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.