Ah machines...
Got the Husqvarna weedeater back from Pat yesterday, and it ran okay for about an hour... then it died mysteriously... Sigh... this was the longest that it has run since I got here. When we first met it was in about ten different pieces. Apparently Eddie had put a blade on it, (not meant for a blade) and it vibrated everything loose, stripped bolts out of their threads, busted off fuel lines and generally fucked things up. I replaced the gear head and retapped threads but couldn't get the recoil starter figured. Pat thought it was missing a Pawl, and I went to get a replacement part. At the store the guy told me that it only needed one Pawl, but ours was broken. I bought a replacement, their last in stock. I left it at Pat's as he had the thing in many different pieces, he took the carb apart and cleaned it out etc...
But he wasn't around when I delivered the parts, so I couldn't explain to him that we only need the one. He tried to install it as per his original diagnosis, and broke the only one on the island... After a week or so he managed to fabricate a new one. He reassembled the thing, tuned it up and I got it yesterday.
Not sure why it is still dying, but it might be that the clutch was damaged 2 years ago... I don't know... Thing is, if it gets bogged down at all, it sort of stutters, and then quits as though it has siezed up. It also seems to get really hot, but then these things do get pretty hot...
Anyway, I think it will do okay for a path trimmer, if it is mollycoddled along. It isn't the high powered brushwhacking fiend that we had... SOoner or later we will want another big one, but I don't see us being able to afford one in the near future.

So, I whacked the tracks in the gulch, and felt a lot better to have fulfilled that responsibility for the first time in a while...

I had hoped to whack down the grasses that had come up in the cacao field area but over lunch we talked about how with it so dry we should really go after as much mulch as we can. So, I got the tractor out and put it through its paces... Slashed a big swathe above the buses and the dollhouse... Realised what a whole lot of work it will be to rake it all up, and got to thinking about fabricating some sort of rake.
I think I can use a bunch of recycled stuff from around the place, in conjunction with the armature from the mower. It will be an awesome labour saver if I can get it to work. Kind of a pain to dismantle the mower every time we want to use the rake, but better to spend an hour doing that than 8 hours pulling on a rake.

I took the red devil up to the top paddock and picked up another load of mulch for the barn garden. There is maybe one more small load left up there, which with the one Bach and I got the idea makes about 3 loads we have taken from there...

installed the new thermocouple on the aquastar and now we're burning less gas to get our hotwater. but of course, you wonder, why burn gas at all?

feel free to answer these questions on the blog]

--if an acre is 4047 square meters, how many runs with your truck does it take to get enough cardboard to cover an acre? How long does each run last (hours)?

I guess it takes an hour and a half to drive to haiku recycling, climb into the newspaper bin and pull out a ford aerostar van load of newspapers... the vanload might cover something miniscule like a 20th of an acre? Of course, other elements required are mulch of some kind to hold down the newspaper and disguise its papier mache appearance. You also need fairly large volumes of water with which to soak the paper...
another option is large pieces of cardboard, and identifying reliable sources of large pieces of cardboard is something we would like to do. bicycle stores have large boxes, as do appliance stores etc... possibly even contacting the recyclers themselves might be an option... or having a big enough truck to provide a recycling service for a few business with the right kind of cellulose to dispose of...

-- how long does it take to sheet-mulch an acre? (or, a meter?) Aside from the cardboard, what materials do you need to sheet mulch? (i.e., what clippings? how many do you need?)
of course, it all depends on how motivated you and your workers are. it is pretty boring work, to be sure, and it is hard to motivate people to do it for long let alone in an aggressive sort of way...
the top dressing organic matter can be anything from straw to pond scum to woodchips. You probably want enough material to make at least a depth of one foot preferably two three...
you really get into economies of scale I suppose. I can sheet mulch so many square feet with a weedeater a rake and a wheelbarrow, so many more with a tractor, mower and giant mechanical rake and trailer, and maybe even more with a bunch of chainsaws and trucks and big diesel chippers. It is sort of a fantasy of mine to charge people money to prune and remove trees and haul away the mulch! Did I mention I am taking a course this semester that will prepare me to take the exam to become a Certified Arborist...
A problem that you will be familiar with is that a lot of the biomass we have here that can be converted into sheet mulch, has a tendency to keep growing and root down through the sheets of carboard or newspaper. So a combination of composting first and using the partially decomposed straw as a top mulch in the sheet mulch approach makes sense...

-- is sheet mulching something you would go with for all
the plantings from now on? what are the alternatives (i saw the alternative, i participated)

all things being equal, in terms of access to materials, sheet mulching is probably the best in terms of energy investment in the longterm. It is a lot of work at the start, and you do have to follow it up with some spot weeding, and make sure you defend the edges against running weeds, but it does seem to be the best way to institute a regime change. Tilling, sowing a combination of annual and perennial groundcovers is cool too, but often you will end up doing so much weeding that you end up doing some amount of sheet mulching anyway...
Of course, mulching is better for the soil than tilling, although initially tilling can give you good growth...

-- what about sheet mulching after digging swales? do these go together? yeah, they can, of course.

--what specification of earth mover did the swales recently? What was the cost per hour? How many hours per acre, roughly, for a total cost?

it was a small bulldozer. may a D5 or D6. He charged $80 an hour and made three swales totalling about 900 linear feet in about 2 or 3 hours... He made a mound that was about 4 feet across, and a cut of about the same size... So, not a huge swale, but a pretty good size I reckon! he wasn't all that accurate in terms of staying exactly on the contour... and his blade merely pushed big clods of soil downhill... I followed up with the little 5hp tiller and spent probably about 5 o 6 hours breaking up the clods into something like a tilth we might be able to sow a cover crop into... also several hours of shovelling the tilled soil back onto the "swale mound"...

It will be interesting to see, once it rains, or Malte runs his well and we flood the swales just how they shape up in terms of levelness... then later it will be interesting to see just how well they hold up to really heavy rainfall. obviously, they will hold better once we have some groundcover established and some roots to hold it all together...

It is hard to make generalisations though, as the best thing to do depends a lot on weather conditions, how much human labor, how much and what kind of machinery you have at your disposal...


hope that helps a bit?

rainfall records 2005

rainfall
December 46.5 mm
November 216.0 mm
October 210.0 mm
September 493.5 mm
August 127.0 mm
July 284.0 mm
June 196.5 mm
May 113.0 mm
April 184.0 mm
March 380.0 mm
February 109.0 mm
January 147.0 mm

total for the year: 2506.5 mm
total rain days over .5 mm: 192
longest period with no rain at all: 19 days (and counting, and it will probably go to 20 for 2005)
biggest rain event in a 24 hour period: maxed out the gauge at 156 mm

This morning after watering the nursery I took some time to mulch and water the Bambusa burmanica's on the driveway. They have been doing fine even in spite of the prolonged dry spell, but it was overdue that I give them a good mulching...
Finished processing the four feedsacks of peanut that Bach and I picked up in town. We made a lot of it long to put stright into the swale, but made a lot of cuttings to pot up in the nursery... Then I showed Bach my method for potting them up in the nursery and we moved a bunch out to harden up...
After lunch I set Bach to collecting pidgeon peas and worked on freeing up the chipper shredder. Also did a little work assembling a work bench for the new shed...
In the afternoon we did some shovelling and shaping on the swale... Realised that the dozer and our surveying didn't make a perfectly level ditch... Ah well, it is pretty good for the most part, and will trap a lot of runoff...

Oh, the new batteries are installed. We really need to get the generator tuned properly and running well if these ones are to last their duration properly...

In which the battery bank at the barn finally died... Actually only two cells out of 24 are totally kaput but that's enough...
I picked up $1250 worth of new batteries today. What a blow. Straight out of my pocket. So much for our new thing~! And Chris Cookman is gonna charge us a slug to recalibrate the inverter... mele kelike make!
the library wouldn't lend me any books on small engine repair becuase I owed them too much and the generator has been backfiring like a civil war veteran...
jeez.
still no rain, although it has gone cloudy on us. worse luck...
At least it has given me a slight chance to get the swales tilled over before they get soaked and unworkable.
We ordered $200 worth of cover crop seed, lana woolypod vetch and red cowpea, as an interim cover while the peanut gets established.
I should go before the power dies!

What a week...

We finally started the common swaling on between Jen & Malte's and our place. It is gonna take a bit of hand work to get it really sweet, but it should be good.

