Vermont’s not exactly known for its tropical weather, but even with our long cold winters, you can still grow and harvest your own chocolate indoors. The cacao trees below were grown from a pod harvested New Hampshire, and germinated in my Vermont home, both zone 4.
The New Hampshire parent tree grown by a friend is about 6 feet tall, and produces a crop of 2 to 5 pods per year, blooming in the summer and ripening mid-winter. That’s not bad, when you consider a tree growing outdoors in the tropics produces only 20 pods a year.
On our homestead, we love the novelty of growing our own tropical edibles. We’ve already had success with homegrown ginger, turmeric, mango trees, coffee, vanilla, lemons and oranges…why not add chocolate to the mix?
A few years back, I asked my cacao growing friend to save me a pod. Mid-February I got a call that my pod was ripe and ready to go. When I arrived, I found that they’d literally written my name on it to prevent anyone else from claiming it.
Since not everyone has a friend that happens to be growing cacao, you can order your own cacao pod online here
If you want to skip the germination steps, and get right to growing your own tree indoors, cacao trees are available here.
Cacao pod with my name on it (literally).
A bit of nomenclature, Theobroma Cacao is the tree name, spelled cacao. The processed chocolate, or cocoa mass, switches the last two letters and adds an o at the beginning. So a cacao tree is needed to grown your own cocoa or chocolate.
It’s important that the seeds are fresh, inside an intact pod. Once the pod is opened they rapidly spoil, and they’ll only germinate while fresh. Seeds cannot be dried and stored like garden vegetable seed packets. As a tropical plant, in nature the seeds would be kept warm and moist, and they wouldn’t have the opportunity to dry down like a package of typical garden seeds.
Each cacao bean is coated in a sticky sweet coating that tempts tropical animals to crack open the tough pods and gorge on the interior nectar. The beans themselves are then discarded as the animal moves throughout the canopy, planting the next generation of cacao trees.
The first step in growing chocolate from seed is to crack open the seed pod, which is roughly 1 centimeter thick. It takes a good butcher knife or chefs knife and quite a bit of elbow grease, so be careful with your fingers.
Avoid cutting into the seeds, because they’re surprisingly soft, gummy and fragile. Whole cacao beans or cacao nibs you buy from health food stores have been first fermented to remove the white nectar around the beans, and then dried and roasted to get a hard, crunchy texture.
Cacao pod sliced in half, with a damaged seed as a result. Note the interior seed is purple. Neat, right?
To prepare the seeds, you’ll need a few adventurous friends. I invited over just about everyone I knew when we cut it open, because it’s not everyday that you get to taste fresh grown raw chocolate.
The most efficient way to clean and prepare the seeds is by placing them into your mouth and sucking off the white cacao nectar. It’s sweet and fruity, and in the group I assembled every single person loved it.
In the tropics, they ferment it into a liquor and since the coating spoils so quickly, if you don’t grow your own your only chance to taste it fresh would involve a very expensive plane ride.
Friends gathered to enjoy fresh raw cacao straight from the pod!
For germination, the seeds want to be kept warm and moist. My drafty 1850’s schoolhouse in February didn’t seem like it fit the bill, but I created a hot water bottle for them with a Ziploc bag filled with warm water, wrapped in a wet towel. I then placed the freshly cleaned seeds in a wet paper towel, and put that on top of the water filled bag.
I put the whole setup into my oven with the oven light on for a small amount of extra heat. After just a few days, the seeds had begun to germinate and I transferred them to soil. With this method, I had a roughly 50% germination rate. Not bad for a cheap hacked setup.
Mature cacao tree leaves in the palm of my hand.
If you’re investing in buying a cacao pod and having it shipped to you, you might as well try a small counter top seed germination setup or at least invest in a seedling heat mat to better insure success.
Once you’ve got healthy cacao trees, either by germinating your own cacao pods or by starting with a live cacao tree, all you have left to do is wait.
