Day 1 of growing my own coffee trees 🌱☕️

These are coffee seeds, and this is day one of trying to grow my own coffee trees at home. This all started in Panama, where a coffee farmer showed me how to harvest ripe coffee cherries, and I was able to bring some of them home. Coffee beans are actually the seed of this fruit, and if you pinch one of the cherries like this, two seeds will pop out. These seeds are what I'm going to plant, but I also have no idea what I'm doing. So I did some research and apparently, if you soak the seeds in room temperature water for 24 hours, it can help to boost germination and can expose the seeds that are less viable, that is the ones that float. While the seeds were soaking, I went to the store and got these biodegradable pots that I filled up with a seed starting soil mix. I also got a heat map, because coffee likes to grow in warmer soil anywhere from 75 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit. When the seeds were done soaking, I removed a couple of them that were floating, and then dumped the water out. At this point, the seeds still have this sticky layer of fruit called mucilage surrounding them, and it looks like this. So I used a towel to sort of scrape the mucilage layer off, which will also make it easier to remove the outer shell that's still surrounding the coffee seed called the parchment. From what I read, if you remove the parchment before planting, it actually helps to speed up the germination. This is all the parchment that I removed from the coffee, and this is what the seeds look like afterwards. Next, I got the soil ready by pre-wedding it, and then I dug a small half inch hole with my finger in each of the pots. And then it was finally time to plant the seeds. They want to be planted with the flat side down, so I made sure to do that before covering them up on the surface. I used a meat thermometer to check the soil temperature, and even after waiting for a while, it was still too cold. Here, it's like 65 degrees, so I decided to swap the heat mat on top of the tray so that it could have direct contact with the pots and make for a warmer soil temperature. And that ended up getting it up to about 75 degrees. I also added these plastic covers on each pot to increase the humidity of the growing environment, because coffee likes humidity. Coffee planted like this can take three to five weeks to sprout, So stay tuned for the next update and we'll find out together if this actually works.