Growing Portugal’s first Cocoa.

But before we dive into the story, let me tell you that we are actually talking about Madeira, a Portuguese island in northwestern Africa. And that we are on a mission of having as many different tropical fruits as possible.

The Cocoa tree is as tropical as a plant can get.

Maximum of 10 to 20 degrees north or south of the equator. Average temperatures of 27ºC (80ºF) for optimal growth. No cold or wind tolerance whatsoever. High humidity and plenty of rainfall required. And soil that is able to drain quite well.

Well, for those of you not familiar with the island, we have more microclimates than you can imagine, but none of them should be warm enough for Cocoa. We are, after all, on the 32nd parallel north — so even on the warmest parts of the island all we can count on is average temperatures of around 18ºC in the coldest months, with absoute lows rarely below 12ºC.

Sourcing the plants

Viable cocoa seeds are extremely difficult to get, specially because exporting them from any cocoa growing region close to impossible due to regulations. I can think of a few creative ways to bypass that, but I’ll leave this part up to your imagination.

From seed to paradise

So what did we do? From our 3 small plots of land, 1 of them is in a cool mountain side 600 meters above sea level, where we have a small greenhouse. This was not ideal but we were able to germinate our seeds and grow our infant cocoa plants for the first few years in this small greenhouse. It worked!

Cocoa trees at the back. My finger on the foreground.

Our two remaining plots are in the southwest coast, where we have the highest temperatures, good draining soil, but less humidity and very little rain. This is where we eventually wanted to plant them definitely, so we built a new 140 square meter, 7 meter tall greenhouse where we would be able to keep high humidity and average temperatures in the 25–30ºC range without any heating sources. And a few months after planting on the ground, they had reached a few meters in height and were producing the first cocoa pods!

Grown cocoa trees with ripe pods

What about pollination?

You must now be thinking — great, grown cocoa trees producing cocoa! But there’s a catch. While most of the world’s flowers are pollinated by butterflies or bees, cocoa is pollinated by ceratopogonid midges (Forcipomyia spp.). Needless say, we had no clue if there were any of these guys in a small island in the middle of the Atlantic. Let alone the few subspecies (from around 1000) that actually do the trick.

But lucky for us there were, which came in handy as we were just too lazy to do manual pollination (comparable in difficulty to surgery if you’re wondering. At least if you have my eyesight).

Funny enough, all our cocoa trees are siblings. However, the plants and pods come in an array of shapes, colours and sizes.

And would they survive outside the greenhouse?

We wondered the same. A few people have been able to grow them in the southernmost tip of Florida, which is much warmer than here. To our advantage however, we never get anywhere close to freezing temperatures, which can happen every few years there, so we decided to try. It’s still too early to tell, but if they do survive, there will be a follow up story.