Taro & Ti Chocolate

I can’t remember quite what sparked my search for my first chocolate tree. Perhaps a Godiva truffle from Christmas? Or perhaps it was a logical next step from my desire to grow coffee trees? It’s hard to say - it was several years ago and has been forgotten in the flurry of excitement, joy and disappointment, success and failures that have colored my chocolate growing experience. However, before it slips totally away from me, I figure it would be smart to lay out the beginning of my chocolate growing adventure.

The hunt wasn’t easy. Chocolate - Cacao theobroma - is a very finicky plant and is not common in nurseries, almost non-existent. I found one and ordered it - looked like a little rooted cutting - but it didn’t survive. A friend of mine offered to go to a local - for him - chocolate orchard and see about getting me some seeds from a pod. I was gleeful, absolutely ecstatic! I had all but given up. He was kind enough to take some pictures while he was there too. The orchard was lovely and the trees were pregnant with cacao pods, each one looking like little foot-balls that had gone thru a kindergarten finger-painting class. That solidified it for me - one way or another I was going to get that here, growing and producing pods for me to experience personally.

He acquired a pod from the gentleman running that orchard and took it home to carve and extract the seeds. The pod has a stiff skin covering a tough rind, and in the very center there is a mass of seeds covered in white goo. Mucilage is the proper term for that, but goo describes it closely. It’s a very rich fruity smelling goo. In some parts of the world, people will suck the seeds themselves just for that slimy sweetness. Once I harvest a pod I may try it.

After removing the seeds, he rinsed them off well and let them surface-dry. I had him pack these seeds in most peat moss this time because the seeds promptly germinate once the mucilage is removed. I suspect that there are hormones in the mucilage that stop outright germination of the seeds - but the seeds are very aggressive germinators if they are fresh - I don’t think I’ve seen clover seed germinate faster. This is a reason why seeds are seldom if ever sold on the open market. These seeds have a tremendously narrow viability window and a very short shelf-life.

When I got them, just a few days after they were shipped, they already had rootlets. They were larger than I thought - these seeds. The type of chocolate tree they came from was Forastero, a tree that produces many large seeds per pod. They are easy to grow compared to its relatives - the Criollo and Trinitario varieties, and produce more - but their seeds are more bitter and require a bit more processing to tame. Nevertheless, Forastero can make a very fine chocolate and I was tickled to have a handful of seeds to get my little chocolate orchard started.

I tenderly planted these sprouting seeds in their little pots, being careful not to break any taproots. I felt like the fate of humanity rested on my shoulders when I planted these little treasures. Then I sat and stared at them. Nothing. Tis okay - it was at my computer shop so I had all day to stare. Then the next day. And the third day. With eyes red from staring, I impatiently waited for them to sprout. For seeds that are so fast to germinate, they sure were slow to sprout. All sorts of imaginations plagued me. Perhaps their roots broke off when I patted the soil around them? Or they withered from the brief atmospheric exposure. Perhaps the garden gnome was really alive and moved when you weren’t looking to eat the scrumptious chocolate seeds? Okay, time for a break…

As it turns out, cacao seeds require a couple of weeks to actually sprout. Some can sprout a little sooner, but in my experience, a couple of weeks seems to be the average. Even though they germinate rapidly, they send out a long taproot first and foremost before lifting up and stretching out their cotyledons. Mine finally did and I was just giddy - for a couple of weeks my wife couldn’t stand me. “Look honey! Another leaf!!!” Needless to say, I’m that way with virtually everything I plant nowadays.

They sprouted and grew rapidly. I was sure to keep them moist - cacao trees are not tolerant of drought in the least. They were stunningly beautiful, pushing out the most tender little leaves like new wings of a freshly emerged butterflies wings. They were soft, so soft I was afraid to handle them. Like little wet rags. They grew rapidly, these limp little leaves, then amazingly they started to harden until they became tough and crinkly like dry paper; they transform from a drooping limp leaflet to an erect and mature leaf ready for the business of gathering sunlight. It wasn’t long before I had 22 little chocolate trees and I was imagining the orchard they would become in a greenhouse I had yet to build. Sure, it would take years for them to mature enough to produce fruit, but it was in progress now - I saw those little seedlings as mature trees bearing fruit and simply waited for the manifestation.

