Coffee berry plant is taking over tiny yard

We live on Bernal Hill, in San Francisco, where we planted a coffee berry some years ago. I knew the day would come when it would be a big plant, like the one we had admired at the Point Reyes visitor center.

That day has arrived and it is taking over our tiny yard. We need to prune it, but I’m a bit in a quandary about the best approach. I’ve been pruning roses for years, so I have an idea about shaping, etc., but would really appreciate some tips.

It also seems to have developed some sort of disease. At first I thought it was white paint splashed by a neighbor cleaning brushes, but it is increasingly covering the leaves. Could it be a powdery mildew like one sees on roses? What would be the best way to identify and treat it? Many thanks for your help!

California coffee berry (Rhamnus californica), which isn’t used for making coffee, grows to 10 feet tall and wide. Even if you had tried to keep it in check by pruning every year, as you do your roses, it would have been difficult to limit its size. It is best pruned in summer, when it’s most dormant and when dry weather reduces the chance of diseases entering pruning cuts.

One approach is moderate pruning. Cut any dead branches to the place they join another limb. Then start at the end of any extra-long branches, trace them back to where they join another limb, and remove them there. If branches are thick and tangled, remove some less vigorous (less leafy) branches in the same way.

A more drastic approach, called coppicing, is to cut all of the stems at 6 inches from the ground, making cuts at an angle, so water will run off of the cut ends. Kathy Crane, owner of Yerba Buena native plant nursery in Woodside (yerbabuenanursery.com, (650) 851-1668), told me the chance of coffee berry regrowth versus death is about fifty-fifty; however the one they coppiced in their demonstration garden regrew into a beautiful plant.

When you are considering any largish plant for a small garden, it’s always worthwhile to research if smaller varieties exist before you buy. If you lose this one and still like the species, consider the following varieties: ‘Eve Case’ (pictured) reaches 8 by 8 feet. ‘Mound San Bruno’ grows to only 6 by 6 feet, and Crane says it keeps a nice dense form at maturity. ‘Ed Holme’ could fit in most gardens, since it’s only 3 feet tall and 5 feet wide.

Steve Dreistadt, author of “Pests of Landscape Trees and Shrubs” (UC ANR Publication 3359), says that a powdery mildew disease has indeed been recorded on coffee berry. It’s Microsphaera penicillata, a different species from the ones that affect roses. Dreistadt says that gardeners often mistake white paint, bird or insect droppings for powdery mildew.

Because your white coating is spreading, I imagine it is not paint. But, to be sure which disease you have, you can take infected leaves (in a sealed bag) to a free UC-sponsored plant clinic. There is one from 9 a.m. to noon the first Saturday of each month at the UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley, 200 Centennial Drive. Another meets from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. first Sundays from January through October at the San Mateo Arboretum, 101 Ninth Ave.

Reduce susceptibility to disease by making sure your coffee berry gets no summer irrigation after the first year. If it is powdery mildew, spraying with summer oil or neem oil could help reduce its spread.

Q: I’d like to plant an attractive, largish, native bush that will eventually cover a west-facing fence and attract birds, especially waxwings and mockingbirds, to eat its berries. The plot is about 12 feet long, 2 feet wide. I hope you can give me some suggestions.

A: Because your bed is so narrow, you will have to espalier a shrub to fit, but some native shrubs with berries birds enjoy can be pruned this way. Yellow- or pink-flowered native currants (Ribes aureum gracillimum or R. sanguineum glutinosum) are good choices since they attract waxwings and mockingbirds. They lose their leaves in late summer to fall, then have late winter blossoms (attractive to hummingbirds) and summer berries.

Or consider an evergreen. Redberry (Rhamnus crocea) is closely related to coffee berry (see above), but easier to keep to a narrow form. Where summers are warm enough, toyon (Hetreromeles arbutifolia) will form red winter berries.

Birds also like California grape (Vitis californica), a vine that bears fruit in warm summers. Ask at a full-service nursery for help with final choices for your microclimate and advice on espaliering the shrubs.

Pam Peirce is the author of “Golden Gate Gardening” and “Wildly Successful Plants: Northern California.” Read her blog at goldengategarden.typepad.com. [email protected]

This article appeared on page M – 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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Mexico coffee farmers shelter from risk behind hedges

CUETZALAN, Mexico (Reuters) – For generations, indigenous coffee farmers in the lush mountains east of Mexico’s capital sold their beans to middlemen without understanding the workings of the international coffee market.

Now some of those same farmers, tired of falling victim to wild price swings, have taken the unique step of learning the complexities of derivatives trading to hedge their risk.

