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.