How a cacao tree grows

A cacao seedling starts as a single vertical stem. It grows straight up for a period, and then does something unusual: it stops, permanently, and produces a whorl of three to five horizontal branches all at once from the same point.

That point is called the jorquette, the vertical stem below it is a chupon, and the horizontal branches above it are fan branches. The vocabulary is worth learning because it is used constantly and explained rarely.

The two kinds of growth are not interchangeable and the difference is not cosmetic. Vertical growth builds height and structure and bears comparatively little. Horizontal growth carries the flowers, and therefore the pods. A tree that produces only vertical growth is a tree producing almost nothing.

Everything below the jorquette is trunk. Everything above it is the canopy a person has to reach into to harvest, prune and inspect for disease — repeatedly, for decades, by hand, with a knife on a pole.

So the height at which the tree happens to jorquette sets the working conditions for the rest of its life. A low jorquette gives a tree that can be worked from the ground. A high one gives a tree where every pod is a reach.

This is why cacao is not simply left to grow. It is also why the trees in a shaded, crowded, unmanaged plot tend to be the hardest to work: competing for light, they run up further before jorquetting, and the canopy ends up out of reach.

A mature cacao tree throws vertical shoots from the trunk and the base throughout its life. Conventional advice is to remove them, and most of the time that is right — they take resources and grow into a thicket that shades the fruiting canopy and holds humidity against it.

But a chupon is also how the tree renews itself, and that is the part usually left out. A vertical shoot deliberately kept, allowed to grow up and jorquette, becomes a new canopy on the existing root system. This is the mechanism behind chupon rehabilitation: rebuilding an old or damaged tree without replanting it and without waiting for a new tree's roots.

The distinction matters because the two situations look identical. A grower clearing chupons from a healthy tree and a grower selecting one on a failing tree are doing opposite things with the same growth.

The consequence that catches people out is what happens when the tree is propagated from a piece of itself.

Material taken from a vertical shoot grows like a vertical shoot: upright, eventually jorquetting, recognisably a tree. Material taken from a fan branch grows like a fan branch: outward and low, spreading, never producing a trunk, and typically with a shallower root system.

Neither is wrong, but they are different plants, and the choice is made at the moment the cutting is taken rather than corrected later. It is the single most important thing to understand about propagating cacao vegetatively, and it is covered properly in how new cacao trees are made.

Cacao flowers directly from the trunk and the older branches rather than from the current season's growth — the habit called cauliflory. The flowers appear on flower cushions, permanent thickened sites on the bark that keep producing flowers year after year.

A cushion is an accumulated asset. That is why pods are cut from the tree rather than pulled off: tearing a pod away damages the cushion, and a damaged cushion stops producing at that site. It is also why a pest that attacks cushions costs more than the pods it takes this season, and why the harvesting record in this catalogue treats a knife as non-negotiable rather than fussy.

What happens from flower to ripe pod is covered in how a cacao pod forms.