Short Term Farm Projects

INFRASTRUCTURE

• Pond House (new ferro cement building w/barrel vault roof- our main living space) 
  • make form for plastering the gable edge
  • dig footings for reflecting pond/catchment
  • dig footings for entry
  • pour last (3rd) layer of concrete on the barrel vaults and apply water proofing
  • plaster/burnish interior and exterior surfaces
  • continue building rock retaining wall between pond and building
  • decide on design for wood burning stove/oven and build
  • decide on design for alcohol burning stove and build

• Barn (standing dead or recycled ohia posts w/recycled metal roofing)
  • organize new barn area (pare down)
  • dismantle remaining section of old barn (pare down)
  • complete last three sections of barn
  • move salvaged plywood and redwood lumber undercover at school room eaves

• Drying Area/Shower/Greenhouse
  • organize linens/clothing into containers
  • design ohia/paper bark post and w/lexan roofing structure

• Intern Area
  • plant vetiver grass barrier surrounding intern garden (to keep out chickens)
  • plant more pineapple, ginger, turmeric, perennial greens
  • plant coffee understory
  • cut down wili wili trees at entry where carport used to be

LAND

• Nursery
  • up pot peach palm, coffee, key lime,
  • plant in flats: african oil palm, american oil palm, chilean wine palm, neem, moringa, jabotikaba, brazilian cherry, pigeon pea, acerola, kapok,
  • starts for intern kitchen garden (perennial cilantro, eggplant, okra, cherry tomato, marigold, pepper varieties, basil, dill, parsley, fennel, beans,
  • starts for crops (peanuts, sunflowers, cassava…)
  • make cuttings of collards and root in cinder pile
  • make cuttings of sweet potato, root and plant in cinder pile
  • propagate cardamom, various bamboo varieties, mulberry, chaya, begonia, garlic chives, gotu kola, taro,

• Orchards
  • lay weed mat over patches of cane grass in orchard areas
  • plant banana kekei’s on north of each fruit/nut tree for water supply…
  • clear to drip line around each fruit/nut tree, design and plant individual guilds (including perennial peanut or sun hemp as nitrogen-fixing)
  • add cinder to any rough lava areas
  • harvest cacao and ferment (save some for nursery starts)
  • harvest coffee and dry, roast
  • broadcast hawaiian pumpkin, chaya in young orchards for weed control
  • weed spice tree orchard

• Garden
  • design and layout raised keyhole garden around pond
  • relocate wing bean, lab lab bean, long bean and tropical lima bean trellises

• Lawns/Pond
  • weed perennial peanut (esp. around taro and pineapple patches)
  • cinder to smooth out area around pond
  • plant acai palms around pond and pond house for 40% canopy cover
  • source water plants (wasabi, lotus, kang kong, water chestnut, reeds)

• Jungle
  • clear of weed trees the area along drive for guadua bamboo (timber) orchard

• Bamboo
  • weed all varieties of bamboo at border

• Pastures
  • build new (pallet) gate at upper (fallow) goat pasture
  • slowly replace wili wili fence posts (gall wasp damaged) with jakfruit, avocado, peach palm… seedlings

MISCELLANEOUS

• move ferro cement hot tub to area behind pond house and hook up chofu wood burning stove
• break down old pallets and store for firewood
• continue to work on farm map using aerial photo and GPS to plot trees
• continue to work on seasonal mandalla
• make more beeswax/kukui nut paste for sealing wood furniture
• set up aerobic composting system (try moringa) w/foliar sprayer
• create vehicle turnaround at carport
• experiment with sand water filter system
• find: pressure tank bladders, bike trailer,
• find seed/cutting source for:
• research: flywheel powered shop tool, pedal powered shop tool, sterling motor refrigeration, direct solar refrigeration, hydrogen fuel, high speed internet/phone options,
• create tropical medicinal plant database

