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.