During the Christmas vacation BGVs kindly came to school to water our Bolivar Garden. This meant that no more cacao trees died. Unfortunately, during the summer months, with no way to water the plants consistently about 20 of the 64 cacao plants that we planted perished.

However, coming back to school we re-assessed the cacao trees that were still growing. We have 10 mature trees from our planting in 2020, before the pandemic (that was a survival rate of 30%) which are now producing substantial amounts of fruit. Our main problem with these trees is that they need frequent pruning and are predated by squirrels.

 

We decided to buy some local, criollo cacao plants from Florida, Valle del Cauca to replace those that died during the summer, and plant them during a wetter part of the year – now in January. In addition to this we now have a watering pipe attached to a water source, so we can ensure constant watering of the plants.

We are in the process of planting the replacement plants: so far we have planted eight of the trees that we purchased, with one still to plant – one died in transport.

We have also been fortunate to harvest over 25 mature cacao pods which we are processing by opening them with a machete, removing the seeds and placing them in a plastic zip lock bag to ferment up to 8 days.

 

Once fermented we have to dry the beans and then wait for a sufficient amount to roast.

The next step will be to process the roasted cacao in a traditional and simple way to either make Cacao Nibs, or Cacao for drinking chocolate.