Native Nahuatl speakers from more than 60 small villages growing coffee on tiny plots around the picturesque town of Cuetzalan pool their cash to buy options contracts to cover their production, around 6,900 60-kg bags of coffee a year.

“We lived through the coffee crisis when prices were high and then fell dramatically, and many people went bankrupt,” said Alejandro Martinez, president of the Maseual Xicaualis cooperative, or ‘Indigenous Power’ in Nahuatl.

“Now we have these new tools,” said Martinez, wearing a traditional, hand-embroidered belt and boots in the warehouse off a winding mountain road in the state of Puebla where the co-op processes coffee and peppercorns .

Turning to the market, which has in the past brought them ruin as well as profits, as an insurance policy could be a new model for small producers facing volatility in world markets.

Ever since coffee prices collapsed at the beginning of the decade, small cooperatives have tried various ways to protect themselves, like selling “fair trade” beans or negotiating deals directly with roasters, but few have jumped to hedging.

The co-op here exports organic beans directly to Japan, Europe and the United States and also sells conventional coffee. With hedging, it now estimates its crop size and locks down a favorable price to sell at a later date on New York’s ICE Futures exchange, protecting itself from a price slump.

When the harvest is over, if the group still has inventories or picked more than expected, the farmers can buy options to sell at a higher price if the market is rising.

A communal budget affords them around eight contracts, each with 37,500 pounds of coffee. Martinez and other members track market trends on Internet pages from a small office built with hand-tied bamboo beams to decide when to make trades.

SOPHISTICATED MODEL

It was a long process — more than a year of training with Mexican firm GAMAA Derivatives — to enter a world dominated by large hedge funds, speculators and multinational importers.

“At first it seemed like talking to rural, indigenous farmers about hedging was like talking about aliens,” said Leonardo Duran, an agronomist and advisor to the cooperative.

“We would ask, ‘what do you understand about the market in New York?’ and they would associate it with the market where they go to buy and sell their goods,” he said. “It was unthinkable that you could negotiate a price for something without having the physical product. They thought there were containers of coffee piled up (in New York).”

But they got the hang of it and now GAMAA operates on the cooperative’s behalf for a fee. The group has started hedging against swings in Mexico’s peso currency as well since they earn dollars or euros but pay costs in pesos.

“Today It is not enough to just know what your parents knew about cultivating the land. Farmers need to know about finances,” said Duran.

Highly organized and disciplined, the co-op is part of a larger network of associations called Tosepan that groups 5,800 families and does everything from building bamboo furniture to running an eco-hotel to producing honey.

“This example is quite sophisticated … hopefully it can be copied in Africa,” said Hans Bogaard, head of agribusiness at Rabo Development, part of Dutch lender Rabobank Group.

“In bigger commodity crops its very usual to see big farmers dealing directly with Chicago, like soybean farmers in Argentina and Brazil, also in the US,” he said, but he noted that it was rare in the coffee industry.

More than 60 percent of Mexico’s rural population is poor and the World Bank has looked at commodities price risk management as a way of combating rural poverty.

Farmers in the world’s No. 1 coffee producer Brazil tend to rely on traders at their huge cooperatives to take care of hedging on their behalf, while many forward sell their produce in exchange for loans that tide them over until harvest time.

The local exchange, the BMFBovespa, also offers a “mini” futures contract covering just 10 60-kg bags, providing a means of protection for small, independent growers, but they are not widely used.

GOVERNMENT TOO SLOW

The co-op’s experiment sprang out of an innovative government program, Aserca, that subsidizes producers and food and livestock companies to hedge risk.

The government operates on behalf of the participants, bundling dozens of contracts for corn, wheat, sorghum and other products and creating a buzz on grains trading floors in Chicago when it makes a big move.

Mexico’s finance ministry also uses financial instruments to hedge oil exports, protecting public finances from sharp drops in the price of oil since crude revenues fund more than a third of the federal budget.

But the Tosepan group felt the government program moved too slowly. Aserca trades only during certain windows and pays at the end of the season even if prices move before then.

With GAMAA’s help, the co-op avoided disaster when prices fell in 2009. They hedged at $150 per 100-lb lot of coffee and were safe when prices dropped to $115, Martinez said.

New York’s benchmark arabica coffee contract is now more than double the level two years ago but is still volatile with prices falling around 20 percent since a peak in May.

Aserca hopes to eventually wean all producers off the government subsidies and wants more farmers to start operating on their own. The co-op is being eyed as a model to follow.

“The goal is for all the members to have information to make decisions,” Duran said. “So their decisions have power.”

(Additional reporting by Peter Murphy in Brasilia; Editing by Kieran Murray and Alden Bentley)

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