Growing coffee plants indoors takes patience, dedication

Q. I recently came across an article about growing coffee plants indoors. Have you ever had one of these plants? Are they hardy outdoors at the coast and are the plants commonly available?

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A. Coffee plants are not frost hardy and are grown as house plants here. I don’t have one now, but I have grown this plant in years past. I remember my plant as very attractive, with glossy, dark green leaves.

Plants should be available in some of your local garden centres. A few phone calls are likely to unearth a source. Even in the small community where I live, local nurseries often have Coffea arabica plants to sell. This is the variety with self-pollinating ( “perfect”) flowers, meaning that, as in tomato plants, each flower has both male and female parts.

These are rainforest plants of equatorial zones. During my year teaching in Uganda, I remember walking through a coffee plantation at the base of a mountain near the eastern border of Uganda, on a trek up the mountain with a group of other teachers. The coffee plants grew in bright shade under a canopy of trees.

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In our homes, the plants do well in bright indirect light with high humidity levels, ideally in a temperature range of 18 to 26 C with a soil kept modestly but evenly moist. The plants can be kept compact with a light early spring pruning.

Expectations of a bountiful harvest of coffee beans from a plant or two need to be tempered with high levels of patience, dedication to hand pollinating, and acceptance that an eventual harvest will be very modest. Hand pollinating is accomplished by moving a soft artist’s brush from flower to flower, transferring pollen from the male to the female parts of the blooms.

To flower and form berries containing coffee beans, a plant needs to be fairly mature, at least a few years old, and growing in ideal conditions.

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