Dug some holes for the citrus, and hoed out some furrows for planting peanut cuttings. Harvested some cocoyams and sweet potato and a pumpkin for dinner.
Made more peanut cuttings. Started to run out of light so I ripped the overhead light out of the dead VW and connected it to the solar charged battery and so was able to finish the rest of the cuttings I had to do...

Hives have mostly gone today. Still kinda itchy but no longer horrible.
Tried to char some wood shavings today, but you know, it was causing such a lot of smoke that I just couldn't help it and I prematurely killed it, again, and so only got a partial charring. Of course when this happens and you have a big mixture of uncharred and charred material, you don't have a soil amendment. So, I thought about using it as mulch somewhere and then I just thought, fucket, I've got some goat shit over there and some other shit over there, and I ended up spending most of the day making compost. Actually made two piles by the time I was finished.
Cut down the dead coconut by the garden and tried to burn it, but I had used most of the handy fuel trying to char the woodshavings, so I don't know I didn't have a hot enough or big enough fire I guess. Of course, a freshly cut palm is basically a bunch of water, so I shouldn't be too suprised I guess. Hopefully roasting on the coals over night will take care of any fungal spores. Man, the rotten core really stunk... Gotta get some rock phosphate and spread it around...

self disgnosis: acute urticaria.

hives all over my shoulders and middle back area. very, very itchy.
reaction to chook shit? to some organic compound in the weeds? fuck it.

One of those cloudy, showery sort of Huelo winter days today. I had some luck trapping the chooks in the longhouse and most of my work was in that general area, laying out cardboard over the area that the chooks had been and then planting up the extreme corner of the paddock with cane and peanut and some cocoyam in a minute after I've had my afternoon tea.

Oh, I harvested a couple of good cassava roots to eat with Ace & Shelley tonight too...

OMFG what an afternoon.
I realised half way through working on the chicken paddock (well at lunchtime anyway) that if I didn't get the truck checked out soon it would probably get a lot worse, and that I really need the truck to haul mulch that doesn't grow back here.
So, I got the phone book out and called the mechanic and asked when would be a good time. They said, yeah, we'll check it out this afternoon. So when I told Lorinda I was gonna go she's like "well, do you think you should charge up the mercedes in case you have to leave the truck with them?" and of course she was right. But when we got it to start it made this incredibly evil noise, and after some head scratching we realised that the fan on the new alternator was bigger than the old one, and the metal on the fins was getting ground down on the alternator bracket! So with much cursing we wrestled it off and I took it into town with me.
The mechanic said he couldn't really tell unless he pulled the belt off and checked all the components, but that I could probably keep driving it for a while. He had a gross boil on his face. So we made an appointment for tuesday when they'll do the valve cover gaskets and the rest of the list and hopefully figure out which part needs care. The alternator shop guy was a bit sheepish when he realised that he'd given us the wrong piece. He took the old fan off and put it on the new alternator.
By now it was too late to get any mulch from the dump, so I got another bail of cardboard from Sears, and did some grocery shopping.
Back home we managed to catch the chickens in the long tractor and we threw them into the dome. I had to take the rooster out though, because he was being an arsehole.
Then we dragged the long tractor into the chook yard, and cut the broken end off. It was too long anyway!
It may take a little bit to get all the chooks in there, but at least we are getting these chooks a bit more into line.

Well, those photo's didn't upload in the order intended... The first is supposed to illustrate the peanut cuttings planted in the last week in the areas that have been longest sheet mulched in the sesbania land. The second shows the attempt to reclear the current chicken paddock. The third shows sweet potato cuttings in the sesbania land, and the fourth the new gate into the chicken paddock.

Yesterday I spent most of my time clearing out the lower chicken paddock, trying to figure out how to make use of the fertility the chooks have lent the area. Unfortunately, despite adding lots of manure they just haven't managed to prevent the weeds from growing back... So a fair bit of machete swinging to remove the woodiest weeds and the grasses that will not succumb to the weedwhacker, and then a fair bit of weedwacking, and a bit of actual hand weeding in the bits that we had thrown in a good layer of mulch, just to you know, see how easily the weeds could be pulled. The thing is, the mulch that we threw in there has actually grown... Probably one half of the area is hono grass, which perhaps isn't too hard to remove, but then there is enough actual grass that is just too much to try to hand pull over too large of an area...
Oh, I transplanted the best looking mango seedlings into pots and put them into the nursery...
And I put in a new gate, which will make it easier to access the area, and possibly we will get that long chook tractor in there and concentrate the chooks over smaller areas and get better, uh, traction.

