The Apes Hill Tobacco Project
Sometimes, the most intriguing potential products in the cigar world can sprout all on their own. Mother Nature—or whatever ethereal goddess claims sway over tobacco—decided Apes Hill in Barbados would be just such a spot.
Like many resorts with gourmet restaurants, the elite golf venue at Apes Hill grows many of its organic ingredients on property to guarantee freshness and to reduce the resort’s carbon footprint. They call it their Farm to Fork Program. A stroll through the agronomy yard reveals growing programs for everything from the Bermuda grass that covers the championship-length golf course and its nine-hole, par-3 Little Apes cousin to a variety of fruits and vegetables flourishing under the island sun.
However, tucked away from the acerola cherries, guava and mangos, there’s an expanding patch of more than 100 young tobacco plants the island’s ecosystem offered Apes Hill. Ed Haskins, the resort’s golf superintendent and ombudsman, found them growing wild across the 470-acre property. He was more than happy to transplant them under his green thumb.
“We have now imported some plants, but we’re using mostly local, wild varieties that we find growing randomly here and there on the property,” Haskins says. His plan is to use that tobacco and, eventually, roll it into local cigars.
While Barbados is currently not a major tobacco grower, the plant first came to the island with the English during the height of the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Descendants of those crops dot the landscape, with Aztec and Virginia leaves making up most of that wandering population.
Haskins and his Apes Hill team continue to play with the mixes they transplant, adding varieties to the crop. Rather than jump into a crash course on tobacco production, Haskins is taking his time, studying growing times, noting seasonal behaviors and getting a sense of when and how tobacco plants mature for prime drying, aging and rolling.
“It’s too early to say which (plants) are more suited to our conditions,” Haskins explains. “We have more than 10 types growing now. We’re finding the best quality plants and letting them seed so we can collect the seeds for more planting.”
Haskins and all hands at Apes Hill look forward to offering the property’s own branded cigars to its golfer guests, as the in-house project doesn’t yet have ambitions of manufacturing cigars for sale outside the resort or exporting leaves to other companies.
For now, an immediate concern is keeping an eye on the island’s unique species of Green Monkeys that like to raid Haskins’ crops as they come ripe.
“We call the monkeys our ‘first tasters,’ but I don’t think they smoke,” he says.
While cigar-savvy guests and Apes Hill residents will be the first to benefit from all of Haskins’ work and education, he Glenn Chamandy, the resort’s owner, plan on enjoying plenty of the very local smokes on their own during Caribbean evenings to come. But it’s a long-term affair. “Make no mistake because this project is happening and is totally going to continue,” Haskins says. “The entire project will take up to five years to be fully in production. But, we’ll see finished cigars in less than three years.”
