In the wild, a coffee plant can tower up to 15 feet high, but don’t worry—it’s a slow grower! Even so, if you want a healthy plant with plenty of blooms, you shouldn’t skip out on regular pruning. Using the right trimming techniques will keep your plant developing beautifully and encourage those lovely flowers to pop up.
The Annual Maintenance Trim
Coffee plants are actually really hardy when it comes to pruning. Generally, you don’t need to worry about a regular schedule until your plant hits about 12 inches tall. Up until that point, just keep an eye out for any stunted growth or areas where the foliage is getting so dense that light can’t reach the center—this can prevent flowers and fruit from developing properly.
For your standard annual maintenance, less is usually more. Focus on snipping off any dried-out stems, sickly branches, or old growth that isn’t producing much anymore. I also like to pinch back the tips of the branches every year; this encourages the plant to branch out and get nice and bushy rather than leggy.
Pro tip: Unlike many other shrubs, you should prune a coffee plant from the bottom up. You can even train it to grow on just one or a few main stems by consistently removing the lower side shoots. This also helps keep the air flowing so the plant doesn’t get too crowded.
Pruning Larger Plants
In professional coffee farming, growers rarely let the plants get taller than six feet—mostly because it makes harvesting a total pain! Because these plants handle pruning so well, you can give them a “radical” haircut down to about three feet if they start taking over your living room.
This flexibility is exactly why the coffee plant makes such an ideal houseplant; you can easily shape it to fit your space. In some coffee-growing regions, they use a traditional method called “La Soca,” where the plant is cut back to just 12 inches high! This heavy pruning triggers a burst of vigorous new growth and is a great trick if your plant’s “bean” production has started to slow down over the years.
If you do decide to go for a major prune, don’t throw those clippings away! It’s the perfect time to take cuttings. Propagating a coffee plant from cuttings is usually much easier than trying to grow one from seed.
When to Prune
No matter how much you’re planning to cut back, timing is everything. The best time to grab your shears is in the spring—ideally March or April. At this point, the plant is just waking up from its winter rest but hasn’t started its big growth spurt yet. Pruning now gives the plant a little “nudge” to start putting out healthy new shoots just as the growing season kicks off.
