Coffee!

A while ago, I was presented with a little coffee cup filled with coffee beans. Except that the beans were not roasted, and someone had dropped them into some soil inside a little flowerpot inside that coffee cup, and poured some water over all that, and watered them again and again and... the result were a couple of small coffee plant sprouts.

The largest one, meanwhile, has grown to look like this:






Some day, the Internet tells me, this thing might actually bloom and have coffee cherries later on. It also tells me that this will probably take another three or so years... well. I think I'll just go on buying coffee in the meantime, and I won't hold my breath for home-grown! It makes a nice plant, though. Not as decorative (yet) as the Ecuador Purple Chili:


but then purple chili fruit is really hard to beat, decorativeness-wise.

Final fun fact about coffee: The plant belongs to the same plant family as madder... does that explain why plant dyers love their coffee?