So, I am trying to insert the rainfall spreadsheet, but everytime I try I lose the format and it is a bit hard to "get it".
Anyway, overall, I guess 2006 with 2125mm hasn't been that much drier than 2005 which gave us 2573mm. But the distribution was quite different, which is where the spreadsheet would be instructive.
Basically summer was much drier. Spring and Fall both had some fairly heavy falls which brought the yearly totals up, but at both ends of the year we did have longer periods of no rain than in the previous year, where the falls were more evenly spread out.
Just to show the marked difference between summer 05 and 06, I will manually give you the breakdown;

Jun 05 - 197mm. Jun 06 - 59mm
Jul 05 - 239mm, Jul 06 - 97mm
Aug 05 - 137mm, Aug 06 - 76mm
Sep 05 - 490mm, Sep 06 - 124mm

In other words, summer 05 had 1063 mm, summer 06 had 356mm...

In October it starts to balance out, and November and December have actually been somewhat wetter this year...

Given that conditions are likely to get more and more extreme, it would be great to put in more storages, both tanks and ponds. A big "turkeys nest" up there on the ridge which we could fill with the solar pump in wet times and via roof catchment from the eventual structure that will go up there, and more swales obviously. I know I am repeating myself, that you are well aware of what I am saying...

Xmas day I made more peanut cuttings! I think I really could go into full time peanut propagation for about a year and it really wouldn't be a bad thing. Mostly they went into old tin cans, which can't be seen in the above photo, since they are in the nursery proper, where they'll get put in pots and actually grown on in potting mix. Most of the ones above will go straight into the ground I guess. Bathtubs are full of worms. Hopefully these ones will be more productive than the others have proved to be. The worms I mean.

We were going to walk all the dogs up to the falls, but it was kind of a cloudy, rainy day. Looks like the sun is out today (boxing day) so perhaps we'll do the family dog walk thing today.

Yesterday I potted up some peanut cuttings, watered the nurseries and pushed the lawnmower on gulch trails and some of the driveway up here. Realised I still had about 5 gallon jugs of "long" peanut cuttings to plant out. Tackled the Mercedes again, got the old alternator out, got the new one in...
Today I planted out those 5 gall's of peanut cuttings, and made 5 more, and finally got around to setting up bathtub wormfarms in the old bamboo prop house. The fridge farms haven't been the greatest success, mainly due to being in the sun and not easily accessed by hose water, so they have been drying out. In the shade they will dry out less rapidly, and I will put peanut pots over them so that when dry they will get watered anyway.
Harvested a big dioscorea yam in the process of clearing the area for the tubs. One planted probably yielded about 5 pounds of tuber. Of course, I couldn't get it all out since they go so deep, and hopefully it will come back again in the spring.

Planted peanut cuttings. Made more peanut cuttings.
Tried to replace alternator in the car, but still haven't gotten the old one out...

Planted the Duku Langsat, the Mammee Apple, the TREC Canistel and two more seedling Canistel trees (eggfruit)and the Gnetum down in the gulch. Did some pruning and mulching of the pidgeon peas in Takako's food forest, and some clearing of the trail to the shower that is getting overgrown in pidgeon pea and sesbania. Sadly it looks like the Lalee Jewo has died off... I probably let the pidgeon pea cover get too dense. I am holding out some hope that it is just dormant, but it doesn't look great. Overall the rest of that planting is doing pretty good though.

Centipede attack

Well, finally I have been bitten by one of Maui's dreaded centipedes. Right at the end of the day, I was running the weedwhacker to clear back the brush on the side of the trail down to Geoff's cabin, aka the former schoolhouse. It was pretty well on dusk and I had just refilled the tank and reset the string, and I had taken off the helmet/faceguard/earmuff thing and put that on the ground as I did so, and perhaps the little critter had crawled in there at that time. Either that, or it might have dropped out of the guava I was clearing under, and crawled up my hair and into the helmet. Probably the former... At any rate, he or she delivered a great sting to the back of my head, about two inches from that spot that has no hair, whatever that's called. The crown?
Anyway, the sting isn't all that bad. No worse than a bull ant, though to be sure that is bad enough... I have a slight swelling, I suppose about the size of an Australian 50 cent piece...
Lorinda and LIchen are at a Suzuki concert in Kula so I have only you dear Blog to complain to.
Planted two B. Textilis and a Artocarpus odoritissimus today, over there by Geoff's cabin. Spread some compost around the Guadua's over that way while I was at. Mostly weedwacking at the edges though...

