The Smallest Origin: Growing Coffee at Home

I have a forest at home — a coffee forest. A dozen trees thrive in my living room in Katowice, already blooming and setting fruit. Soon I’ll face my virgin harvest: seven berries, barely enough for two sips of brew. Will I live to drink coffee that grew in my Polish apartment?

Would you like to try growing your own? Here’s a guide — and the story of my small, impossible plantation.

At first glance, growing coffee at home in a big city doesn’t seem so different from growing it on a plantation in its country of origin. 

There is soil, there is a plant — both demand care. 

Of course, the scale is incomparable. 

At home, coffee growing means adapting agronomic techniques and climatic conditions borrowed from farms. 

So: with a watering can I simulate rainfall. I keep the temperature fairly stable — in Poland’s frosty winters I rely on radiators, in summer I shield the trees from scorching sun. My coffees grow in the shade of taller plants with broad leaves, like monstera or ficus.

There are also techniques you won’t find on farms. 

My coffee trees listen to a lot of music — they seem to prefer indie and lo-fi, less so coffee podcasts. 

Sometimes they spend weeks shaded by a Christmas tree with colorful lights, other times they get a bath under the shower. They must like it, because they’ve already started to bloom and set their first fruits. After less than two years, I can count on a zepto-harvest — symbolic, since zepto is one trillion times smaller than nano.

The coffee-banana landscape in Quindío, Colombia — the place where I pulled my first sprouts, each with just two leaves and fragile roots.

Do you want to know how to start your own home plantation? Here is my — incomplete — guide to growing coffee at home. And the story of my Katowice pico-farm.

It began with the first two little trees. While in the picturesque region of Quindío in Colombia, I pulled out two small seedlings, each with just two cotyledons and two first true leaves. One of them had a deformed root and grew in a strangely twisted way. I thought it wouldn’t survive — and yet it was the one that later gave the first flowers and fruits.

Step 1. Obtain seedlings.

When you visit a plantation, ask a friendly farmer if you can take a few seedlings. Sometimes they’re kept in a special nursery, other times they sprout wild beneath larger trees. 

Choose seedlings with healthy cotyledons (the first embryonic leaves that emerge from the seed) and at least two true leaves. 

Check the root — it should be straight and free of pests or disease. Be sure to find out which botanical variety they are. Choose those that give higher yields and are known for better resistance to diseases and environmental conditions.

A coffee seedling with cotyledons and first leaves — the fragile beginning of a tree that might one day bloom in your living room.

Robusta (C. canpehora) will, in theory, be easier to grow at home, but if you like challenges — go for the more delicate Arabica.

⚠️ Note: under home conditions, do not try to plant coffee from green beans. Typical green coffee, prepared for roasting, will not germinate — it is too dry and no longer fresh enough to sprout.

You would need specially prepared, very fresh and moist seeds; if you don’t live near a plantation, you won’t be able to get them, not even by airmail.

But when your trees finally bear their first fruits, you can use them to expand your home collection — raising new offspring from the seeds of your potted companions. Patience is key.

The Curriculum insight: RAW takes you deeper into green coffee — its classification, ethics, and hidden market systems.

Step 2A.

Let your seedlings survive the journey to their new home.

This is one of the hardest moments in your home plantation adventure. You’ve obtained seedlings on one continent, but you live on another — and now they must survive the transport.

A layover ritual — washing seedlings to keep them alive after hours sealed in transit.

First, focus on preparing them for the trip.

Make sure your seedlings travel in a moist environment, so they don’t dry out and die. A good method is:

• Wash them thoroughly after taking them from the soil, just before packing (ideally, pull them out right before your flight).

• Wipe them gently with paper towel or shake off excess water.

• Pack them while still moist into a tightly sealed zip-lock bag, large enough so you don’t bend the seedlings or damage their roots.

👉 Note: If you have a layover during your journey, you can wash the seedlings again, dry them, and reseal them in their package.

Step 2B. Do it legally.

First of all, always check national and international regulations. Seedlings are regulated material. In many cases you may need a phytosanitary certificate confirming they are free from pests and disease, and sometimes an import or export permit as well. Without proper documents, customs in places like the EU may simply confiscate the seedlings from your suitcase.

A good practice is to declare both seedlings and green coffee samples as “for laboratory testing” before departure.

Seedlings packed for travel. Crossing borders, they carry both life and risk — fragile roots depending on air, water, and luck.

In reality, if your few seedlings lack documentation, much depends on the individual customs officer at the border. One may laugh at you for declaring just a handful of plants for home use; another may inform you that without test results proving no risk (for local ecosystems), he must confiscate them for destruction.

