Last week we had Lauren, from Panama Portal, a website focusing on Panama travel, stop by!   Check out her review of our hotel, and  trip highlights in Santa Fe:

Our hotel: Coffee Mountain Inn:  Highlights about our hotel

The Orchid House in Santa Fe, Panama: Read about the local orchid growers

Wandering the Backroads of Santa Fe, Panama: Local adventures and great views

I know I’ve mentioned the morning Cafe Tute cup of coffee.

Here’s the neat thing about Cafe Tute and it’s sister brand Coffee Santa Fe – it’s part of a locally owned and operated cooperative. No big farms here, just rural people with a couple of acres making some extra cash.  There is a small coffee factory in town where the coffee is processed, toasted, ground, and packaged.

And it’s good stuff with a story of past poverty, a statue, a priest, a disappearance and expanding business.  (Lead for next time!)

What are coffee cooperatives?

With the Santa Fe Coffee Cooperative at least, it’s a business owned by farmers.  The cooperative gives locals the coffee plants, fertilizer and training in exchange for them agreeing to grow, take care of, and harvest coffee for a certain amount of time (seven years).  Coffee beans, when harvested, are sold back to Santa Fe Cooperative’s Processing Plant.  The farmer receives a portion of the profits and so to does the cooperative.

Do you grow coffee?

Our inn was part of a historical coffee producing area, turned to ranching.  Calling it a coffee plantation sounds great, but the fact loving girl in me says that would be misleading.  Here, traditionally, coffee is not grown in unicrop plantations, but interspersed with other tree crops, like oranges and lemons -that can provide shade.This provides a diversity of plants, increasing resilience both to pests and for farmers against bad crop years.  Some say that the coffee in Santa Fe even has a citrus note to it because of this.

When we built the inn in 2012, we replanted coffee plants from the cooperative of a couple different classes.  It takes about three years for plants to start producing.  They are midgets right now, and we are fighting with the leaf cutter ants who seem to be big fans of coffee plants.

In the foreground you can see evidence of what I term as my husband’s new hobby – renting heavy equipment. Now, if you know Cele, you know that he’s very neat.  We’ll go out for a day on a muddy backroad, and I’ll think – cool- we had a great time the mud on the car- wow, it’s over the rear view mirror -it’s a badge of honor.  He’ll think, great, we had a great time, now it’s time to clean the car…and worse, somehow he manages to talk you into helping out.  Sigh.

He discovered that you can rent time from owners of the road construction equipment.  In front of the hotel, there used to be a green area, but it had little indentations and hills, the free spirit in me thinking- how nice a little character.  But man, those hills didn’t stand a chance once Cele learned about the cuchillo that was in the area.  The upside, we have a nice area for parking…. got motorhome? No problem.

His friend Eliecer is an outreach technician for the coffee cooperatives in the area and helped us (er Cele again) plant 50 different coffee bushes around the inn of different classes, they’re planted around the perimeter, currently about 10 inches high.   Eliecer says that one of the kinds only takes 1-3 years to start producing coffee – how great would that be!

So, the columns in the front of the hotel were going up last week.  I really want to see, I really want to see them. Can’t wait, can’t wait, can’t wait.  My husband wants to surprise me, so he says that he’s too busy to send pictures.

Let’s analyze this.

This means, he’d have to get his phone out of his pocket (he’s there every day), aim the camera towards the building, push a button, and then hit send.    The excuse isn’t flying over that well.  With that, I give you  a picture from last week, looking towards the balconies (maybe this will prompt him to send a pic-love you hon).

Update: he dropped his phone…oops.   I guess I will be surprised.