Would you believe I spent a lot of today potting on peanut cuttings? Yes, I did...
I also got the tractor running, and slashed a fairly large swathe up there on the ridge... I kind of got the hang of it to a degree... The trick is to cut in one direction with mower fairly high, and you have to keep the revs up all the while, then you have to go back in the other direction and pick up everything that you just knocked over, and this time you can generally drop the deck down to ground level. It isn't perfect, but it kind of works. It is nice to be able to get mulch on demand like this, it really is... Our cacao polyculture planting is going to consume quite a lot...
I also spent quite a bit of time pulling grasses out of the pinto beds we started this summer... They are getting pretty thick in places.
Delegated the property management related social interactions to Lorinda, thank god.
Did some moonlight mulch raking.
Sadly, Brooke has had to go to hospital tonight. She cut her hand pretty badly with a machete, trying to open a coconut, and it has become infected... They drew a line around the wound and said that if the swelling and redness moves past the line that she should go back and get an intravenous drip of antibiotics. Poor lass. I hope they can kill whatever is infecting her hand!

No new posts for a while, just on account of being pretty busy rather than anything else...
Have been propagating peanut like crazy, with a view to having enough to plant out the cacao patch in one fell swoop, or at least a lot of it... Had a bit of an epiphany, which is obvious in hindsight, which I will relate here. The fact is that I probably botched the first attempt, but nevermind...
Friday was a busy day, we went for bamboo (despite the fact that the Forestry people are trying to charge $2 per pole now) and we met Steve Cabrall (?) who was sad at us for gathering his cow shit from the Papao state lands where his cows are causing terrible compaction (lots of earth worms may be mitigating that somewhat)- so after Steve ran us off we decided to go up to Brooke & Susan's old digs where they though for sure we could get some cow shit. We did, and then as we were leaving I saw a pond and asked if we could check it out. It had peanut growing around the edges, and there were nice strands of it, sometimes 2 feet long with large roots coming from every node... We cut off the stuff growing into the water and took it home to propagate.
Earlier that day however, on a run to the dump, I had picked up several bags of cuttings from the county and so I set about processing that stuff and getting it in pots of water before it dried out anymore. I had entertained notions of going up to the nursery and doing an allnighter with the headlamp and potting on all the rooted stuff from the pond, but by the time I had processed the three bags from town, I was ready for bed, and so decided to soak the rooted stuff in the bathtub. Doh! I ran hot water on them, and probably killed a bunch. I don't know. As soon as I realised, I ran cold on 'em and overnight they seemed to come back to life... Spent half the day at least on Saturday potting them on. A little bundle yielded about 5 trays of pots. Enough to plant out several square metres...
So, the lessons learned are - probably don't pour hot water on plant cuttings that you are planning to grow, but more importantly, that you can grow a lot of perennial peanut quickly by using it as an edge plant around you ponds, and taking many cuttings from the stuff that grows aquatic.
In other news, Greg Jones has been doing some consultancy work for Jen & Malte re the bamboo plants he has to sell them, so I have been collaborating with him in terms of making some rough maps and telling him our plans so that they are complemented by whatever Jen & Malte decide to do. We also discussed doing some plant swaps. I'm going to give Greg a G amplexifolia for a latiflorus or something, and so on...
The shed paid off in terms of giving us a dry space to work on the vehicles this week.
I'm sure there are other things to talk up. Legume propagation in the nursery has been the general order for me though. Also, just trying to keep the weeds at bay in the plantings we have done in the last six months, and in the new sheet mulch areas for the cacao field.
Oh, yes, we scored a bunch of roofing from a house remodelling in Kahului. I strapped it to the top of the van. Brought two loads home yesterday, will go for more today. Probably be enough to make a roof for a 20 foot long cabin. It steel, in the shape of clay tiles! Kind of goofy, but I think actually better than the corrugated stuff.

Added water to barn batteries. Did maintenance work on the biodiesel car - changed oil, changed fuel filter, rotated tyres... Realised the brake shoes need changing soon...
Went over to J & M's and picked up the pile of carpet they offered to us ages ago but it has been too wet to get. Brooke and Susan helped me lay it around the edges of the upper pond, and it went about half way and covered all the stuff that is lying out in the sun. The rest is either shaded by the big old gliricidia or has wedelia growing down to the waters edge...
In the morning I planted corn, but no pumpkin... also watered the nursery and planted a few more trays of pidgeon peas. Greg came over and talked story with Malte, who is going to pay him to draw up a design of where to plant the various bamboo's that he is going to sell them also, so I hung out with him for a while - he helped me plant some pidgeon peas and we talked about trading some species and we walked the area that straddles the property line with J & M, and I gave him my ideas of where to situate some windbreak species...
I'm sure I did something else of note, Oh yes! wandering around, shelling pidgeon peas out of my shirt, I saw that Roo's understudy was about to escape from the Chicken Tractor. Roo has been getting fed up with him lately and I guess he finally put his foot down. So, anyway, I see him perched there right on the edge of the two sheets of chicken wire. As I approach, he jumps down and starts to scurry off. I was a bit annoyed I guess, that I would have to chase down a bloody rooster, but as I had my hands and shirt/pouch full of seed I didn't chase him that second. Instead I wandered over to the tractor, and started throwing in the seed that was too young to plant or too mouldy or bug eaten or whatever. And of course the rooster came back trying to get in. I managed to pin him down with my foot (I was wearing slippers) and get a good grip on his ankles without losing a single good pidgeon pea! Ha! We'll be eating him tomorrow I suppose.
Oh for dinner tonight I made fried cassava chips, excellent with salt and a kind of Palak Paneer, (using costco goat cheese) but also a medley of spinaches from the garden, mostly katuk and brazilian spinach (both perennials) and some kale and chard too. Lorinda had the solar cookers going all day - a good sun day...

With no weedeater yet (the old HUsqvarna that was in 10 pieces when we arrived is now in one piece, but it still doesn't do anything - but Pat McGrath is looking at it for us now) I have been going "old school" with the machete and rice knife, to try to keep the grass at bay in the future cacao polyculture. Spent a an hour and a half cutting the tops off that big old clumping grass and clearing around the indpendent sesbanias and williams banana's we have already planted around... Later Brooke planted some extra cabbage seedlings into the areas already sheet mulched and planted with peanut...
I went to town and paid the rent midday, picked up more peanut cuttings from kamehameha blvd, and more cardboard from the recycling depot. I wonder how many trees would go into the amount of carboard it would take to sheet mulch the entire property? (we have learnt what is obvious really, that the peanut groundcover establishes much more succesfully and weed free where you sheet mulch! It will be interesting to learn what happens to the two different methods in time - will the sheet mulched beds end up harbouring just as many grasses once the cardboard/newspaper is eaten by the worms etc?) Also got oil and filter for the biodiesel car as it is due... will see if I can gtet under there today to drain the oil.
Lorinda, Lichen and Mikayla moved the chicken dome all by themselves, and Mikayla also helped gather goat fodder. Susan looked for coriander seeds but to no avail...
I had changed gates around in the stationary chicken tractor, and modified a fence, so that the system looks more like a chicken rotation than a general dogs breakfast, and in the evening I ran the tiller over the little patch that the chooks have been manuring and weeding for a few months. It was perhaps a little too wet down by the swale, but it general it was about the best moisture content one could hope for in the middle of the wet season, in terms of tilling... I think the plan is to tryt he 3 Sisters guild there to begin with, and we are right in the new moon now...
We have another batch of pidgeon peas coming out of the nursery, from seed I collected striaght off the bush, shelled and planted immediately. The remnants of last years saved seed has become weevil infested, and we got only about 20% germination from them. With the fresh seed we were back to about 80% with around 50 plants... Today I am going to aim at putting in about 250 or 300 seeds, with a view to using them in the cabinet timber forest over on the other side of the gulch, where we have already dropped in the Jacarandas and INges's.
Oh, I brought home heaps more hibiscus cuttings for rough mulch from Joans - made about 6 big piles that will make good weed suppressants themselves until we get around to chopping them down smaller with the chainsaw... Oh to have a giant mulcher!

Oh, and in the phenomenalogical calendar division - the california grass is flowering and the countryside is covered in a tapestry of yellow straw and soft red/purple... Very pretty. Sort of like a tropical savannah version of the Fall colours I suppose. Also, I saw the female pheasant for the first time, coming down ho'olawa road. Thought it was a chukar at first...