The Curriculum insight: Two Leaves is about business, law, and ethics. Even crossing borders with seedlings connects to bigger questions of regulation and responsibility.

Step 3. Welcome home.

Jet lagged? Forget about unpacking your suitcase, or spending long hours with family after your trip. Your seedlings won’t wait any longer.After being sealed in a suitcase for a dozen or more hours, the best thing you can do is get them into soil.

If they are small seedlings, pots just a little taller than their roots will do. Make sure the pots have holes in the bottom — the soil should hold moisture after watering, not standing water.

The early plantation: dozens of seedlings lined up by the window, each one a potential tree, each one fragile as breath.

Use soil with a pH of 5.5–6.5, slightly acidic. At the garden store you’ll find it labeled as soil for azaleas or citrus. If you don’t have that on hand right after landing with your seedlings, it’s fine — use a standard neutral potting soil. You’ll replace it at the first repotting (in later steps). But do not use heavy garden soil: it can suffocate the roots, especially since your seedlings are far from optimal condition after transport.

Plant them in airy, loose soil, so the roots can breathe. At this stage you don’t yet need to worry about drainage — we’ll get to that later.

After planting, water the soil, but not too heavily, and let your small trees — and yourself — rest after the journey.

Step 4.

Your small trees now require:

• a sunny spot, ideally on a windowsill close to the light;

• warmth indoors, 18–22°C — better a little warmer than cooler;

• watering every two or three days, with cold or slightly lukewarm water;

• patience, and observation.

Note: If your tap water is hard, use filtered water. Boiled and cooled water is also fine — it won’t harm the plants.

Stacked by the window, the young coffee trees stretch toward every hour of sunlight they can catch — a daily ration of energy for survival in the apartment forest.

After a week or two, you’ll notice the seedlings pushing out new pairs of leaves.After a month, you can expect them to shed their cotyledons and have at least 2–3 pairs of true leaves.If you used small pots for initial planting, check the bottoms — roots may start peeking through the drainage holes. That’s the signal: time for the next step.

But… some of your seedlings will not survive. They will stop growing, their cotyledons will dry out, their first leaves will shrivel. Say goodbye to them, especially if you see no root growth extending beyond the holes at the bottom of the pot.

Fresh leaves unfolding on young seedlings — each new pair a promise that the small trees are finding their strength indoors.

Step 5+

This step you will repeat many times.

Repotting is crucial. With every proper repotting your coffee trees receive new minerals, fresh soil, and — above all — the space in the earth that they need at that moment.

If the roots have too much room in the pot, they tend to expand excessively underground, while the above-ground part of the plant slows down. On the other hand, too little space in the pot will stunt both root and plant. So how do you find the golden balance?

Repotting day — soil, pots, and dozens of young coffee trees waiting for more space to grow. A living room turned into a miniature nursery.

Observe your plants’ condition and take measurements. If your coffee plant is twice as tall as its pot, that’s a yellow warning light — time to plan a repotting. If it is three times taller, that’s a red alarm — rush to the store for a bigger pot and a bag of soil immediately.

From the first repotting onward, follow a few good practices:

• Start with the tallest of your small coffee trees.

• Check their roots as you go — are they twisting? Do they look weak or underdeveloped?

• Always make drainage!

Important: Make drainage with perlite, pumice, or coarse sand. It should make up 20–30% of your soil mix. Blend it with slightly acidic soil (pH 5.5–6.5) and plant your tree’s roots into this mixture.

Months pass, and the coffee trees grow taller — each repotting, each new leaf a quiet milestone in this homegrown origin.

Equally important: Repeat repotting whenever a tree’s height is roughly double the height of its pot. This means that in the first year you will likely repot each of your trees several times. Later it will be less frequent — but never avoid it.

The Curriculum insight: RAW explores how coffee grows — from roots to soil, from seedling to maturity. Your repotting at home mirrors the same principles that shape full plantations.

Step 6. Composting at home?

In my home coffee plantation I haven’t used compost or fertilizer. But it may be worth considering — if you do, proceed carefully.

✅ Compost can: add slow-release nutrients, improve soil structure, and mimic origin soils rich in organic matter.

⚠️ Use only mature compost. Limit to 10–20% of the mix to avoid heaviness and excess moisture. Avoid lime/ash-rich composts that raise pH; coffee needs acidity. Watch for pests in moist compost.

👉 Recipe: 2 parts acidic soil + 1 part perlite/pumice + ½ part mature compost or worm castings.