Mature and productive tree in a New Hampshire greenhouse. It’s only about 6 feet tall, but producing well.
In nature, cacao trees are a zone 10 plant, so they want to be kept warm, but room temperature, keeping them consistently between 65 and 70 degrees is sufficient for them to thrive. They’re an under story plant, so filtered light indoors is actually ideal, and they grow wonderfully even in northern climates near a south facing window or in a sun room.
It takes 5-6 years from germination to see your first crop. The flowers will appear directly out of the stem, and though the plant will produce hundreds of tiny flowers, only a few will actually go on to produce cacao pods even in ideal conditions.
Cacao tree flowers growing directly out of the trunk. This tree flower and bears pods indoors in zone 4.
The fruit will begin to form, and will grow slowly for 6 to 8 months. Harvest happens in February or March for northern grown indoor cacao trees.
Be sure to have plenty of friends on hand for the harvest, to share in your success, and help you enjoy the sticky sweet cacao seed coating. When you harvest, you can continue to propagate from the seeds, or you can try eating the fresh raw seeds themselves. They have a unique flavor, and texture somewhat like a very firm grape or kiwi.
It really is a rare treat to get to enjoy your own fresh, raw chocolate from a homegrown tree. Best of luck, and get growing!
Kathryn
I really want to try this, but I know I’m moving in two years and it would be hard to move the tree with me. I guess I’ll just have to wait a couple more years.
Ann
This is great. I love chocolate! Can the trees be grown in a container?
Ashley Adamant
Of course! Unless you live in zone 10 or 11, you have to grow them in containers.
Gail Bailey
Can you tell how to harvest the sticky coating from the seeds to make your own cacao liquor? And how to roast the seeds upon harvest to make them into cacoa powder? Also…how often do you have to fertilize your cocoa tree ?
Kate
Pretty amazing.
I have to comment on something I see a lot but I think is a misunderstanding of the results of a species evolution. Ashley said the seeds want to be warm and moist and the same thing about the tree. Neither the free nor seeds want anything; either they, germinate or not, thrive, survive or die. They aren’t pleasure seeking anymore than evolution had a goal, reached a spot it was supposed to and sat back, finished.
Laura
Aren’t the leaves on cocoa trees how people get cocaine?
Ashley Adamant
Good question, but no, it’s not. That’s a totally different plant. Cocoa is the plant that produces chocolate (Theobroma cacao- also called the cacao tree and the cocoa tree). The plant that produces cocaine is in the Erythroxylum genus, such as Erythroxylum coca. It’s a totally different thing.
Here is Cocoa (Chocolate) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobroma_cacao
Here is Coca (Cocaine) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca
Sarah
Could you actually make chocolate from these trees instead of just eating the nibs?
Ashley Adamant
In theory, yes. They’re first fermented, then dried, then roasted, then ground and processed into chocolate. You could run through the whole process on a countertop if you wanted. It takes quite a few chocolate pods to make a meaningful amount of chocolate though, and I really like getting to taste and eat the raw fresh beans.
Gary
Hi Ashley! good work! I,ve got little cocoa plants as well, but I’ve never achieve that big!! I can you tell me the way you get the warm & humid ambient?
Thank you!
Gary
Ashley Adamant
Hi Gary, We actually have moisture issues in our house since our house is super-insulated and very tight. In the winter it’s actually a bit too moist in here, since we heat with radiant rather than a wood stove and all the windows are shut. If you have a sunny spot near your kitchen or bathroom, that’s one way to do it. The one in the picture isn’t mine, that’s the parent tree, mine’s not that big (yet).
Felix
Amazing that you are growing this great plant . I’mthinking about doing so, too.
I’m just wondering if you need to heat up the roots too (maybe through an underground pipe system (GAHT)?)
Ashley Adamant
An underground pipe system might work if you’re in a very warm area already, but up here in the frozen north, ours live indoors, no question about it.