Well, of course, being Huelo, the prevailing explananation is that Mercury is retrograde, but whatever it is things have been pretty fucked up around here lately. I won't go into too much detail here, but our little cast of tenants have mostly been going apeshit lately. Or to Mexico. The reliably sane ones, thank the maker have been reliably sane.
The stage for all this madness is that with the rain event the other day, you guessed it, the phone went down! And then the screen on the computer died... Did I mention the little clip on the bottom of the truck not working and dropping parts of the clutch hydraulics all over the road?
Other than that things are fine!
Lorinda and I laughed about it one afternoon last week, when things had gotten about as out of hand as they ever have, and there was even talk of someone threatening my life, and our response to all these little disasters, was to shrug our shoulders, say, "yeah, yeah, whatever...", and go back to pushing wheelbarrows of woodchips or feeding the goats or whatever we were doing...

In the last 24 hours we measured 149 mm in the rain gauge. That's a lot of rain!
It appears that the sun is coming back out this morning, hopefully it isn't just a tease. 3 days of dark, overcast weather is enough!
I never did plant seeds or inge's yesterday, it was just insanity out there. I did clear away the molasses grass that had choked out the spill way of the pond in the bottom of the gulch. The pond still had a foot to rise before going over. I walked up the gulch to the kitchen and talked to Marshall for like 2 min, then wandered back and in that time the pond had filled and was overflowing massively.
The planting I did just upstream of the pond earlier in the month to try and make a silt catch was largely washed into the pond I think, although this morning I'll go down and get a better look.

The deluge has returned... A 3 inch rain event to finish out Oct, and still it comes down. I managed to get some cover crop seeds out in part of the noni paddock, but not the citrus paddock, before the ground got so wet that just walking out there is a muddy, compacting mess. The real reason is that the roosters are still getting loose and planting seeds would be just like feeding the chooks... I am going to see if I can catch them tonight and if I do I guess I'll plant that section tomorrow. If not, I may turn my attention to planting Inge's out into the long grass. Whoo-hoo!

Oh god. It is the year of the dog, after all. We have lost another flock of chickens to dogs. The worst of it is that it was probably our dog. The entire dome is vacant but for mulch and feathers. If it was Bono, he killed them all, and carried them all off to some secret hiding spot. No doubt the smell will come up in a couple of days and we'll get more clues.
In the meanwhile Bono is tied up in the tractor shed, and Lorinda is asking around to see if anyone wants to a adopt a big black dog, who is actually a lovely dog when he isn't being genocidal...
Of course it may not have been Bono, but all circumstantial evidence points towards the big brute...
So, what to do? We have sort of decided to circle the wagons so to speak, and make one really solid chook pen that hopefully will be dog proof and will prevent the chooks from escaping, where the current flock is preparing for the microcitrus orchard. It kind of sucks to design in reaction to such factors, but there you are. It will necessarily mean a reduction in our overall poultry flock, but they'll breed again I suppose...

The earthquake the other day brought rain with it amazingly enough. We've had some pretty consistent heavy falls. The main tank which was getting dangerously low is back to over half full, and the Iruka's pond while not full to the spillway is looking more like a pond than a puddle which is great.
I finally managed to find the disk with 2005's rainfall records, and comparing them to this year is interesting to see how much drier this summer was.
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep
156 131 380 197 113 197 239 137 490 2005
174 249 315 137 294 59 97 76 124 2006
Of course, those figures are in millimetres. Interesting how the year started out much wetter and then tapered off eh?

I've been continuing to plant peanut cuttings and seed down there in the Salak zone, and I spent some time adjusting the shade cloth to cover the salaks... Also whacked in one of the grafted Canistel's or "eggfruit", on the berm further down towards the ginger terrace... I think the very inensive peanut cutting planting is going to do well, it is nice and low and gets pretty good afternoon shade. If we can keep it weed free it will be a good source of future cuttings I am reckoning...
Today I planted the pomegranate, across the lane from the chook shed, a little below the swale, so, its neoighbours will be the abiu and the frangipani... I have been pulling weeds in that general area, there is a spot there that was never really well planted with peanut, so I think I am going to go back in there and replant it once I get the weeds pulled.
So, nothing momentous to report, just chipping away slowly slowly.

weLL, after the earthquake I figured it was high time I planted out the 1 gallon legume trees that are left over in the nursery. they were actually overdue, but due to various constraints I have been holding back. the old thing of having all the ducks in a row... so, the bali salak palms were also looking like their roots wanted to come out of their pots, so I made the decision to pull up the scraps of pond liner which have been killing off the grass/acting as extra catchment just above Iruka's pond... This in itself was sort of a compromise, as it really was nice to have the extra runoff contributing to filling up the pond. but... it was time to get those plants out of their pots, you know?
Of course, the salaks need some shade for their first few years, and the calliandra's, flemingia's and sesbania's won't quite do it for another few months, so I messed around stringing up some shadecloth from the Java Plum to the worm farm guava tree, and in the end really only covered enough to be good for one salak... This morning it rained really hard, bowing down the trees and slacking down the shadecloth, so I am glad that I didn't go ahead and plant the other palms yet, which would have been buggered up.
I planted hundreds and hundreds of peanut cuttings, since I will be watering that zone a lot anyway, and the shadecloth should help them establish and with a grass kill right now, it only makes sense to strike while the iron is hot...

earthquake!

