Planting Coffee



Mountain Thunder's nursery where several thousand coffee seedlings are sprouted nutured each year.

All coffee trees must be planted from a seed to grow. In some cases the trees will be pulled from cuttings or what we call in Hawaiian plantation-speak, pulla-pulla. In most all cases, and in the case of Mountain Thunder, we start seedlings in a nursery. We put together plastic bags with soil inside them and put a sprouted seed. Then, a year or two later, we have several thousand trees which are ready to be planted in the earth.


Mountain Thunder's escavator at work.


Next, in the process of planting trees, we truck them to the site and create a space where they can be watered while they are waiting to be planted in the earth. We bring in the escavator geared with a hammer, which easily puts good-sized holes in the lava. We plant rows of 8-5-8 feet, which is sometimes called Guatemalan style. This allows for a planting style which affords more trees per acre. This makes your production per acre go up. We then fill in the holes with the trees and in cases where the customer wants their trees irrigated, we install irrigation. At this point, the trees are planted and we continue this process acre by acre until the plot is finished.

For more information about our planting program or even our management program please see our farm management page.