About 10km outside of Matagalpa, there is a coffee farm, or finca, called Finca Selva Negra. This plantation is completely organic and nearly fully sustainable. And well since that is right up our alley, we had to visit. Coffee is made by harvesting the red, ripe seeds off the coffee plant, removing the seed coat, fermenting the slimy beans in water to remove the jelly coat, placing the beans in the sun to dry for 5 days, shaking the dried beans to remove the last shell called the husk, then roasting and grinding the beans to make coffee. It´s just that simple.

Now what does it mean to be an organic and sustainable coffee farm, you might ask. Well, this farm doesn´t use any chemical pesticides or fertilizers. Instead, they plant legumes around the coffee to condition the soil, fertilize with manure from their cows and horses, and trap insects with traps made from used bottles from their restaurant. But they use water right? Yeah, they divert water from a mountain stream to process the beans, but they reclaim the byproduct, called honey water, and run it through a digester that makes gas to fuel their stoves. The leftover water goes to irrigate the fields. In fact, almost every byproduct from all their farm´s production is reused. Human and animal wastes are processed to make gas for cooking, bean coats and shells are thrown into a worm pile that fertilizes the crops, and river water is run through a small turbine to generate up to 55% of the power for their whole operation. These are only a few of the many ways this farm is trying to reduce its footprint on the globe, and they are constantly inventing more. So if you see Selva Negra coffee at your local Whole Foods Market (their main buyer), be sure to try their delicious coffee and know that it comes from a good source.

While touring the Finca, we picked an elephant lemon from one of their trees. If you are unfamiliar with the elephant lemon, as we were, it is a species of lemon that is about the size of a small child´s head and is supposed to be good for juice. We just couldn´t resist trying to make a little elephant lemonade ourselves. We carried the giant lemon back to our hostel, and I immediately started hacking into it, trying to be as sterile as I could in our hostel´s bathroom. Genny sat back and laughed at me as I talked my way, Julia Child-like, through the process. FYI, trying to squeeze a lemon the size of a large cantelope by hand is a tiring and difficult endeavor. The whole lemon yielded about a third of a cup of juice, which of course we had to try straight. I´ll let the pictures speak for themselves, but let´s just say that I said a little prayer for my stomach lining after that sip. About a half of a cup of sugar and about a 450% dilution later, we had made our first, and very tasty, batch of elephant lemonade.