Day 3 Part 1 ~Finca Isabel~
Fernando and Gabriela’s Finca Isabel was amazing!
After arriving, the first thing we checked out was a nursery where they grow 500 seedlings of F1, a hybrid variety he created.
Cross-breeding can be a daunting challenge. You have to grow a single variety in an airtight environment and cut off the stamens before they open up. And then you have to take pollen from other varieties’ stamens and pollinate the pistils with a pen, one by one. He was such a geek who studies and researches coffee trees all the time👏
That wasn’t all I saw at Finca Isabel.
They were trying their best to grow coffee trees as naturally as they can, taking good care of the trees that have always been there.
This area was surrounded by the woods, and it was really comfortable being there, with birds chirping nearby. They don’t try to chase away the birds, which eat ripe coffee cherries. When birds eat cherries and excrete the cherries, they take the droppings and do natural processing with them, calling it Bolivia bird. Hats off to their ingenuity.
They were really meticulous about cherry picking, too. When I tried to eat cherries, Fernando stopped me and said we can’t just pick all the red cherries like they are ripe. Then he picked the right cherries and handed them to us. Ripe Geisha cherries were so sweet like candy that I could eat them all day. The taste of cherries was different depending on the farm. That’s partly because different farms grow different varieties. But even the same variety tasted different between the farms. I wonder if this is what terroir means. I think I could understand what they mean by terroir a little better.
They teach pickers about what kind of cherry they are supposed to pick, like the color and conditions. This is to ensure the quality of cherries. So they don’t pay pickers for the amount of cherries picked, but pay them a fixed daily allowance. This goes to show how much they are committed to picking only the best.
And here again, women pickers were hard at work, too. When I asked why women, they said women are better at distinguishing between different shades of red😳
I was really happy to see so many times the power of women in Bolivia!
The drying beds in their home were also very beautiful. And the cherries being dried also tasted good😌
It was cool to see how they respect and preserve nature, and continue to explore a new coffee.