With no weedeater yet (the old HUsqvarna that was in 10 pieces when we arrived is now in one piece, but it still doesn't do anything - but Pat McGrath is looking at it for us now) I have been going "old school" with the machete and rice knife, to try to keep the grass at bay in the future cacao polyculture. Spent a an hour and a half cutting the tops off that big old clumping grass and clearing around the indpendent sesbanias and williams banana's we have already planted around... Later Brooke planted some extra cabbage seedlings into the areas already sheet mulched and planted with peanut...
I went to town and paid the rent midday, picked up more peanut cuttings from kamehameha blvd, and more cardboard from the recycling depot. I wonder how many trees would go into the amount of carboard it would take to sheet mulch the entire property? (we have learnt what is obvious really, that the peanut groundcover establishes much more succesfully and weed free where you sheet mulch! It will be interesting to learn what happens to the two different methods in time - will the sheet mulched beds end up harbouring just as many grasses once the cardboard/newspaper is eaten by the worms etc?) Also got oil and filter for the biodiesel car as it is due... will see if I can gtet under there today to drain the oil.
Lorinda, Lichen and Mikayla moved the chicken dome all by themselves, and Mikayla also helped gather goat fodder. Susan looked for coriander seeds but to no avail...
I had changed gates around in the stationary chicken tractor, and modified a fence, so that the system looks more like a chicken rotation than a general dogs breakfast, and in the evening I ran the tiller over the little patch that the chooks have been manuring and weeding for a few months. It was perhaps a little too wet down by the swale, but it general it was about the best moisture content one could hope for in the middle of the wet season, in terms of tilling... I think the plan is to tryt he 3 Sisters guild there to begin with, and we are right in the new moon now...
We have another batch of pidgeon peas coming out of the nursery, from seed I collected striaght off the bush, shelled and planted immediately. The remnants of last years saved seed has become weevil infested, and we got only about 20% germination from them. With the fresh seed we were back to about 80% with around 50 plants... Today I am going to aim at putting in about 250 or 300 seeds, with a view to using them in the cabinet timber forest over on the other side of the gulch, where we have already dropped in the Jacarandas and INges's.
Oh, I brought home heaps more hibiscus cuttings for rough mulch from Joans - made about 6 big piles that will make good weed suppressants themselves until we get around to chopping them down smaller with the chainsaw... Oh to have a giant mulcher!

Oh, and in the phenomenalogical calendar division - the california grass is flowering and the countryside is covered in a tapestry of yellow straw and soft red/purple... Very pretty. Sort of like a tropical savannah version of the Fall colours I suppose. Also, I saw the female pheasant for the first time, coming down ho'olawa road. Thought it was a chukar at first...

Damned if I know why the images keep repeating... anyway, this is the tractor, the new tractor shed and the water collection barrells off the roof that nearly knocked my block off. Of course, the pciture of general disarray is a pretty average one...
Hope you enjoy all these pics, I know officially have blogger fatigue and am going to eat a cheese toastie.

ok... this is supposed to be a before and after shot showing the swale just dug on september 25, followed by the view of it on november 26... we planted the swale out with peanut, pidgeon pea, cocoyam, flamengia and a few other things. there is some sesbania sesbans on the right, just starting to take off, and you can see the thrown together goat shelter inside the fence.

This is the first peanut I planted after getting here. It is going well...

Here's a series of photo's from in and around the dome garden, hopefully showing a system settling into stability. I just pruned back the walk around the garden for mulch the other day, and it suprised me how well established some of the peanut groundcover has become. There are still spots that could do with more planting and weeding, but mostly it is there.

just to the northeast is the very recent planting of a gardenia hedge, which we hope will make part of a living fence for the chicken run. the ground was pioneered by covering the grass and weeds for several months with several feet of dead nahiku grass mulch.

This shows the "support planting" to the row of guadua's... there is perennial peanut, pidgeon pea, cassava, sugar cane and dwarf banana's that will be good mulch and windbreak and food while the bamboo gets going.
In the background you can see malte's drilling rig digging for water...

and here is a guadua "less thorny" from along the driveway to the barn, really starting to go for it. you can see two shoots in this shot that will I bet end up about 8 or so feet tall, and probably ensure that this specimen will make it out of the the long grass without any further help. Of course, with lots of tlc it will do so much better...

here's a shot of the bamboo prop house. I pulled out all the unknown variety of dendrocalamus that came from Leonards and put them in pots in the nursery, as they seemed to be suffering lack of drainage.
the stuff going off in the photo is guadua full thorny. there are about 3 good plants in there, that we could divide from further, but I think I would like to just put them in super holes and get well established plants quicker. you can always propagate from them later...

Used Geoff's truck again today to take the garbage to that glorious edifice to the modern era, the Central Maui Landfill, and also dropped off 10 times the amount of waste engine oil for (recycling)as you are allowed.
Had hoped to fill up with Maui Earth Compost for the return trip but they don't have their act together and couldn't sell me any. So, I cruised into Kahului thinking we might find some barrels but they didn't have any of those either... Feeling a little bit defeated, I put more gas in Geoff's truck and bought an Australian Rules Football shirt (North Melbourne 'Roo's) for Lorinda. Stopped in Haiku and picked up woodshavings and sawdust from Vanover cabinets and some hibiscus prunings for mulch from Joans.
After lunch I made a deal with Malte for a truckload of the compost sand/mix that he has had sitting at his place for 6 months, and I hauled it over here and distributed it about the various stations. So, at least our plant propagation regime won't be interrupted for this next little period.
I worked with Brooke for a little while, laying down carboard around the edges of our pennyroyal groundcover nursery area... She and Susan worked at this and that I guess, Susan drained some rain barrels in the gulch, and planted more sweet potatoes by the pond in the gulch...

The weather finally dried out just enough to get a couple of redtruckloads of mulch out of the gulch and up to the current growing systems. I did one big load early in the day and one late in the evening.
In between, I ran to town and deposited cash so that if we get ripped off they don't get the rest of the months budget, and I swapped the Mercedes for Geoff's truck, and went to Hawaiian cement, for a load of cinders and the for a load of crusher gravel. Did I mention that in the big 6 inch at least rain event we lost all the gravel from one of the tracks to Geoff's place? It washed out the whole side of the road into a pile at the bottom next to the schoolhouse building. I have scraped up this and that, and readjusted the road so that the track that got washed out is now a gutter, but we still need more material to make the road really properly drivable over a wet season. Unfortunately Geoff's truck could really only take 1/2 a tonne, which is hardly anything in the scheme of things.
I also stopped off and picked up a bale of straw from Joan's and delivered it to the Jungle School, sort of as a favour to both parties I guess, and I was sort of on the way anyway. Joan has a bunch of hibiscus prunings that I think I'll run in and get today, and see how they go through Greg's chipper...
The girls had good times in the dome garden, which is really starting to get in some kind of order...

I spent most of monday moving "leftover" timber around, denailing it and getting it stacked under cover and in the wood rack. It was a drizzling day, with on and off helter skelter downpours so it was beautiful to be under cover and somewhat dry, as I worked at denailing on a pair of sawhorses under the new shed...
I guess I also fed the chooks morning and evening, and talked to Mark who might want to move into the Pavillion when Myra moves out of it, and later to Geoff who came home from the mainalnd, and whom I had to nicely dissuade from turning on his electric fridge until at least the sun came up, if not completely out in the morning.
Marilyn and Thurl went home.

Susan weeded and mulched the chicken beds, known as zinnia gallery...
I built more on the roof of the shed and covered a lot of the containers. It will be interesting to see how long it all holds up for. Probably not for too many years, but if it lasts a few years I do think that the containers will retain their usefulness for a lot longer...
It ahs been pretty rainy with bits of sunshine.
I don't know if I recorded that I pumped water up to the upper tank yesterday, so the power has been low today - about 70-80%. Even so, Marilyn went ahead and washed a load of towels and I used power tools all day, and we are still at 75%...

A very frustrating day today as yet another of our tenants is ripped off, this time in broad daylight, whilst he is absent from his structure for no more than 45 minutes, and whilst I am cutting out cow cane about 200 yards away. I located the trail through the long grass leading back to Ho'olawa Rd.
Of course, we called the cops who came out and took the perfunctory list and issue a little card with a report number, but asked no real questions that might help them to form a plan to catch the villains...
It is getting serious... if it continues people won't want to live here, let alone rent here, and obviously this will threaten the viability of the project and the owners investment. Sigh...
One solution, probably untenable would be to fence the entire property, with a few rows of barbed wire at the top. I could do this if was considered desirable. It would cost a bunch of money, and take at least a few weeks, but it could be done. Of course, this wouldn't be impassable, but it would be a deterrent. We have also looked at security cameras, but really we wonder about the efficacy of such measures. Even if the cops did identify suspects and catch them, sooner or later another ice head will find us. We're really at wits end. Fearful to leave the house unattended for even five minutes. It is ridiculous.

