Subsistence Farming - Hawaii

things are getting crazy on the island with rising gas prices etc. when you live on an island you feel the changes sooner. no buffer. we actually experience empty shelves at the stores at times! they are not all empty but there might be no organic oats in all of the 3 health food grocery stores for a few weeks, or no olive oil or no propane! its a bit scary.

but we are sitting relatively confident on the food front (that is if i give up butter and bread…). we gave up driving for a few months and it wasn’t so bad. we bike mostly now anyway. its 4 miles to the mailboxes, 5 miles to friends we visit and closer for most everything else (except town). less and less pull to go to town, except during the height of the horse emergency (which happened to coincide with a few weeks of serious rain) when i would drive to get lauren at the end of the day from the horse farm (she would ride her bike there and home lots of times. but when it was raining so hard and it was getting dark i would hop in the car and get her, and then keep on going right into town to buy things we usually only buy for xmas (jelly, boxes of soup. chocolate bars, deli sandwich, fish and chips….). i said “all bets are off, we get to come home with dinner!”

the emergency is over and the desparation is wearing off.

we just participated in a food from the land cooking class for the local Know Your Farmer Alliance with some other friends in the neighborhood. lauren, scott and i cooked breadfruit pineapple and coconut curry, taro burgers with cashew pesto and fried plantains. 99.9% of the food we used was local. we are also making chocolate! and coffee along with pineapple vinegar….. i feel inspired in phases. sometimes i just want pasta with red sauce and other times I’m making broth or concentrating lemons.

it is such a hoot to have chickens. i love their personalities.

time to plant a new variety of taro we got yesterday. scott is cutting down some 150′ tall invasive (they came from africa where they grow slowly in the dryness and are sturdy beautiful trees. here they grow so quickly from all our rain that they create large overstory and prevent anything else from growing. they are a soft wood here and can’t even hold their branches up. what sounds like gunshots are often the albezia branches popping and cracking as they fall.) trees and the 2 interns are sitting nearby watching and clapping as they come down. this is a show.