The Trans Africa Truck Gallery #12
Tetteh Quarshie was an Illerate peasant who was gievn some Cocoa seeds buy a trader, he went back to his family homestead and planted the seeds, some of the trees that he planted are still alive today after several genrations they still produce fruit.
His grandsons still have the original plot and we were privalges to be shown around.
Joshua his granson ( 73) was insistant that we saw how the harvest was managed and took us through the various stages of the harvesting and processing of the Cocoa plant.
Cutting the pod from the tree, each tree will produce apx 100 pods during the 2 seasons a year
Once harvested,they are split open and the pulppy seeds are wrapped in leaves to ferment the seeds for 4 - 6 days.
They are then laid out on matting to be sun dried for 3 days. The dried seeds are then bagged and sent to the central processing factory, the dry husks are removed and the sore is raw Cocoa. This is then used for Chocolate and alike.