So, in other news, we chopped out a lot of the cow cane in the bottom of the gulch and ran it through the chipper. It has been growing very luxuriantly down there, soaking up all (or at least some) of the water and nutrient from the solar shower. So, in a sense it is a greywater crop. We have about 4 or 5 wheelbarrow loads of chippings, which of course won't go real far, but will be an aid in sheet mulching out the new cacao forest... I like the conservation of energy implicit in this, grabbing it in the cow cane at the bottom of the valley, and taking it back up the hill. Of course, we used half a gallon of gas to chip it, which makes it pretty energy inefficient, but if we didn't chip it we would have a new clump of cow cane in no time. Oh, to have a biodiesel chipper!

Later in the evening we turned our attention to setting up a tank stand for catching water off the new shed roof. Had a bit of an epiphany about how to connect up the 50 gallon drums with standard plumbing fittings to make a 200 or 300 gallon storage...

Also, pumped excess water from the barn tank up to the gulch tank. Moved about 3000 gallons up there, almost to the point of turning off the float valve but not quite. Drained the power down to 75% so hopefully we get good sunshine today.

more peanut propagation, more roofing on the shed... would you believe I ran out of screws again before we got it all finished? but most of it is done, and we put the gutter up, and it seemed to run the water in the right direction. So I guess I feel like we accomplished something.

Pretty well spent the whole day working on the shed again. Unfortunately I still have quite a way to go, but it is getting there. Repairing all the holes in the fibreglass roof panels took a lot longer than I thought it would, as I had to do a lot of prep work, cleaning them and drying them before I could get either silicone or resin to stick. When I finally had enough ready to do a section the wind had gotten up so much that it was sort of like wrestling trying to get them up without being blown off the structure. I am not so good with walking around on frameworking at such a height, but I somehow managed. Then I ran out of roofing screws...

I worked all day on converting the rotting pile of timber we brought here from Une Place back into a tractor shed. Who knew that building was such hard work? With luck tomorrow I will get the roofing onto the framework that I built today and we'll have a nice big dry area in which to park wheelbarrows, tractors et al, and do stuff when it is pissing down with rain. Yay!

I worked here and there today, a bunch of work in the nursery, potting on albizzia's and chilli's (perenial ones that will be a good food forest understory) dropping more sweet potatoes around the pond, pinto's in the cacao field, mulch, mulch, mulch to the cacao field... in the afternoon I worked on the tractor shed and made a little bit of progress I suppose...
i really should take some photo's eh?
BROOKE AND SUSAN went after crawdads in twin falls vreek this afternoon,and although they didn't get any, they learned some tricks and will be back.

susan and brooke and I made a bunch more peanut cuttings from the pieces Lorinda brought home from home depot, and then susan and I planted out the hillside above the pond on the opposite side of the pond to takako's food forest. we did a bit of a simple polyculture, with pidgeon peas, sweet potato's and 5 malabar chestnuts. oh, and we dug a big hole for a gigantachloa "maxima" that should do a lot to hide the buses when it gets up, and we did put in a few cassia elata, and a few red gingers and red ti leaves, and some cocoyams, which ought to look nice downby the pond. it actually didn't rain today for the first time in days and days and days, so if it doesn't rain tonight we might have to get the hoses out. the ground is really wet though.

Another day... Brooke potted on a bunch more cacao, Susan worked on the seedlings some more. We all did a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I pulled two big totes full of weeds from the guadua/pinto beds... Before lunch I trucked off to Joans and picked up a bunch of stuff like 4" pots, overshoes for the girls, mosquito nets also, and a big pile of hibisiscus prunings...
In the pm I potted up a couple of trays of pinto in the new pinto prop area, and then me and the girls made a new banana circle opposite the chicken hose. We harvestsed some Peruvian ground apple to go in the circle and divided the crowns up to go on the circle... Harvested a cassava root that was about 1.2 metres long. Fried a lot of it up for dinner. Lorindas mom arrived. Lorinda brought home three shopping bags full of pinto cuttings from the home depot motherbeds.

A fairly productive day today. Brooke and Susan helped me move things around in the nursery and then as Susan went off to new moon in some seeds and pot on some seedlings, Brooke and I put together the shelving that I scored from Joan to help us propagate out some peanut. We made three sets of two tiered doubled sided shelves and they double as a nice height of potting up benches... we tried them out potting on a bunch of cacao seedlings and they did work nicely.

I spent most of the day trying to organise the container. It was such a mess. It still is, but finding stuff shouldn't be as hard as it was.
At the end of the day Donald came by and helped me pop rivet a section of polycarbonate over the hole where we've been catching water! if we are satisfied with how it worked we talked about covering the rest of the containers which are badly in need as they are close to rusting through all the way around!
First calliandra flowers.

More rain. You gotta love the north shore.
Did a funny sort of switcharoo in the bamboo windbreak over there in the windward corner... Dug out a Dendrocalamus albociliata that hasn't thrown a single shoot and put it in a pot. I don't think the rhizome has any buds on it, so that may be why it hasn't done anything. I think I might tell Jericho about it if I see him and see if we can get another one in exchange, because three years with no shoots is ridiculous. I put it in a big pot with some good mix so we'll see if it does anything. I do think it is a neuter though.
Also dug out the Guadua Amplexifolia, and potted 4 divisions up. It wasn't looking so bad as the alb. but it isn't looking the picture of health, so maybe nursing it along for a while before putting it in some superholes will get us somewhere faster.
I replanted one Guadua angustifolia in one superhole. Also threw some Sesbania's in and amongst that windbreak, as they will do something faster than either the bamboo's or the casuarina's.
After lunch I had to help Eve move her boxes to the Haiku post office as she and her nonagenarian Dad are catching the Love Boat back to the mainland.
Found out that the Haiku True Value is closing since the rent has doubled. That sucks.
Back in rainy Huelo I went sick with the machete and kama, since we don't have a weedeater. I enjoyed it a lot more, but of course got less done. Finished up the day a little cold and wet, planting peanut after the chickens with Brooke.
Meanwhile, Lorinda Lichen and Susan and Brooke prepared masses of sweet potato cuttings (we are in an advanced phase of abundance with that plant now) and have been doing a lot in the garden, getting the pumpkin vines cut back and the dome beds in shape.

Oh, we discovered that one of the more advanced Coconut palms has died off due to some kind of grub infestation. Or I don't know, maybe the grub isn't responsible but the central stem has died off and their are grubs in there eating the heart out. Took some photo's, will try for a positive id. Maybe will call that Filipe guy about his injections. I assume he is organic.

Sesbania grandiflora flowering. Also ti plant.

Yesterday we moved on the sheet mulch around the backdoor. Planted a whole bunch of pennyroyal out. It will, we hope, form a beautiful aromatic, fly repellant groundcover around the herb spiral and up to the lanai so that we barely need to mow ever again! We also added more shadecloth to the nursery as the winter sun is peeking through from that lower angle.
I dug around in the venting system of the mercedes to try to work out why it is catching on fire on start up. Didn't really figure it out, unfortunately.
Today, I planted about a dozen casuarina's out, in an arc following ho'olawa rd in the trade wind direction. it will be a little support for the bamboo...
watered the three clumps that I am looking at transplanting from that hedge, and dug a moster hole for a new guadua there.
Then I went off and planted 5 Bambusa Burmanica's between the deriveway and Ho'olawa Rd. It would be nice to have the right species ready to drop in the lower stretch, but the ones I have aren't really ready to go out yet.
In the afternoon the girls did peanut and sweet potato cuttings, and I think Lorinda was in the vegetable patch. I spent some time working on the new shed/tractor barn.
Oh this morning, Donald and I went out and did an hour or so of road works on Ulalena, scraping the sides of the road and throwing it in the potholes and digging out some of the drains that aren't allowing the water to get away very well. We got a lot of thankyous and mahalos from the neighbours...

Well, the thieves hit us again, this time making off with my chainsaw and the projects weedeater. Very discouraging.
In more happy news, Brooke and Susan found the trail down to the ocean on their afternoon off.
I planted a few more pidgeon peas, decanted leftover biodiesel out of the dead rabbit, checked the fluids in the running cars, an d changed the gear oil in the 8N.
Sheesh. Of course, the locked gate didn't stop the thieves, but I guess we could have been more security concsious. Apparently the likeliest suspect is called Bobo, if you can believe that, and the rumour is that the cops are his friends.

