Here's the 6th Kona Coffee farm report from our Licensed Q Grader and resident farmer extraordinaire, Paul Massard:
At this moment everything on the farm is all hands on deck as we continue to plant the seedlings while the rains are continuing to fall. We have about 500 trees left to plant and the wet soil is making it a lot easier to dig the holes. We are continuing to fill the holes made for the seedlings with the soil taken off the large mounts at the front of the farm.
As you can see from the photos we have a lot of cherry growth started and again we are seeing a flowering at the higher elevation. This means that again we will have a longer than usual harvest season.. Late September through March 2016.
We are about 1/3 of the way through the seedling program at the small farm, which puts us right on track to have them ready for planting this time next year.
CBB (Coffee Borer Beetle) infestation is very low (Below 1%), this can be attributed to continuation of Bi-Weekly spraying of botaniguard and the continued rains.
We have moved the Rain Gauges as you can see from the photos and are tracking the variances between the higher and lower elevations. So far they have been very similar with a 2 month variance of .58 inches.
The pruning experiments, we continued to implement this year, are definitely improving coffee quality and increasing yields. The new tree growth is coming back with a vengeance. From walking the large farm, it looks like there is going to be a zero mortality rate on the trees that were pruned this year. We can attribute this to proper timing of pruning, fertilizing and continued rains we have seen.