ENTERPRISES

• read literature on how to operate still (essential oils, hydrosol, alcohol fuel, tinctures…)
• experiment: harvest and dry variety nuts (malabar chestnut, peach palm, jakfruit seeds…) , starches (cassava, breadfruit, yam…) and test with mill to make flour
• design aluminum bee hives/frames to eliminate problem with wood rotting
• build system to convert wood ashes to lye for soap making
• design and build bamboo and thatch structure for hot tub
• experiment: making charcoal from variety of woods (coconut husks, guava, pallets…)
• experiment: oil for lamp fuel, cooking, soap making, base for medicinals with variety of nuts/seeds (coconut, kukui, macnut…) using expeller press
• design and build solar dehydrator w/backup heat (wood)
• define and create backyard medicine cabinet (tinctures, salves….)

FUTURE (considerations)

• Land Lease (2.5 Acre 30+ year)
• define our needs
• explore contracts

Ideas for tropical meals

evening rain farm meals from the land, some we have regularly, most we have tried when we had the ingredients and some are ideas (modifying other recipes i have used from the continent with tropical ingredients).

• green drink (katook, honey, ginger, lemongrass, mint, perennial cilantro, ice, water, lemon or lime w/ a quarter of the skin) blended
• malabar chestnut steamed and eaten out of the shell with a petit spoon
• steamed plantain with grated ginger (leave the skins on the plantains while you steam, remove skins and add fresh grated ginger)
• ripe (soft) bread fruit, steamed then mashed with coconut milk/cream, sprinkled with toasted coconut and topped with lilikoi
• steamed taro with coconut oil (or…shhh… butter)
• nourishing breakfast smoothie (goat’s milk yogurt, 2 raw eggs, coconut – hard meat, banana, honey, spices (cardamom, ginger, black pepper, vanilla, nutmeg), mac nuts, seasonal fruit (pineapple, mango, jak fruit…) (sometimes cacao) blended with ice
• refreshing smoothie: ice, water, available fruit (banana, jak fruit, lime), honey blended
• egg omelet with plantain and cheese (ideally goat’s cheese)
• pudding snack: ground cacao, mashed banana, black pepper, ground mac nuts
• kombucha “tea (black or green tea, crushed sugar cane and kombucha culture)” with lime and honey
• jak fruit seeds ground and added to anything (like pork or any starch)
• steamed moringa or steamed steamed edible hibiscus with pineapple or mango vinegar
• sauted veggies (eggplant and or wing, long, string beans), ocean water, with scrambled eggs added in the end
• steamed lima beans with ocean water
• pigeon pea dahl (onion, tumeric, ginger, chives, ocean water, hot pepper, cumin, corriander, coconut milk/cream, toasted mustard seeds)
• half TBS roasted coffee, half TBS cacao — both ground very fine, honey, crushed contents of 2 cardamom pods- all boiled together until it froths 3 times (makes one cup turkish coffee)
• bedtime drink: heated goat’s milk with honey, ground nutmeg and coconut cream
• ground pig, sage, chives, hot pepper, plantain or banana, sea water
• coconut water from green or brown nuts, also sprouted coconut right out of the shell
• sauce for plain stuff like steamed breadfruit or taro or greens: toasted mac nuts ground with chives, hot pepper, liquid (pineapple skin tea, or vinegar, or lime juice, or lemon grass tea, or coconut milk…), ocean water, spices- ginger, herbs like perennial cilantro, black pepper, toasted mustard seed (tastes like a tahini dressing)
• pork roast browned then cooked for hours with just ocean water, black pepper and goats milk
• breadfruit pancakes: steamed breadfruit (unripe) grated and added to anything in the fridge or from the land (spices, veggies, herbs, greens), made into paddies and cooked in coconut oil
• avocado eaten out of the skin with ocean water, vinegar or lime/lemon and hot and or black pepper
• pudding: avocado, cacao, honey.
• toasted and ground mac nuts with honey, ground cacao mixed together and rolled into balls, rolled in toasted coconut. refrigerate
• green papaya salad: garlic chives, hot pepers, shredded green papaya, long beans, lime juice, honey, mac nuts chopped, , ocean water, tamarind- all chopped with mortar and pestle until juicy
• heart of palm salad: palm heart from peach palm (clumping palm), garlic chives, pineapple vinegar, ocean water, black pepper, ginger, coconut shredded
• papaya with lime juice
• curried chayote (or hawaiian pumpkin or eggplant or okra): coconut milk/cream, hot peppers (lots of kinds mixed), garlic chives, ginger or galanga, cumin, black pepper, ocean water, cilantro.
• kim chee: asian cabbage and perennial greens, hot peppers, ocean water (fermented)
• pesto: cilantro, coconut oil, mac nuts, ocean salt, lemon/lime juice, pepper corns, garlic chives (if only we could grow garlic here!)
• guacamole- avocado, hot pepper, lime juice, tomatillo, chives, cilantro, black pepper, ocean water
• pineapple salsa- pineapple, chives, cilantro, lemon juice, hot peppers, (garlic)
• dried bean stew- dried beans,
• sweet potato salad
• banana ice cream- frozen bananas (or pineapples or jak fruit…) run through champion juicer w/coconut cream
• chocolate sauce- cacao, coconut cream, vanilla blended (add mac nuts)
• curried egg salad (we used to eat a lot of this)