Did some recognisance (sp?) of keys and padlocks this morning, and packed some gravel into the gate post of yesterday... Then set about cleaning up area in front of containers to erect tractor shed and workshop. Used the tractor to make the postholes and had eight in and levelled by days end. I will tamp them in a little better tomorrow... Donald was a great help in laying them out and getting them pretty square...
Meanwhile, Susan spread some liquid feed and Brooke rounded up some materials from the Takako Food Forest and planted pinto and pidgeon peas in the wake of the chickens in the noni field. Lorinda and Susan did quite a bit if vegie planting in the dome garden too...

A town trip yesterday in which I discovered the backroad through Cane fields from the dump to Hawaiian cement and the Kiawe lands. Cut about 30 minutes driving time out of the mission and meant I didn't have to set rubber on the Mokolele at all. Yay! I stopped at HC&S and got one of their permits to cut Kiawe and actually pretended to support all their nefarious activity..., also picked up some parts to work on the chainsaw and the tractor, and got another load of cinders so that propagation in the nursery can continue.
Meanwhile, back at the farm, Lorinda, Brooke and Susan were doing some prep work behind the chickens in the new food forest area (between the barn and the nursery...
If this is an area that doesn't want trees we should decide soon, because they're itching to go in, the coffee and the noni and the citrus to be just outside the backdoor of the barn kitchen so you can run out and grab a few for making goats milk yoghurt or whathaveyou.
Spent most of the afternoon resetting posts and putting back the gate that we took down to use for the goats, because sadly, on wednesday night we had some people come into the property and break into Mark and Jerise's cars. They stole Jerise's jewelery making supplies and trashed Marks driver side door... Jerise's partner is a 6'6" Hawaiian dude with connections though, and has vowed to find the perpertrators and bring them to justice. Still, we are going to see how well we can function with a locked gate. Still undecided about whether to do a key or a combination. Either way we will probably be replacing them regularly and it could get to be another expense, another hassle...
Oh I enjoyed very hot water, gravity fed in the gulch solar shower last night at about midnight. It actually has one small plumbing leak that we'll need to take care of, that Tim didn't find or want to find before he left, but at least he did most of the work to get it operational.

I've been slack on the blog, but I've been kickin' out the jams on the land... Well, anyway, we got the little red mulch truck running today. Working for Joan I scored a dozen Williams bananas (dwarf variety with A1 bunches) and planted them in the future coffee/noni/banana/vanilla/pepper polyculture. Brooke and Susan have done marvellously sheet mulching the entire area of Takak0's food forest. They finished up today. They've also been making peanut cuttings and doing other garden stuff, and helping us out a lot with all the grinding domestic chores. Champion wwoofers they are.
Used the PhD with tractor to put in a bunch of gliricidia truncheons the other day, and it worked beautifully. We just need to figure out how to get the mower working to expectations and we'll be laughing.

Well, the shower has given us a few problems, after countless trips to just about every hardware on the island and several reattempted joins I think we finally have a shower hooked up by the ginger terrace. Tim did some landscaping work there today, moving rocks and planting pennyroyal.
Brooke and Susan have been doing lots of different things, sheetmulching in Takako's food forest, caring for chickens, mulching and weeding and planting and harvesting in the gardens.
I bought a 1950's 8N farm tractor with a mower and a post hole digger yesterday. Spent a lot of today looking it over with Donald, greasing up the fittings we could find. I had a a bit of a practise with the mower and dug a couple of holes. It will be great for planting trees.

Made two more trips to the hardware today for parts for the shower project, but that's okay, since the first trip was part of the Giggle Hill/Harp Circle excursion.
We almost got it all done by nightfall but we got a bit buggered up trying to roll out the pipe...
The moment of truth when we find out how well Tim's sweating worked will have to wait until the morning. I did random stuff before and after going out. Pulled weeds in the bamboo peanut, and planted a few more odds and ends down in Takako's food forest.
After we got back I unloaded the vanload of newspaper and cardboard brought one load of mulch back on the return trip. If we don't get too much rain tonight and it is sunny tomorrow hopefully we can get a bunch of mulch over to this side of the Gulch where we've been planting!

More of the same today, with Tim continuing to work on the shower setup, and me putting energy towards the food forest. Susan started her work trade and pulled nahiku out of the bamboo support plantings, with lorinda and fed them to the chickens, and planted some flowers in their places I think... In the afternoon, Susan came and helped me gather in some mulch, since it had been sunny enough to run the van over the breach... When it started to drizzle we decided to go to town for more newspaper and cardboard. GOt back in time to just do a little bit of sheet mulching. By then Brooke had come back from her town errand so the 3 of us worked for a bit on getting the mulching done. It is really hard to sheet mulch on that kind of slope. The logistics of it are a bit ridiculous. Still, S & B got the idea quickly and did a nice job.
I also did some experimenting with the cow cane in the gulch under that big mango. I ran it through Greg's chipper. If it kills it, we are onto a really good mulch source there. Of course, it could just sprout from every little piece! Will leave it sit in a pile for a month or so before we decide to do anything else with it.

All efforts to sure up the driveway with gravel enough that we might push through in the van with loads of mulch were dashed by another 30mm of rainfall. So, we decided to reprioritise and look at the gulch shower II. I showed Tim where it was at, and helped him move down the new tank and the gas heater, and he set to work building a platform for the tank and sizing up all the pieces needed to do it right. The biggest decision to make is whether or not to spend the extra bucks on pipe to get the water from the top tank or from the barn tank. I think we are going to spend the bucks and get the longterm relief of gravity feed! Also, the fewer systems connected to the barn tank the less chance we have of running the pump dry again! Lovely to be able to show him what we need done and then just leave him to it...
Anyway, with Tim busy on that project, (and setting up a more useul rainwater catching barrel for the top A-Frame - alternatively known as the Litchie Hut or the Bambusa Lodge or...) I got on with the planting and mulching of Takako's food forest. At first I tried wheelbarrowing loads of mulch over from the other side, just to get the wet newspaper covered, but after about 5 loads I realised that this was going to kill me before I killed the grass on the slope. And it was raining so often that I figured that I should just go ahead and plant, plant, plant and just make sure that I get around to mulching it all properly later.
In what was really like a very delayed climax, I finally planted some fruit trees here! I mean, I have planted a few things here nad there before, but this was finally putting the "climax" species into their intentionally prepared (albeit only partially) microclimate. Anyway, I felt quite high about it. The abiu that Brad and Jason brought back from La'akea, the Rollinia that Josh from Laulima gave us, and an Eggfruit planted from seed... This just about filled in the spots already sheltered by the Pidgeon Peas from a couple of years ago, although of course there is room for more stuff to be packed in there. Cacao, maybe some coffee etc. I put in the understory stuff like the coco-yams and the monstera and some red gingers as well as the peanut. We need heaps more peanut and other ground covers still, to compliment the rest and shade out the grass. I suppose I'll work some more on that today.
Harvested some big old cassava roots when planting Sesbanias in the patch between the Ginger Terrace and Takako's food forest. I'm thinking that this little area will be the future home of a Black Sapote amongst others. Hopefully by the time the sesbania's are up, the Black Sapote's will have filled out the tubs they're in right now...
Lorinda and Lichen moved the dome chooks all by themselves, and have collected about 4 wheelbarrow loads of guavas for poultry fodder in the few days.

