that you just need a little bit to enhance the rubbish produced in other parts of the world. But that sounds pretty biased to me.