Woody what a GREAT pic, nice accomplishment Woody's DH.

Annette

Woody, after seeing the whole process at a cocoa plantation in the Dominican Republic, it's a wonder I ever ate chocolate again! OMG! When the beans are taken out and laid in the sun to ferment, or whatever they're doing? That was one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen/smelled!

A trip to Belgium reminded me of how much I like chocolate....DARK chocolate! I'm able to overlook the memory of the hideous sight I saw! Ha ha! How could something so incredibly good start out so nasty?

DH would now like to grow a second one to see if he could get cross-pollination. The other two guys he worked with who were also trying to grow a tree both hard their trees die. So we need to find another source of plants or seeds. RBG had a chocolate-themed exhibit a year to two ago that had a small tree as part of it (not in as good shape as DH's tree!). We may try to get in touch with someone there to see if we could get a cutting or seeds through them....

T2D - dark chocolate is our favorite too...! DH asked whether the cocoa beans were in the acetic acid stage of fermentation when you experience it. That is likely the smelliest stage he says. The whole process only takes a week or less, so you just had bad timing I think :-).

Oh yes! I'm sure we were there at the smelliest part of. The process. They were laid out on the huge cement slabs and still had that sickly, mucousy look to them. At least that is how I remember it. Unfortunately, I had dropped my camera earlier in the trip so I was unable to get a single photograph. Albeit smelly, it really was fascinating,mane I was truly bummed about my camera.

While on the subject, which readily available dark chocolate do you prefer?

We usually use theLindt dark chocolate. There's a Lindt store nearby so it's easy to get the big bars, often on sale. It's what we use for the Chocolate Truffle Cake we make when we're feeling decadent :-). For the fudgy brownies we make, we just use Baker's Unsweetened and Bittersweet. We use the Ghiardelli cocoa powder which is supposed to be best at preserving the flavinols.

I do enjoy the Lindt extra dark truffles. Sounds like you make a lot from scratch, but have you ever tried the Ghirardelli brownies? They are sooooo good.

back to the flower.....one thing we did not learn while at the cocoa plantation was anything about the flower. Are you saying the large pod comes from that teeny flower?

I am a chocolate snob! Only Ghirardelli for baking and Belgian for eating (ok, Dove too..but not Hersheys)!! And I am on a mission to have white chocolate abolished...it is a crime to call it chocolate, lol. The flower is very cool!

Chocolate Flower

Woodyoak, it kind of like the Maxwell House Coffee scenerio. This lowly rough leafed, unassuming little native is the closest thing to chocolate I have growing down here. Its often called Chocolate Flower because they smell like cocoa. I'd shoot my own shot but its 98 degrees out there with a heat factor of 103 and the garden looks so dry and dismal right now you'd end up feeling sorry for me, think I'm a bad mother or had shot an over-exposed photograph of a weed patch. Its alive and at this time of year, that counts for a lot.

By the way, that weird funky plant reminds me of some column types of cactus which will put out gorgeous blooms coming straight out of the trunk like a surprise (or trunk 'warts' that open into pretty flowers). Weird looking.

TR2 - interestingly, the cocoa tree does not smell like chocolate at all. I wondered if the flowers might have the scent but was afraid to try to smell them in case I knocked them off! But DH says there is no scent in them either - that all the flavor and aroma comes about through the fermentation and roasting. He says he's eaten the raw beans and they have no chocolate flavor at all! So you have more chocolate scent in your garden than we would ever have here from this tree!

If we can keep this tree alive for a few more years, I hope we eventually get a display of flowers a bit more like the ones on the page I linked. I've e-mailed RBG to see if they might know where we could get some seeds to start another one - or maybe get a cutting from RBG perhaps.

It's outrageously hot and humid here too these past few days - it's 89F out there now, with a Humidex of 101F. The normal (cooler by the lake!) temperature for this date is 72F.... So I wouldn't go out in our garden to take a picture of anything either!

Amazing, I had no idea the blossoms came out along the trunk! And such a lovely little bloom. I am not a chocolate snob, I have plebeian tastes, milk chocolate and even like Hershey's Almond candy bar. Will occasionally buy myself a good quality Lindt or Belgian bar. Dark chocolate is too bitter for me.

https://ecuadorfulbrightguaranda.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/some-tropical-fruits-and-their-flowers/

For some reason my mom thought I loved white chocolate and bought me a white chocolate lamb every Easter. I have been traumatized every since!

woody that is so impressive, hats off to both of you! Fascinating.

I'm with you mnwsgal - milk chocolate for me too.

Bummer Deb, I hope you got more than a bunch of those inedible hard mallow eggs to go with that white bunny. We would have cried if the Easter Bunny had put white choco-rabbits in our Easter baskets instead of the normal, expected, chocolate hollow ones like he's supposed to leave.

