Mango hill coffee

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The Story

The story starts in 2017. We found a couple of coffee trees which had spread, self seeded, in our yard, and through a friend of a friend we were put into touch with the amazing Beaver creek guys. at the time one of south africa's barista champions was our first contact into coffee growing. we harvested a few kg of beans pulped them by hand and sent them off to get roasted  several months later the beans had been lost, however the next season we did it again and sent the beans off to the Beaver creek guys, this time we got back roasted coffee, and it was delicious, this sparked a measured planting cycle of trees which we grew from those original two trees we had in our garden. 

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A micro urban plantation

Its in the name, but i will explain. We started with a urban plot 

formally a  farm. Somewhere around the 1960s it was planted to seed mangos, over time the farm was divided into urban plots and  and sold off leaving behind old unmanaged seed mangoes. in 2015 we purchased our first of these plots and proceeded to plant macadamias, which we use almost everyday in the cellars kitchen. So when 2018 came along and we had our first batch of seedlings, we found a small space and planted them out under the outstretched arms of the indigenous flat crowns.​

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With our absolute love of drinking coffee driving us forward we entered the world of growing coffee. needless to say there is a learning curve and we are still on that steep slope, but boy is it fun.

 

The idea behind a micro urban plantation or garden is, "how to maximise yield with the least impact?"

so here are a few of our practices and what makes our urban spaces so special.

 

Minimal ground disturbance when planting, retaining our top soil profile.

Zero herbicides or pesticides, this is a choice and cant always be made when farming commercially.

Shade grown, we don't cut our old growth trees down we grow under them, which provides shade when its hot and mulch in the winter. 

We create jobs and training on underutilized land while maintaining a neat nature friendly environment.

 

what makes the coffee special

we are one of the lowest altitude coffee growing spaces in the world 15m to 55m asl.

micro urban plantation also means micro lots, currently we have SL34 in prduction with Catamoor f6 and sl28 on the way for the 2027 season.

we focus on a the honey process so as too articulate our oceanic coffees best profile

we do it for the love of coffee! 

  

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