The bigger the trees grow, the more space they demand — a good reason to share seedlings with friends and let the forest spread beyond one living room.

Step 7. Fertilizing.

Use fertilizer for your home coffee trees only when it’s truly necessary. In practice, there’s just one clear sign — when the entire leaf turns yellow, showing the plant is undernourished.

In that case, I reach for a mix of fertilizers: one for palms and yuccas, combined with one for flowering plants. Fertilizer for citrus or orchids will also do the job.

Follow the instructions on the package, but apply only half the recommended dose per coffee tree and then observe the results. After all, we don’t want to burn the roots with too much fertilizer, do we?

Step 8. Take Care of Them

Water your coffee trees every 2–3 days.For example, here in Poland I water them every 2 days during the warmer months, and in winter — when it’s cooler but home heating dries out the air — every 3–4 days.

Never water so heavily that it pools on the soil surface. Overwatering will cause the leaves to turn brown and drop.

But your plants need more than just regular watering. Place them near a sunny window, but make sure they also have natural shade. Monstera or ficus with broad leaves work perfectly, and a banana plant also grows well indoors alongside coffee.

Several times a week I mist their leaves — a little rain shower. Once a quarter, I give them a proper bath under the shower. A natural downpour :) And a good way to wash off the dust that inevitably settles on their leaves.

You can also prune them — though you don’t have to — to shape them taller or more spread out. Personally, I only cut branches that have lost their leaves and won’t grow them back. That’s been a rare occurrence.

Step 9. The First Scent

Keep repeating all the care described so far — watering, repotting, patience. With luck, one day you’ll catch a shy hint of jasmine in the air and spot the first coffee blossoms on your home plantation.

One of my trees flowered almost two years after planting, the other only a year and a half after its journey from Colombia. I’m still waiting for more.

The first coffee flowers opening in a pot — tiny white blossoms filling the room with a jasmine-like scent, a promise of berries to come.

The bloom lasts just 2–3 days. It’s not only a small triumph and a moment to enjoy the fragrance — it’s also the time for pollination.

Arabica is self-pollinating: each flower carries both male and female parts, so even indoors it usually sets fruit without help.Canephora is different — self-incompatible. It needs pollen transfer between flowers, ideally from another tree. Without insects, you become the pollinator:

1. Wait until the flowers are fully open and the white petals spread.

2. Use a soft brush, cotton swab, or even your fingertip.

3. Collect pollen gently from the anthers (the yellow, dust-like tips).

4. Transfer it onto the stigma — the small sticky knob at the flower’s center.

5. Repeat across several flowers and trees if you have more than one.

Do this in the morning, when blossoms are fresh. If pollination works, the petals will soon wither, and tiny green berries will begin to form.

The Curriculum insight: The School of Percept trains our senses, reminding us that the scent of jasmine is not neutral — it is a doorway into perception itself.

Coffee blooming at home — delicate white flowers that last only a few days, yet turn an ordinary apartment into a momentary origin.

Step 10. Fruits and Patience

Leave the flowers on the tree and let them dry naturally. After a few weeks you’ll notice tiny green beads forming at the base of the blossoms. These are your coffee berries!

One flower, one berry. But sometimes a flower won’t set fruit — it simply wasn’t pollinated. On my tree, seven berries grew from eight blossoms.

From blossom to berry — the first green fruits swelling on homegrown coffee trees. Tiny, slow-growing proof that even a windowsill can become an origin.

And even then, not all berries will reach maturity.

Arabica needs about 7 to 9 months from flowering to ripeness.

Canephora (Robusta) takes longer — around 9 to 11 months.

Many factors can interrupt the process: your small tree may stop nourishing a berry, aborting it before it ever ripens.

Hidden among the leaves, the earliest signs of harvest emerge — fragile green coffee berries carrying the weight of years of care.

Keep up your care (including repotting!) and watch as your berries slowly shift from green to red — unless you’ve chosen a botanical variety that ripens to a different color, like yellow.

Step 11. Time for Harvest and Processing!

One day you’ll become your own home picker. It’s a moment of triumph, honor, initiation — you’ll pluck ripe berries straight from your living room trees. If you’re lucky, you’ll harvest a few in a single day. If fortune really smiles, you might gather a dozen, maybe even a few dozen at once.

Either way, start processing your coffee berries immediately.

Choose whichever method you like, but I suggest going with the simplest: natural process. You can also experiment with washed or honey. Peel off the skin fully or partially using a knife or other sharp tool.

Leaf upon leaf, layer upon layer — a thicket of green that turns an apartment corner into a miniature jungle.