Lindsay
Ashley,
Like most trees, do you have to pollinate for it to produce?
Thanks! I can’t wait to try!
Ashley Adamant
Reading online it says in no uncertain terms that you need 2 trees to get fruit, but I know for a fact that my friends only have one. Maybe they have a freak tree, but they don’t have a cross pollinator. They also don’t hand pollinate it, but they do have a large greenhouse so it’s possible it’s insect pollinated in there. If you’re raising it in your house I’d hand pollinate the flowers with a paintbrush just to be sure. You’ll need a very small one, they’re really incredibly small flowers, a bit smaller than a green garden pea.
erg
Many cacao varieties are self-incompatible (hence the warning that a minimum of 2 trees is needed), but there are self-compatible varieties also, so presumably your friends have one of these.
Ashley Adamant
That’s likely true, since their’s fruits every year without a second tree.
Scott Roberts
Did you notice you have a huge bug infestation in the flower photo? I found using a toothpick and smooshing those bad bugs to be very therapeutic.
Nicholas
I’ve read different info regarding whether cacao needs to be hand pollinated. Does it?
Thanks.
Ashley Adamant
The tree these came from is not hand pollinated, it’s basically ignored and fruits every year none the less. I’ve also since heard that many cocao trees require a second pollinator, but that some are self-fertile. These beans came from a tree that’s growing alone, so perhaps lucky. I’m not sure how common self-fertile trees are, but these were not hand pollinated. That said, they’re greenhouse grown and there are pollinators that come into the greenhouse. If it were completely indoors, hand pollination might not be a bad idea.
Michael J. Vanecek
I have been growing…and killing… cacao trees for perhaps a couple of decades. I’ve finally got four Forastero trees that have survived me well enough. I have been shuttling them indoors for the winter, and back out under mulberry trees for the summer for their first years. They flower profusely, but even under the mulberries, the environment is just too dry for their preferred pollinators to flourish. Except for this year. Got a single pod – even though the trees did not flower as richly. The pod did not survive, as expected – most pods die, and something chewed on the pod’s stem. But I am very happy that pollinators found that flower. It means more pods will follow.
I have just moved my trees into my new greenhouse, where I hope to keep a moister environment to attract and maintain a healthy ecosystem of pollinators – ants and midges – to hopefully actually get some pods to mature. We shall see. They are growing with my tubs of vanilla orchids, coffee trees, a banana tree, lemongrass, pineapples, etc so it will be pretty tropical in there.
I am to the point, however, that I need to prune these trees. That is my next biggest challenge. They’ve grown quite ungainly and need to be cut back hard. I may start with one to be sure I don’t kill off all my Forasteros. For containers, I want lower branching and to maintain a tighter canopy. I did have one tree completely defoliate and return to health at one time, so I am hopeful that stumping the tree will result in new growth. I’ll wait until the tree is in vigorous growth mode before cutting to hopefully see a faster suckering.
I also have several Criollo saplings that are still in their tree-pots indoors. They’ll get a greenhouse next year when I pot them up into larger containers. And likewise, I plan on topping them and getting a few thicker branches trained to manage their canopy for greenhouse life.
When you cut the pods, consider just cutting the rind around the pod, then cracking it open. Then you can pull out the seed-mass intact with no damaged seeds.
For Forastero seeds – the ones that are purple or dark purple when cut – you can put those seeds in a gallon ziplock if you only have a few, or a tub if you have a lot, and left to ferment for a few days in a warm but shaded area. Criollo seeds are white when cut – they require little or no fermentation since the seeds contain few bitter tannins. Then you rinse them off, and dry them in the sun, turning them often. You could try drying in the oven set on low – but you don’t want to cook them. Once dry, you can roast them in a Behmor coffee roaster, then shell them and grind the nibs with some cane sugar to make your coffee – there are melangers available for that stage.
Michael J. Vanecek
Oops – “…some cane sugar to make your coffee” should be “…some cane sugar to make your chocolate”