I've been working off the farm, bringing home the breadfruit and doing town errands, school shit for the last couple of days.
Today, I finished cutting back the grasses under Takako's pidgeon peas, by hand with the kama, and got fully soaked in the process. Started planting out a grid of pidgeon peas, peanut, monstera, cocoyams and a few other things like the torch ginger and some red ti, and gardenia. Had a great plan to leave strips in between and sheet mulch them with cardboard, but ran into problems with the slope being so steep that the mulch slid off the cardboard, that is what mulch I could get over to that side of the gulch, as it has been so wet that it took a barrow full of gravel to get the van out of stuck... Had to spend an hour or so getting the siphon back on like so that I could fill buckets for sheet mulching, and a fitting cracked as I was messing around so I spent some time improvising a replacement.
Planted a seedling Rollinia that Josh at Laulima gave us about a year ago, down under the pidgeon peas...
Also dug out a couple more steps in that funny stairway that didn't have a top or a bottom, now it has a top but no bottom. Also weedwhacked around the "ginger terrace" shower. Might see if Tim wants to go ahead and install the hot water heater and plumb up the new tank...
And, I added water to the batteries in the gulch solar system.

since our last post, we have had all sorts of activity here on the farm. the school people have been busy cleaning and fitting out the front end of the barn. Tim has been helping keep up with the lawn mowing, with the weed eater, since the lawn mower has a broken solenoid. he has also doen a bit more on the chicken fence and spread some gravel. lorinda has been harvesting and cooking a lot. richard built a new goat fence and put the goats in there for a while, and then decided the time was right and took the goats over to Ray and Loki's where their big la mancha/boer cross buck will do the business... we've been putting in the sesbania's, gliricidia's and jacaranda's around the new swale and goat paddock...
this afternoon I went over my daily limit of two tankfuls on the weedeater in an effort to claim the ground in takako's orchard that didn't get converted to pidgeon pea cover. we have maybe just enough mulch, peanut, sweet potato and more legume trees to get that whole patch sometime soon... maybe this week before Tim leaves us???
Brooke has been here tonight getting the loft ready ads a temporary place for her and Susan to stay. So, we're actually getting pretty busy around here.

animal systems
Tim assembled most of the rest of the next chicken paddock over a couple of his work days earlier this week. first he had to cut back the long grass that had grown up in the meantime since I first started on the project, then he did a little bit of work rebuilding the frame work that I had half finished before throwing up the diagonal splits. It looks pretty good. Should be ready to run the chooks in by the time the watermelons have finished, and probably about the same time the area they are in right now will be ready to plant up. We were talking about doing an onion patch there at lunch today.
I spent the last couple of days planting up my birthday swale, and putting together the goat fence above it which will give us the capacity to move the goats around without tethering according to the weather, so that will be wonderful. We will finally be able to get them pregnant and start getting milk out of them, which will be a great thing.
Eve's cat got stuck down the big hole, so I had to get the ladder down there and climb down and rescue it. Serves me right for not covering it I guess.

the idea of the perimeter of cardboard and mulch is that eventually the peanut will establish and spread out into the sheet mulch. I think it will go about 2 feet a year or maybe more...

Some shots of the guadua plantings with their support species, from the ground up; perennial peanut and mung bean, pidgeon peas, sugar cane and bananas...

well... maybe I will try again later. seems like the blogspot is having trouble uploading my photo's. godamnit.

this is the plt of pidgeon peas that you planted a little less than a year ago, Brad. Just below the barn garden. There is other stuff in there, including the sweet potato for ground cover, and gliricidia, calliandra, bambusa etc but the pidgeon pea is the dominant species right now.

new swale

the new swale. It is only wheelbarrow size, being hand dug, but it should do a lot to stop runoff getting down to the barn and will help to establish windbreak trees that will provide good fodder for the goats and chooks.

new swale

the new swale. It is only wheelbarrow size, being hand dug, but it should do a lot to stop runoff getting down to the barn and will help to establish windbreak trees that will provide good fodder for the goats and chooks.

chores

Woke up got out of bed, neglected to drag a comb across my head.

This morning I didn't even need to check the rain gauge as I could tell it hadn't rained overnight, so first thing I watered the nursery. Most of the pots were still pretty moist, but I wanted to give the new bamboo divisions a hit as they are in that critical phase.
Feeding the animals. First off I went after some fodder for the two goats. I think I took a bundle of cassava from the patch next to the house, as I headed in that direction after the nursery, and kept going toward the outhouse when I realised there was a wwoofer in the toilet. Also pruned some guave on the way. Later, whilst taking care of chickens I took off some side branches of some sesbania sesbans by the little pond in the garden, and some nearby pidgeon peas. It was a nice "harvest is your maintenance" sort of moment, as the branches were obstructing the pathway.
I fed the chooks grain. There are four different flocks of poultry right now. Two mobile tractors of chickens, and one stationary house with rotational pens, plus the ducks. So, for each flock I did things like make sure they had clean fresh water. For the stationary flock I fiddled around and found some screen to over a barrel to catch water from their roof so that I don't have to carry the drinking vessel outside every time it needs to be filled. For the other chickens who are tractorinng between the nursery and the barn, I found a hose end so I can not walk back and forward... I threw a little more straw into the main chicken yard and wasted a bit of time trying to pounce on a free ranging drake who would have gone in the pot if I'd been a bit quicker.
All told, I was finished with the animals in about an hour.
'Til lunch then I worked on the new swale which will pick up runoff from the driveway and hopefully divert the bog that is the area immediately outside the barn.

Justin has a recurring hockey injury so he has been laid up for a few days.
Tim has done some weeding in the pinto patch he and Justin and I put in on the "annoying berm", cracked coconuts for human and animal consumption, gathered guavas for animals, and done some weedwhacking on the trails where I would normally use the lawn mower, but it is broken right now.

Lorinda has been working the solar cookers, making banana breads and muffins, coconut, pumpkin & macadamia pies. And readin Lichen bookies.

luckily hurriucane jova gave us a swerve and we have just been getting plenty of rain. planted 30 odd jacarandas and inges and a few coconuts on the western side of the gulch.
pruned back gliricidia hedge on loomis lane, chipped it all up for mulching the barn herb spiral/pennyroyal bed.

I had to do the chores today, with Lichen convalescing inside and I guess I remembered what a big job those two do... After that I pottered around, raking mulch and cutting some grass with a rice knife, mostly in the zone between the barn and the nursery. We have it pretty ready to be conquered by chicken tractor and sesbania I think... After lunch I went into Paia and scored some different materials, plywood and composite board that was getting pulled out of an office in Geoff's building. Grabbed some cardboard on the way back.
Did some weedeeating paths in the gulch. Installed the propane tanks in the kitchen that Eve went and filled. Fed animals...
Did the first chop and drop into the first banana circle that I dug when I first got here. It is about a year old today I guess, so that was a nice moment for me. Then I kinda just pulled weeds that were growing amongst the sweet potato in that area. I did spend a little time in the nursery pottering also.
It feels like winter is returning a bit early. Of course, there is no such thing here anyway...
The pond is still there, still holding water...

I'm a bit soggy and addled but I think this is a couple of shots of different parts of the gulch. Donald trying to address some drainage issues by his buses, and a view of the very full ditch behind the Pavillion.

the flood!

last night I went to bed before even the sun had set. I had thought that after eating some food I might go back out and rake some mulch but I was so exhausted. i slept from about 6pm to 8am the next day. We haven't been working that hard here lately, I have just been missing a few hours of sleep every night for too long and it finally caught up with me I suppose.
Anyway, I seem to remember falling to sleep with a question on my mind along the lines of "now that the tanks are full, should I divert some water down to the big pond and see if it is going to work out when it is full?"... When I woke up this morning Tim asked me if I had emptied the rain gauge yesterday. Sleepily I told him, "Yeah, at about 7:30am, like usual...", and he rsponded that this morning it was overflowing! I sort of didn't really believe him, as that would mean more than 6 inches in 24 hours. More than 5 and a 1/2 inches ovefrnight, as we got about 10 mm during the day yesterday...
So, I set off to have a look at the pond. On the way I found that the gravel we added to the driveway in several places had been cut out, and I ran into Malte who told me that his driveway had been severely gutted out where some straw mulch had blocked his drainways... I ran into Eve, our new tenant, who is in the process of moving into the Dollhouse so had her car down there overnight and almost didn't get it out!
Of course, the pond was full(!) but not exactly overflowing in the right place! I had built up the spillway in order to get more storage at the back of the pond, in the shallows, thinking we had enough room to play with. So, now the pond was flooding the anchor trench which could be bad... So we excavated the spillway a little and moved some more soil around and hopefully it will be cool. I came up here to get some sweet potato cuttings, and then it started bucketing again, so Lorinda asked me to take Lichen inside and dry her off. So, I think I'm going to go back now and see if it is still overflowing... If it stops raining long enough I'll try and get a pic or two...

I have been neglecting you my little blog.
This last week we have been pulling down the UNe Place shed. Tim was a treasure being able to walk around 15 feet in the air like his feet were on the ground, and Donald came up with a good method for jacking the posts out of the ground so we got an extra 3 feet to what I had thought we would get. Justin got a nail ni his foot but besides that and a few scraped knuckles and splinters we came out without too much loss of life.
Other stuff included the trip to Puunene for cinders for potting mixes, potting up trees in the nursery, planting out perennial peanut... We made a trip for some bamboo poles to continue the chicken fence craziness...
The pond is filling out slowly but surely.
The swales have been put off for the 8003rd time. Richard Jacinto can't do any slashing right now because he is waiting for a part for his tractor...
Everythings pretty good. I feel like a headless chicken most days but I wouldn't expect much different...

