I am a chocolate lover. Hot Chocolate, Chocolate Milk, Dark Chocolate, Milk Chocolate, Chocolate Bunny, Chocolate dip, Chocolate covered…. anything. So when a friend reached out to say “Hey.. if I send you Cacao fruit, would you give it a shot to grow the seeds into trees?” Umm.. Sir! You had me at Cacao.

I documented the process and am here to share it with YOU! In part one I will go over the effort I put in to harvesting the seeds and how I planted them. Then- in a couple of months when we see our success rate I will post a Part 2 update!

So this week – my Cacao pods arrived. Before now I had never even thought about the process of making chocolate and definitely didn’t even realize that these Cacao pods existed or imagined that people eat them as exotic fruit. When I cut it open the seeds were incased in this super slimy “fruit”. Although I hear that they taste like Banana, I completely resisted trying any of them. I am a texture person so the thought of a slimy fruit just grosses me out. Ill eat a Banana, but you do you – if you are adventurous enough, give it a taste!!

To make sure that I didn’t mess up the process of getting these seeds out correctly and planted, I watched a recommended video of a successful Cacao tree planter here in Florida. Below is the link if you are wanting a video of the process. I followed his steps to a T.

Tutorial YouTube Video from Pepe’s Fruit Trees

As I was working through getting the slimy substance off of each individual seed, I had to be careful to not damage the seed itself. It was causing my hands to cramp because I was trying to hold on tight to these pods that were slipping all over the place, and at the same time dig my nail in gently to scrape directly off of the pod. I had a total of 3 pods to do. The first pod had 50 seeds, the second pod had 45 seeds, and the third pod had 38 seeds. My hands are cramping up again just writing that. A total of 133 seeds!!! Whew.

As stated in the tutorial video, you don’t want to sit around on these guys. When you get them out and ready- you need to get them planted. It was pouring rain all day today but what better day to plant some seeds? I was lucky that my husband already had a ton of 1 gallon pots filled with potting soil so I simply had to poke holes in each of them, place the seed with a tiny bit of brown exposed at the top and boom! Seeds planted. We decided to do 4 seeds per pot, giving us 33 1 gallon pots. If we see them all pop we will be sure to transplant them before they get tangled up.

Wish us luck in this process, we are SUPER EXCITED! I did look up the process to make chocolate and it seems super involved. However… the thought of eating chocolate that I grew myself and made just sounds way too cool not to try!

Until next time – HAPPY PLANTING!