future (or haven’t yet tried these recipes):

• lau lau (taro leaves and miscl stuffings (pumpkin, spices, maybe a protein like fish or pork) steamed)
• beet ginger kraut- grated beets, ginger grated, chives- fermented
• cold soup- chopped mint, papaya chunks, lime juice, w/pineapples blended as sauce
• tilapia fish cooked with lime (once our pond starts producing tilapia big enough)
• lime juice avocado banana ginger pineapple tea water blended dressing over fruit
• mac nut ground, lemon juice, ocean water, ginger, hot pepper. honey – blended dressing
• papaya, lime juice, toasted mustard seeds, black pepper, ocean water, blended dressing
• dehydrated fruits (my kingdom for a solar dehydrator that can handle this humidity!)

Wish List

Food related for the main homestead:

• maybe a cow or two in a few yearshedges to hold a flock of sheep in the orchards
• the driveway turned into an enclosed pasture for horses or sheep
• corn crop for drying and millling
• peanut crop
• sugar cane crop
• sweet potato patch
• more taro patches from roof or sink runoffs
• pond plants (water cress, water chestnut, reeds…)
• more more more pineapple patches
• an acre or two of guadua bamboo (for building)
• an acre or two of a cash crop
• ground cover for orchards (pigeon pea? tumeric? perennial peanut?)

Other

• guest house
• solar dehydrator
• bio digester (to replace solar panels and batteries in the future)
• entry gate and sign at road with farm logo
• medicinal garden
• experimental one acre sustainable plot
• bamboo building class
• no more tarp structures
• ladders at pigeon peas for harvesting
• really tall ladder at peach palms for harvesting

For the intern homestead

• cacao (chocolate) trees
• coffee trees
• spice trees (nutmeg, cinnamon, all spice, clove)
• sugar cane patch
• pigeon pea understory

Mutually exclusive

i can appreciate the pull of the world which makes hunting for wild mushrooms become a chore instead of a delight. this school year i have changed my primary focus from eating sustainably on the land to focusing on high school-level home schooling with our 14 year old daughter.

come september, the first thing i noticed was my bean trellises looking neglected, the jungle successfully encroaching into my perennial peanut lawn, the coffee beans, bright red begging to be picked turning darker and darker brown on the trees….

i realize that i can have ANYTHING i want, i just can’t have EVERYTHING i want.

