Arontius of Bygelswade

.....I was surprised yesterday. I was in the spare room taking care of my Theobroma Cacao (watering, feeding, picking dead leaves) and noticed its first ever cacao pod! It's just a tiny thing, about an inch long, but it looks healty.

.....I've had the Theobroma for about eight years now. Got it from an Ethnobotanical Place in Florida. I can't remember the name off hand, but they are dedicated to the preservation of endangered plant life. They take seeds and cuttings and grow them in their green houses. Then they sell them to collectors and gardners around the world for really reasonable prices. Their motivation being the cultivation of rare plants.

.....A friend of mine at the time was really into her greenhouse and turned me on to the web-site. I was just browsing and the muse struck when I was reading the entries for the dozen or so different varieties of cacao that they had in their catalog. Picked up two seedlings (gave one away about a year later) and have been working on the other ever since. It's now a small tree in the spare room in a pot that is four feet across. If I ever had to get it out of the house I'm not sure what I would do. :-)

.....I had always thought that I would need another Theobroma to have cacao pod production, but someone at work suggested I try brushing the flowers myself with a tiny paintbrush to see if any would then bear fruit. This last year it started flowering like mad and so I tried it and here we go. It's rather cool.

.....I know, I'm a freak. :-)

.....Arontius / Aaron.