I have plebian taste too. Give me the plain jane Hershey kisses any day over those fancy ones they've come out with. Some of that dark chocolate thats out now is too hard to bite into and the 'adult' taste is awful & bitter + I'm also a cheap skate & I $hun the fancy $tuff. I do like a splurge on a box of Russell Stover's for Valentine's Day, a tradition that started with my Dad which has continued through the years with the whole family & I still buy a box of Cocoa Puffs every once in a blue moon.

that tree.. in that pot is amazing.. in and of itself.. lol ...

ken

People's chocolate preferences are almost as varied as their garden preference :-) It was often interesting when DH would bring home samples of chocolate bars from places like India and Mexico. Hot climates and retailers with warm stores mean the chocolate formulations have to be adjusted to minimize 'bloom' (where the cocoa butter moves to the surface after the chocolate has melted and re-solidified and lost its 'temper'). The bars also reflect local preferences for degree of sweetness/ bitterness of the chocolate, preferences for other ingredients like wafers, nuts, etc. There was one bar from Mexico that I particularly liked. Familiar bars can taste quite different in different countries.

TR2 - I loved those hard, colored Easter eggs when I was a kid! :-)

Ken - true- being repotted probably wouldn't hurt....:-)

peren.all - all credit goes to DH - it's his baby! I'm occasionally assigned watering duties, but otherwise 'hands off'.... :-) It is called Little Nigel - named for the guy who provided the seed.

mnwsgal - I like Hershey's Almond bar too (gross treason!) The very dark chocolate is indeed bitter and an acquired taste - I've always preferred dark chocolate but it took a while to work up to enjoying the darkest ones :-) I find coffee very bitter and have never acquired the taste for it. Since DH is really 'into' fresh roasted coffee (black; no cream, no sugar....), he thinks I have no taste in such matters! :-)

TR2......I'm pretty sure I should be in a Cocoa Puffs anonymous group. I haven't bought it in years, but it was "my dessert" many an evening for a loooong time. I love the chocolate milk it makes!

I also really like milk chocolate, especially mixed in with goodies. And don't get me going on Kit Kats! However, a weird thing for me is that when eating milk chocolate I'm never quite done.......I eat lots and lots of it but never find myself quite satisfied that I've had enough. With dark chocolate, one ounce of a fairly dark chocolate immediately satisfies me. I guess that the reason I stick with dark! I'll pass altogether in white. Poor Deb with the white Easter lambs!

Woody, that must have been so interesting tasting chocolate from all different regions of the world. Was ther anything really "odd" added to any chocolate bars? I don't know, crickets or something?

How long does it normally take for a cocoa tree to mature enough to flower and as we'll produce the pods? See, I'm trying to keep the thread gardening related! LOL!

I like the bark of that tree.

T2D - no, nothing 'odd' in the bars I tasted! Once he brought home several versions of the same bar, each made in a different country to see if I could identify the Canadian version, and which one I liked best. I couldn't pick out the Canadian one, and it wasn't the one I liked best. I can't remember where the one I liked came from....

I'm not sure how long it takes for a tree to grow from seed to flowering size. Ours is about 5 years old, so they obviously mature quite quickly. But commercially they are grown from cuttings, not seed, I think so they'd mature even faster that way. But how old they'd need to be to give optimal/maximum production, and how long they produce for, I don't know. DH was in the production of bars etc. end of things, not the growing of the plants, so his knowledge of the plant-related end is somewhat limited - what he picked up in passing or reading on his own. It's a very complex business spread all over the world, with lots of politics and unsavoury activities scattered through its history!

mnwsgal - I like the sort of 'netted' pattern on the bark.

Yeah, that's what I like also.

Woody and Husband

I like the way it looks like there are little closed mouths along the trunk and then one of the mouths sticks it tongue out. Thats what I think the plant is doing.

Woody, I've given this serious thought, you know how I love to rethink stuff, obsessive person that I am.... I have come to the believe that the plant is attempting to communicate with you and Mr. Woody. Cactus do that too. They think, they invent and they communicate unlike other types of plants. Parts of plants have the uncanny ability to turn into 'things', like little surprises or a small voice saying "hello there, how ya doin?".

LOL TR2 - this one may be saying "get me a bigger pot"!

Just when I thought no truly new thread could come to this forum...I was so mistaken. So cool 'woody'.

Very cool. What are you going to do when it gets taller?

Good question gyr_falcon! Controlling size may be part of the reason DH keeps it in such a small pot. I suspect that the most likely thing we'd do is start a new one (or two or....!) from cuttings and see if perhaps RBG would be interested in Little Nigel :-) It would fit nicely in one of their greenhouses I think....

Rouge - cocoa trees don't exactly fit the topics for this forum, but I thought this group would be most likely to be interested in such a 'cool' plant :-) It was basically a pretty boring tree - until it bloomed!

Mine is named Theo (for Theobroma cacao) and also bloomed for the first time this year. I'll probably never get a pod, but it is fun knowing I have a chocolate tree! Logee's sells them.

But, that is a perennial, just not a hardy perennial.