So, instead of eating taro, fresh beans and roasted feral pig for dinner, some nights when i eat at all, i am eating store-bought rice, black beans and packaged cheddar cheese… (with a freezer filled with pork roasts, the bread fruits ripening, the katok plants are falling over from the weight of their nutritious leaves). i have to admit that local food isn’t always as fast a food as i’m wanting or have the energy for.

i feel a sense of embarrassment about my swift decline away from my goal of eating sustainably. my goodness, i had just barely gotten comfortable (and perhaps self-righteous) at my 80%-from-the-land mark.

but i also recognize the importance of educating my daughter. i’m beginning to see clearly that just as relying on others to grow and ship my foods, build my house, provide my electricity and water etc. is not serving me or the planet, neither is letting the same system that tells me: “commercial agriculture is the only way to feed me, i need a bigger army and more weapons to ever feel safe, to go ahead and consider the insatiable-consumptive american lifestyle my birth right, i can find happiness by smelling “morning fresh”, a new car will get me a hot date…” how can this same voice be trusted to educate my dear one? does it have to cost feeding me with commercially produced agriculture?

how can i throw my daughter to the wolves who want her to tone herself down, who want her to believe what she is taught without question, who shame her into becoming homogenized instead of explode with her beautiful uniqueness and strong voice?

how can we have second generation of homesteaders if all our children are taught to chase the carrot of MORE?

oo, i try to resolve myself to focus my energy as best i can. i try to be gentle with the voices (inside my head) that scold me for being a hypocrite or not doing enough. and i continue to realize that eating sustainably and homeschooling are not mutually exclusive.

Artwork for kath

Kath just turned 50 and my gift to her when she comes in January for a visit will be an art piece. i will crate a shallow wooden box, paint the inside surface with a face. i will purchase a beautiful simple gold chain bracelet and attach it to the face above the third eye, like a head band. then Kath and i will spend a week exploring the island and exploring her life and create, find charm like symbols of her life. each charm will represent an image she has about herself. one might represent herself as a fiber artist, one a mother, one an able bodied woman, one a business owner, one a good friend… as we reach a point in our lives where these images begin to fall away, so must our attachment fall away. we will use tie wire (very temporary metal wire) to attach these charms (which dangle in front of the eyes, symbolically). then time will let them fall away and the eyes will be able to see with a different clarity. And the gold chain, the essence of her, will never tarnish.

Response to finding my way

i never thought this way would be my way. really.

in fact i decided to leave hawaii, ticket in hand until i met scott.

all it takes are a few days of horizontal rain, wet socks (inside the house), rat shit on the rim of my iron teapot or another ruined tin of dragon pearls jasmine tea and i’m wondering what exactly they mean by paradise. this is the rain forest and not the sandy beaches kind of tropics.

but then the rest of the days are so easy. i love my life so much that i dread going anywhere. i love our evenings together so much that i resent company.

i have thoughts like believing there is no real world beyond what i can see with my own eyes. do places like iraq, washington dc and melting ice caps exist in the same world? are they any more or less real for me than the places i visit in my dreams each night?

twenty-two acres and a quirky neighborhood that surrounds it, this is the size of my world.

i remember when i was building my earthship, had to buy, finish (sort of) and move into a tiny (about 500 sq ft.) version of the earthship. at first i was feeling claustrophobic in such a small enclosed space. but once my life squeezed down to fit i noticed i liked that life more. i loved looking at my possessions and asking myself “why would i ever need two spatulas? am i expecting to do a pancake party some day?” out went the second spatual. it felt so good, i did more and more.

same thing when i gave up driving when i lived in portland. it took a bit of time but once i adjusted my live to my circumstances, wow, what a better suited life.

giving up having a phone for a year, same thing. first it was hard but then i realized that i was no longer the person my freinds called with their dramas or emergencies. i was too unavailable. and i kinda liked that. i had to learn to make plans with a disclaimer attached “if i’m not there by 6:30 go without me, i can’t call.” immediately life actually got better.

next it was relationships parring down. noticing when my inner voice towards a particular friend was consistently “high maintenance” and then letting the relationship drop away. not easy but such freedom.