Oh yeah, we got a ripe watermelon today too. Pretty sweet too. And huge. Chicken Tractors really are pretty good...

The rains have returned lately, just as I was starting to get worried. We have been planting perennial peanut and pidgeon peas in the areas we tilled. Tim and I shaped up some beds in the chicken paddock. We planted sweet potatoes, soy beans, carrots, pumpkins and milo in there today. There is still some space that we could sheet mulch and maybe room for climbing beans or peas... Have collected more plastic 50 gallon barrels and started experimenting with valve options, so we can collect rainwater from all the little roofs and have local applications...
Today I had a tutorial with Geoff on how to use Illustrator and we are going to collaborate on doing some maps of the property.
We positioned all the spare tarps we could find today to run extra water into the pond. Of course, they will suppress the grasses and make that bit of ground ready to plant up after the pond has filled. Nice, eh? It was actually Tims idea...

Well you can imagine some of the filthy language I uttered on wandering down to check the pond and finding that we had laid it in way too tight and that the little puddle in the bottom had lifted up the sides and stretched them tight. Much more weight in there was going to tear a seam or something for sure.
So, we rexcavated the trench and pulled out as much slack as possible, and hopefully it will be enough to still hold the pond up without making a weak spot... Jeez... We were pretty lucky that it didn't rain in the meantime, because more water in the hole might have made it very hard to manouvre. I have a much better idea of the best way to go about installing pond liners now. I think.
My shoulder has still been hurting like hell, so I have been trying to go easy on it. I showed Justin where I wanted to plant some windbreak trees and he went crazy and dug a bunch of awesome holes... So we have spots to drop our casuarina and Kukui's when we get some serious rains.
I mowed the lawn and gave the lawn mower a good clean with Donalds air compressor. Later in the day I realised that the pidgeon peas really needed to go in the ground so I put them in in support locations for the guaduas.
Added water to the batteries in the barn. Did the Ll relations thing with Jenna and Nick (egad!).
Was greatful that I don't live in New Orleans right now.

There are some random photo's of the pond as a work in progress. We had some big help from Marshalll and Donald, and of course quite a lot of preparation work was done by Tim and Justin.
Overnight we got 4mm of rain and there is a good little puddle in the bottom already. I think it won't take many inches of rainfall before we see the spillway flow.
Unfortunately I seem to have tweaked my shoulder in a big way. I can't think of any one moment where I did anything, but I guess dragging carpet and plastic around as much as we did will do that to you...
Right now, Justin is making some cuttings of the garden sweet potato's to plant around the edges. I think that will be the quickest way to cover the ground and stop too much erosion. Perhaps we'll do clumps of vetiver and lemon grasses too. Maybe I should actually get some landscaping water features type books and have a good think about it...

We got the pond liner in. It took a whole lot of person hours but there it is. Now we wait for rain and lets hope like hell it actually works. Will post some photos soon.
Made heaps more peanut cuttings.
Met with Jen and Malte re the school this year. Seems like we'll do the barn thing, but we'll see. They have to take it back to the rest of the co-op.

we had planned to get into the pond hole again, but the day woke up raining so we decided to plant out some of the area tilled. we had some good peanut cuttings rooted. we planted out a handful of bananas and a bunch of pidgeon pea and mung bean seed. mulched the edges with cardboard and the shredded goat fodder prunings, so that the peanut has an edge to colonise once it gets going. I figure that it will be pretty easy to gradually expand that egde as the peanut expands. It is different in the areas with more vigourous running grasses, sorta... donald came up and helped me move the carpet out of the dead vw with his jeep.
left Tim to feed the animals and went in to k'lui to embark on my new academic career.

Greg came to get the tiller on Monday and we ate a nice meal with him of young rooster. He brought round some green beans from his garden. We went on a walk and I showed him the bamboo's that I got from him that are doing quite well in the ground...
Earlier in the day we did some more tilling to make the most of the dry weather and its availability. I Tim erect the temporary wire and bamboo run for the egg laying hens, while Greg and I wandered and waffled. Then we did some potting up of Sesbania's and Marang's in the nurserym and finally a little bit of work on the pond. Removing rocks painstakingly and then dragging carpet into place.
Over the course of the day, Tim also did some weeding and he harvested a few pounds of okras and cherry tomatoes and even some full sized tomatoes...
In the evening we took Lorinda to harp circle and then Lichen, Tim and I went further in to Paia. I got a notice telling me I had been selected for Jury Duty, which is funny since I'm not even a citizen. Pretty sure that that little point disqualifies me. We also put an ad in the Mana board for rentals (again) and Lichen made friends and influenced people with her youthful insousiance.

the roar of machinery

could be heard here all day, as I spent the morning tilling the chicken paddock. we'll rig up some scrap wire for their next run and then shape up beds for the crop. the plan is to make a nice bamboo fence for the lower area, hopefully by the time we are next ready to move them. we seem to have gotten over the mites by the way. Lorinda did some cleaning in the henhouse today. You just have to stay on top of your fowl hygiene I suppose.
Greg came around midmorning and told me in so many words to snap out of my despondency re the truck. he had the belt for the chipper and wasn't even in a hurry to take the tiller as he had his mothers little car. invited him round tomorrow night for chicken supper.
after too long tilling the chicken paddock (and a nice midday swim in the hole nearest the highway) I went to chipping and shredding. reduced the two big piles of goat fodder prunings to one pretty good sized pile. It is nice stuff. I am tempted to use it on bamboo's and fruit trees but fear I will need to spread it kind of thin to hold dopwn cardboard edges of the new plantings...
killed two more roosters. talked to Donald about potential vehicle sharing. he may be into letting us use his 4wd jeep for farm work if we can find a trailer etc. He has saved my bacon a few times now.

tragedy strikes

Well, after all the false alarms this time I think the rabbit really died. Such a shame. Coming back from kahului with loads of carpet for the pond and bags of peanut cuttings one of the radiator hoses popped off and dumped all the water and by the time I could get off the highway in rush hour traffic the head was toast... Donald came to my rescue and towed me back here at 10.30pm last night.
I am still in shock, although after last months dramas I guess was emotionally prepared for it. Still, it sucks. We'll pull the head and see if it looks like rebuilding, but I fear even for a biodieseler it will be more trouble than it is worth...
How the hell are we going to move mulch around the farm? or get materials to the farm? My god that truck was worth its weight in worm castings for what we are doing here. I suppose at least I didn't reregister it yet!
Lorindas birthday today so we went for a stroll up to twin falls and had a swim. ramana is running the fruit stand...

It has been pretty dry, so we kept running the tiller, the three of us taking turns to loosen up the soil in an arc that more or less follows the driveway. Perhaps we are biting off a little more than we can chew, you know, but probably not... The idea being to till as much as we can while the soil is dry enough that it doesn't get too compacted. And we're expecting Greg to come around and borrow the tiller in exchange for lending the chipper so we won't have access to that for a while.
After lunch, the three of us borrowed malte's transit and I showed Justin and Tim how to mark out the contour. We now have three swales marked out that Malte might want to go in on. Then Justin and I worked on preparing the gulch pond while Tim did some more tillage. Donald even came and helped me position carpet at one point. I even moved some gravel by the moonlight a little later...
I better go water the peanut before I go to work at Joanies this morning.

No posts in a few days becuase the solar power has been a little low. Not sure why as it ahs been nice nad sunny for the most part...
We've been trucking along. Tim and I did some work on getting the ground ready to plant support species for the main guadua hedge yesterday. Today, they worked with Lorinda in the garden and then after lunch Tim helped me, or rather I helped him sweat together some actual copper connections for the schoolhouse solar shower...
We hooked up the gas fridge and killed a bunch of roosters. Susan and Brooke who have been trading garden produce with us came by as we were in the middle of it and they were so amused that we ended up giving them a small one!
Did I mention we got load of Maui Earth compost the other day? Will be interesting to see how long this load lasts...