Then I noticed that the seedlings started to lose leaves. At first it didn’t alarm me much - it’s normal for plants to lose some leaves periodically, shed to divert energy to produce the next flush of leaves. This leaf-drop, however, didn’t slow and before long I was seeing sticks where there were once seedlings. I was beside myself in anxiety, trying to find the source of the problem. My orchard was under attack and I didn’t have a clue from what. Twenty two seedlings became fifteen, which became ten, and finally down to the last three - when I came across a very obscure document deeply ensconced in the mire of information overload that the web was becoming.

Cacao trees have a high dependence on a little root fungus called mycorrhizae. Without it and the tree cannot adequately survive, even with fertilizing. My trees were starving, having used up the food from their cotyledons. The reason why they take so long to sprout is because their first order of business is to send out a long fuzzy taproot to meet up with the root fungus it depends on for survival. In a panic, I scour the Internet and find a source of mycorrhizal inocula. At the time, it was a chore to do because it was just starting to get known for its benefits for plants so products were few and far between. But I found and ordered some and promptly inoculated my remaining seedlings - two that still had leaves and one that had declined to leaflessness.

Then, like a father in the waiting room of a hospital, I waited. A week went by and nothing. But that’s wasn’t necessarily bad - the two with leaves didn’t lose any more. Then suddenly, a new leaf! And another one! After a couple of weeks, the trees were responding by putting out numerous leaves! Suddenly each tree went from nearly bald to big-hair. And it was from that point that the soil food-web made itself consciously known to me. Decade old soluble fertilizers promptly went in the trash and I went from being economically organic where I couldn’t afford expensive fertilizers and pesticides, to philosophically organic - where my first priority is the soil food-web and using natural processes to create a healthy growing environment for my plants. Cacao lends itself uniquely to this in that it depends on something that soluble fertilizers kill - mycorrhizal fungus is very sensitive to soluble phosphorous.

My trees grew well over the years. They tolerated moves from the office to the home. They tolerated the little 5-gallon buckets I had them in. They even tolerated a level of neglect as my plant family grew. Years went by and the trees matured. I would put them outside under the peach tree every Spring and then bring them back in when Fall hit. Our summers are too hot for them, even under the shelter of the peach tree, but they suffered along anyway. When I built my first little cattle-panel greenhouse, they took to it very obligingly. They even survived a heater failure that caused temperatures to dip below freezing in there - the only thing I lost with that failure was my vanilla orchids that never fully recovered and had to be replace. They were joined by more chocolate trees from another pod as I sought to rebuild my little orchard.

Then one day, I noticed something new. Some strange growth coming out of one of the branches. An odd looking bud. I held my breath all day long and the next day it was bigger and more distinct. Yep - it was my first flower! The tree was too young and small to bring fruit to maturity just yet, but this was exhilarating. I recalled those pictures of the orchard from where these trees came from and realized that I too would have pods hanging from my trees. Later on, even after the greenhouse chill, I saw more flowers developing. The tree was on its way to maturity.

Then tragedy struck. Ironically it wasn’t in the topside greenhouse that experienced a single night of chill - short enough that the trees weren’t set back. It happened in the pit greenhouse where a heater failure down there went unnoticed because it was just warm enough from the earth-mass to keep all the other tropicals green and happy. I found it odd that my boswellia sacra was going dormant, as were my figs, and chalked it up to it being a little cooler and the shorter day length. But the chocolate trees - their leaves were wilting. The soil was moist - I wondered if perhaps too moist? I just couldn’t put my finger on it - but one by one, they all wilted and my entire chocolate orchard faded before my eyes. It was tremendously heart-breaking, and worse still because I couldn’t nail down the cause.

That Easter it snowed. It’s odd here in this part of Texas to get snow at all, especially that late in the Spring. But it was beautiful. While out frolicking in the snow, I went down into the pit-greenhouse to see how the plants were fairing. And… it was quite. Too quiet. That’s when I noticed that the heater was not running. I plugged a drill into the outlet and it wouldn’t turn. There was no juice whatsoever. I traced the wire up to a splice and found that it had corroded and a wire had broken off. All winter with no heat. I’m proud that everything I had been preaching about the benefits of earth-mass was confirmed - and still very sad that something as simple as that did my chocolate orchard in. During the winter the heater is always off during the day because the sun warms things up perfectly well, so I had never noticed it.

But the path isn’t over yet. I’m now experimenting with different soil compositions in my search for the perfect container soil to grow cacao trees in. I have to say, I’ve killed more than a few seedlings - but each time I learned something and believe my latest experiment will yield the next generation of my chocolate orchard aspirations. I will have that orchard. And that is the topic of another post.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 10:56 am and is filed under Babble Column . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.