Summer ends

getting ready for h.s. is thrilling and scary. we started this week. scott is doing math (interactive math), i am doing life skills (a workbook by dave ellis called Master Student), art class (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain) and large animal anatomy (i figured why not start to tackle the stuff vet students have to learn along with a bazillion other things). so far so good.

we are doing this spanish program from pbs that presents half hour soap operas in spanish. there is a narrator who fills you in, but all the characters speak only spanish. very fun. its the way we all learned our first language, only there wasn’t the narrator and the characters were our families.

plugging along on the concrete building. the foundation came out beautifully despite all its imperfections. in another week we will have poured the slab then on to stacking the 16″ square column blocks.

lots of pigs. up close and personal!

settling in with school and balancing work.

what a great summer it has been.

Letter to an old friend

still here

we are slowly converting our temporary buildings into “permanent” ones. peace of mind.

we have an intern here from nyc and one from sf. this is quite a change in geography and life style for both of them. the one from sf milked the goats and now won’t even consider tasting the milk after having done so. they both have cell phones.

i remember when i used to feel scared when i lived in that little basement apartment in wilmington and i had to pass by the woods to get from the parking lot to my door. i don’t really understand whether i was afraid of people in the woods or wild animals or if it was just a childhood bogyman thing. i used to get such a sense of security living in the city (phila, sf, portland) when i could hear people making people noises at all hours of the night. its hard to believe that we walk every night through jungle to get to our tiny sleeping space (no electricity, can’t even stand up). that would have been an impossibility for me in the past.

nature? sometimes i still think “thanks but no thanks. i’ll take the ballet and high tea and tweeds.”

my days of “fighting fires” look like dealing with a neighborhood dog pack rolling our mongoose trap or stabbing holes in the barn tarp roof to relieve the “bathtub” of water collecting from 40 days and 40 nights of rain, or walking a colicy horse for hours with my entire arm up to the armpit up his ass trying to find the blockage in his intestines. my favorite days are working with scott and the interns, sweating, laughing, taking a break in the got sun with blended ice, local honey and our limes (a slushy), or getting so carried away with some tangent during homeschooling with lauren that we get hopelessly behind and we don’t care one bit.

lauren is in high school! here is a r. steiner quote i just sent to her dad:

“We shouldn’t ask: what does a person need to know or be able to do in order to fit into the existing social order?”

“Instead we should ask: what lives in each human being and what can be developed in him or her? Only then will it be possible to direct the new qualities of each emerging generation into society. Society will then become, what young people, as whole human beings, make out of the existing social conditions. The new generation should not just be made to be what present society wants it to become”

Malia rides again

the vet was out a few weeks ago and gave our injured horse malia the thumbs up. he said there is NO sign of lameness from her injury. he gave us the ok to take her riding, so lauren and i took java and maila on a brief jaunt around the neighborhood.

malia is a sweet and honest horse. she has been very patient with the extensive treatments and fussing with her legs. she has gotten weary of having her back legs touched but lauren and i have been working with her and lauren is doing horse yoga on her legs. malia is more easily spooked than when she arrived and we are working with her on rebuilding confidence.

there is a parelli horse trainer who has started to board her horse next door! how lucky for us. lauren met the trainer when maila was transported to the horse farm up the street for the first week. it may be time to put our round pen to use (it has living posts so we were waiting for the roots to securely take hold).

After receiving a forward about prayer in school

i actually have an issue with prayer in schools ONLY because it generally means CHRISTIAN prayer. what would allowing (only) christian prayers in a non religious, tax payer supported institution be saying to the jews, the hindu’s the moslems etc. who have a right to their religions practices being valued? it reeks of colonialism and missionary arrogance. i don’t hear the law separating church and state as saying no prayer, they are saying if your religious ceremonies/prayers are “exclusive” then keep them out of here. that policy meets my need for fairness.