No matter which method you choose for your tiny but homegrown crop, try to resist the temptation to roast and taste it right away. Wait until you’ve collected enough dried green beans to at least brew a few sips of your very own coffee.

The Curriculum insight: Fermentation Feels explores the science and symbolism of transformation. Even tiny home harvests echo the microbial and social ferment at origin.

Step 12. Roast Them!

Once you’ve collected enough of your own green beans, it’s time to roast.

If you’re lucky enough to have a handful that fills at least the minimum charge of your sample roaster, use the machine. If not, you can try a home popcorn popper, or even a simple pan.

Don’t expect to master a precise roast profile with such tiny batches. And forget about measuring moisture content with a meter — you almost certainly won’t have enough beans for that, right?

The home forest matures — coffee trees standing tall in white pots, their roots anchored in city soil, their crowns brushing the window light.

With a small harvest, you’re chasing symbolism more than perfection.

Look at the reference table I prepared: it assumes a 13% weight loss during a light roast and uses a recipe of 6 g coffee per 100 ml water, with an LRR of 2.2. At the very lowest quantities, it’s practically impossible to roast and brew even a weak cup — so treat those numbers as a curiosity, a reminder of just how little your home trees can yield.

Berries	Beans	Min Green (g)	Max Green (g)	Min Roasted (g)	Max Roasted (g)	Min Brew (g)	Max Brew (g)
2	4	0.48	0.68	0.42	0.59	6.0	8.6
5	10	1.20	1.70	1.04	1.48	15.1	21.4
10	20	2.40	3.40	2.09	2.96	30.2	42.8
20	40	4.80	6.80	4.18	5.92	60.4	85.6
50	100	12.00	17.00	10.44	14.79	151.0	214.0
100	200	24.00	34.00	20.88	29.58	302.1	427.9

The Curriculum insight: The Profile is about systems of roasting and brewing. From pan to drum, from accident to precision — it’s all patterns of heat and time.

Summary: 

Katowice OriginThis is where I am right now: waiting for seven coffee berries to ripen on my dozen little trees.

From those seven berries — about fourteen beans — the numbers look like this:

• Green coffee: 1.68 – 2.38 g

• Roasted coffee (after ~13% weight loss): 1.46 – 2.07 g

• Brewed coffee (recipe 6 g / 100 ml, LRR 2.2): ≈21 – 30 g

In other words: not even half a cup. Just a few sips.

But that’s the point — an absurdity of scale, yet a triumph of meaning. My Katowice origin lot will never reach a cupping table, never fill a bag, never chase points. However, it will be one of the most symbolic coffees I have ever roasted or brewed — even if all you manage is a few noisy slurps with a cupping spoon.

Afterword

In the spring of 2024, I planted at home — as you may have noticed in the photos — 100 seedlings. I gave most of them away — to family, friends, students. Along with each plant I passed on the same advice you’ve just read: how to care for them so they might grow.

At home, shade comes not from banana plants but from neighbors like monstera and ficus — broad leaves casting the shelter coffee needs to thrive indoors.

I’ve seen some thrive, stretching tall, while others — without judgment — still look as if they’re only a few weeks old.

Of course, if you manage to plant that many, you could keep them all at home (if you have the space) and hope for a larger harvest — perhaps even enough for a single charge on a sample roaster. But let’s be honest: it’s far nicer to give them away as gifts, and to let your loved ones share in the small miracle of a coffee tree growing in their living rooms.

The Curriculum insight: The Better Coffee Blueprint zooms out — from living room trees to the global system. It asks how coffee can be rebuilt, based on care and collective intelligence.

Reflection

Think about how much work hides behind your cup of coffee — how many full-grown, healthy trees must flower and bear fruit, how many human hands it takes to tend them, harvest the berries, process them, and later roast and brew them.

How time-consuming this work is, how long it takes from planting to the first harvest (most often three, sometimes even four years).

How many resources it requires — space, fertile soil, the right conditions.

Will our homegrown coffee be “specialty”? No — there won’t even be enough for a cupping to check, will there? But could it be The Better Coffee? If you grow it at home with care, remembering your friends on coffee farms, perhaps yes.

I wish you successful harvests from your home plantations, tall and healthy trees, a cozy atmosphere, and peace — because that is not a luxury, but our right.

The Curriculum insight: Coffee Atlas maps the world behind your cup — geography, migration, and colonial legacies. Even your two sips belong to that vast landscape.

Foundation - The first two coffee trees I planted at home. The smaller, twisted one — against all odds — was the first to flower and bear fruit.