I'm not even sure when I last posted. Maybe I should go backwards just this once and I'll figure it out.
Today, Tim and I worked for Jen & Malte. Pruned the gliricidia hedge on Loomis road and met Rick Bickford who cuts the grass on the road. He urged me to cut the gliricidia back even more... We shredded the prunings with Greg Jones' 8 hp chipper/shredder. It worked pretty well until we broke the belt. The shredder function will be wonderful for making composts. Absolutely wonderful!
We also planted about 50 gliricidia's in a block down amongst Malte's bamboo's. It will make good mulch material for the guadua hedge I am going to convince him to buy from Greg to extend the one I plant on our place!
Yesterday, Lichen, Lorinda and I went to the fish bowl, and Iao valley, and we got our TB clearances, and we gathered a bunch of fineleaved pinto cuttings...
Thursday I worked at Joan's and didn't really bring much home, except for some extra cash, and Greg Jones chipper...
Have I done wednesday? I think that was the day that Tim and I worked at planting out the lemongrass and sugar cane divisions that we moved from the "annoying berm". We did other stuff too, but it seems like a month ago now...

Seems like the thermocouple will need replacing after all, by the way, god damn it... Why can't they make shit to last?

Lichen and Justin examining part of our aphid control army, a cute little Praying mantis...

And here are Tim & Justin clearing and mulching more of the berm...

We have a a good sheet mulch down over most of the annoying berm now... We will have to stay on it and hammer any "nahiku" that pops out, and when our flats of peanut are well established whack them in and hope that they claim the berm before the grasses can reestablish! I think we have got it this time...

I had Tim do some aquaculture... he took some guppies out of the lower barn garden pond and put them in the white barrel we have catching water at the edge of the power shed/laundry, so as to eat any mozzies... He also harvested two more buckets of lilikoi, some of which he and Justin cut up for chicken fodder, and a good bucket of carambola's or star fruit. I believe the first harvest from that tree in the gulch...

After lunch we set off for town on various errands. Tim and Justin chilled at the Kava bar while Lorinda and I did banking and went to Del's where we scored on half priced industrial chicken food, and filled the biodiesel family car with biodiesel... Then it was onto Wailuku where Tim had business in the state building and Justin was directed to a "public breadfruit" tree... Lorinda and I got TB tests at the Wailuku medical centre so that we can qualify for tertiary edu. Lorinda is trying to get me into the Alternative Energy associate diploma... night school!

Then we raided the macadamia orchard and got about 50 pounds... awright!

Unfortunately the F250 on the side of the road had already had its solenoid fuel selector valve removed, so the vegie conversions still aren't going anywhere...

Well, the oft spoken of day when we would have a team of wwoofers working away came true today.
Justin and Tim were an amazing help clearing weeds and sheet mulching the bank. Of course we ran out of paper around midday and had to make a run to town to get more paper. There were some dudes there from the Recycling Co but they were happy to let us take what we wanted and even helped us load it all in the truck!
We would have finished the whole bank for sure if it hadn't been for the water heater going on the blink. I ended up spending most of the mid afternoon taking it apart and cleaning out a blocked nozzle - don't know if I damaged it in the process of removing the tube to clean it, but after we cleaned it out and reassembled it it was still not working. Of course, with all the rain the phone wouldn't work, so getting on line was a trip and when we did there was nothing about how to service it anyway. Called Chris Baz and he explained the principles of a thermocouple. Armed with this information and Tim's mechanical aptitude we managed to have hot showers. And we got a lot of mulching done too. And had an awesome lunch with food off the land (including some monstera deliciosa)and those yummy maca nuts. Yay!

Sunday morning I showed Tim around the farm pointing out activities that we might be involved in and try to give him some bearings. Found a "vine ripened" Monstera deliciosa that is chilling in the fridge right now. Also harvested another pineapple form near the barn garden...
Then we did some work in the nursery, moving some large pots out of the middle space into a "hardening off" environment and started moving the shelving into place. Unfoturnately, I think we need another piece to properly assemble the shelves, so we postponed that until I raid Joan's once more and did a little housekeeping up there. Got Tim to sift out all the crap from the potting mix that had accumulated on the floor of the nursery and we prepared some trays of little pots for planting...
Then we solar cooked some pumpkin and had lunch...
Rather than make him work all day on his first day, we elected to take him over to the sunny side of the island. We stopped for a dip at Makena landing before pushing on to the fishbowl. Welcome to the tropical wonderland!
On the way home we stopped at the abandoned Mac grove in Wailuku and harvested maybe five pounds of nuts in about 20 minutes! They are on! We will probably go back with the pickup and some five gallon buckets and glean until we are challenged by someone this week! Today we have Justin and Tim on board, so I think we are once and for all going to attack the annoying berm between the barn and the barn garden and really roll out the pinto carpet...

Friday we did the same old same old perennial peanut prop stuff... I planted out some mulberries from pots and some cuttings from Joan's for the chicken fedge (fence/hedge). Also a fig and a handful of papaya's around the chicken house to cash in on their manure, and grow some food for them in situ... Then I went around to Joans and loaded some shelving that she had offered for me. Some of it should work well in the nursery to increase its capacity, and we'll probably have enough to line the walls of the other container...
Saturday, Lorinda had harp circle Lichen and I dropped her off and then cruised up to Makawao library. We also drove around the backrounds heading out to Olinda. Saw a few nice crows ash trees, but nothing interesting was seeding that I saw...
At home I processed more peanut cuttings, and potted some more up. After about 5 I went out and pulled weeds in different spots around the barn garden. Amazingly some of the weed border plantings are so dense that the sweet potato is getting shaded out already... The side closest to the house is a real hassle, with so much good stuff amongst so many running weeds.
Around dusk the phone rang, and Tim our newest wwoofer had made it to Door of Faith Rd, so I went and picked him up in the biodiesel family car...

Busy couple of days on the farm... Justin came around to help so we had him doing dome neglected chores in the garden. Pulling weeds that are starting to come up in the pathways and beds. We made a big compost pile - salvinia and hyacinth, goat and chicken straw, one coppiced gliricidia worth of leaves, a barrow full of lawn clippings from the morning's lawn mowing, and a bucket of comfrey... Justin also took care of some planting and sheet mulching while I ran the lawn mower around.
We moved the chicken dome yesterday, wednesday the 3rd, and planted it up. We also mounded up the other half of the long chicken tractored bed and planted it up with an experimental timestacking guild of tomatoes (which will die after an initial flush if they are anything like all the other tomatoes we have grown here - although these ones had some of Robs Azomite trace minerals and we'll see if that makes a diff) with sweet potatoes which will last longer no doubt. We also dropped in bunching onions, beet berries and eggplants. Happily I was able to catch the araucana that keeps getting out of the bamboo corall. I threw her in with "speckles" as Lorinda and Lichen have taken to calling him. Oh, I also caught one of the free ranging ducks and we had her in fried rice for dinner.
Justin came up to the site of the bag with me and we dragged the carpet back and rolled it up and I sort of wrang my hands over it. I still can't decide the best course of action. Leaning towards making the most of what we actually have on the farm right now and dragging all that carpet down to the gulch and following through with Iruka's pond, even though it is not an immediate solution to irrigation water. I know we don't have the money, but a tank right up there on the top of the hill would be kind of cool. I don't know... Justin is open to spending part of his time for us helping with pond work, rather than gardening, which is his primary interest which is great, and if this Tim Farmer bloke shows up we will have the nucleus of a team for dragging carpet and plastic around!
What else, oh the usual ongoing things, like adding water to the batteries, feeding the goats, etc. Oh, and first thing yesterday I spent some time pulling weeds in that annoying area between the garden and the greywater trench. It is a strange reverse tardis like area that seems so much bigger than it is until you get in there and start clearing it. I actually cut out some stupid stuff like the self sown guavas and I trimmed back a big agave and used it to mulch a Jakfruit growing there, as those plants while providing some windbreak and groundcover, were really doing more to harbour weeds than anything.

Here for instance, there is some cardboard at the edge of the expanding peanut, and if we added a little mulch here, it would work even better, but sooner or later, the coardboard will be covered with nitrogen fixing living mulch.
I think a good strategy if we can get enough carboard, mulch and rooted cuttings together at the same time, will be to plant thoroughly weeded strips either side of sheet mulched areas, rather than trying to plant into sheet mulched areas en masse, or even actually weed massive areas, as some people do...
Of course, we'll try lots of different things here by the time we've finished!

This is that spot that we started on back in December/January. I had the weedmat out over it, and you were asking if I was making a slip and slide. I'm pretty happy with it. We have done a bit of weeding on it. Perhaps 3 major concerted efforts a dozen or two dozen half hearted little pulls as we walked past. We will have to weed parts of it again, to be sure, but most of the area is now covered, and the peanut is starting to spread out from either side. So, we can work the edges and gradually expand it out.

Oh I am forgetting that this could be read by anyone and have started to address this directly to you, Brad! I was hoping to do that only obliquely, but I guess I got a little too much sun today...