Today we are starting our blog to keep our visitors and guests informed of various things happening on our farm.
On Sept 18, 2022, Hurricane Fiona moved over the South Eastern part of Puerto Rico; our farm did not suffer significant damage. We have several trees that are unrooted and many others whose branches broke off. Some of our valuable coffee trees were also damaged, which is saddening, especially since we are only now starting to have a perfect coffee harvesting season after Hurricane Maria in Sept 2017. Cleaning efforts are underway but slow due to a lack of local labor.
Unfortunately, we are still without electrical power and rely on our generator for limited use. Getting enough Diesel to operate the generator is another problem, and it requires long wait times at the pump for the first three weeks. Because of this, we currently closed our bed and breakfast lodging and the coffee tour, but we continue to sell our freshly roasted estate coffee online.
We do not know how much longer we will be without power, and this has forced us to make significant changes in our current coffee harvesting season, which is on its way. Not able to process the coffee ourselves, most machinery requires electricity; we are looking into selling our coffee beans wholesale to local buyers. Our coffee trees are full of ripe coffee beans, and the continuous rainfall hinders timely harvesting. The ground is saturated and slippery, and we are hoping for some dry days to pick coffee, or we will lose this year’s harvest.
For now, this is all the news we have, and back to work.
“Life is beautiful”