Not sure where it would register on richter's scale or whatever they use these days, but this morning here at like 7:08am, approximately, we had a fairly severe little earth tremor. My first thought was that the dogs were all running together along the lanai, but then realised the lanai isn't quite long enough to sustain that amount of dog tread, and wait, how did the dogs get get into the roof? We bustled outside and felt the ground shaking under our feet, and listened to the house buckling and groaning a little under the strain. It was kind of cool, and yet really horrible. The spare gas fridge that is sitting next to the glass doors in the back of the barn was rocking back and forth, and the house was actually rumbling, as though it were generating thunder. About 10 minutes later, as I was beginning to write this post actually, there was another little aftershock, but by the time I could say, "Fuck!", and we were on the lanai, it had passed. Oh, yeah, the first one set off a car alarm somewhere up on Ula Lena... Nothing appears to have broken, I guess I will go and check gas lines and such. Crikey!

Rainfall in September was better than August, but our tanks are still pretty low and the ponds are about half full or empty depending on how you look at such things.
We have been going ahead and putting in Pheasantwoods (Cassia siamenensis) more because they are ready than we are ready...
The other main focus of activity has been cutting mulch (yes, with a weedwhacker - the 8N is this far from being consigned to the scrapheap) and throwing it into the chicken yard that is going to be a dwarf citrus orchard one of these days...
I've been tilling patches, since the soil is unusually dry enough to be workable, and have thereby been wittling away at the paddock above the barn, putting in bits of this and that. pineapples, perennial peanut, sweet potato, cocoyam, ginger, green onions, capsicums, beans, greens etc. will soon do another big planting of sugar cane for windbreak and cash, and more of the peanut and sweet potato thing...

We hosted a nice workshop here yesterday evening for the Maui Permaculture Network. Greg Jones demonstrated a couple of methods for making "Biochar" as a soil amendment for our depleted tropical soils. I guess about 10 people came to participate, and we had a nice potluck dinner afterwards. It was free, which was the best part about it, but we get to use the charcoal here so we win!

Planted 10 textilis up there on the loomis rd side the other day, watered them in from barrels on the back of the truck, since we don't have the money to buy the pipe we need. but we had a nice rain of 8mm which will help to settle them in, and it really was time to get them out of their pots. we have a couple more in big planters that can go in a bit later.
tim is closer to understanding the wiring on the 8N, so maybe it will be running again soon.
I hope so. I have been killing myself with the weedeater, and although the tractor would only work in some of the places I have been weedeating, it would make a big psychological diff to have a mowing deck running. I would like to mow a bunch before the rains come back, so that we have a bunch of straw mulch saved to use on plantings in the winter...
Today I concentrated on cleaning up around the barn mostly, getting ready for showing it to new renters I guess. I also wacked the grass in the chicken run under the swale, and will start throwing the piles of mulch generated from tidying up around the barn in there to catch all the chicken manure and suppress the grass from coming back.
I wonder if we'll be able to buy those dwarf citrus for that area, ever...

Actually, it wasn't an old Hawaiian plant at all. If I am identifying it correctly as Crescentia cujete it is from the Americas.

We tied the goats out today, along the lane to the lilikoi cabin. they ate some of the nahiku, and lay around on it...
I spent some of the morning planting peanut, then when the sun got hotter I moved onto weedwhacking. started to reclaim the nursery hardening off area, which has just totally gotten invaded by long grass, damn it. my efforts to recycle old tarps and bits of plastic and carpet really didn't do the same job as weedmat. I charred the remains of the pallets, to throw into the banana pits... excavated around the two dead cars. lorinda thinks she is going to get a deal on the work she has arranged for the mercedes by giving mango the junk mercedes. we just have to figure out how to get it there.
so, I have been tidying up, but it is not before time really...
if we can get a welder for Tim he will turn the vw into a trailer for hauling mulch and lillikoi etc around the property. we would just need the tractor to pull it!
at the end of the day I tried to unearth some trees on the loomis lane berm. I guess they are rainbow showers or yellow showers or something? I'm not sure. They are some kind of legume anyway. There are like four or five of them over there... They had like, 7 feet tall nahiku growing up through their branches. I hope they feel a bit better now.
Realised that the tree with fruit over there is the gourd tree. Remember, I was asking you about it and you had no idea either? Well, today I uncovered a dried one, and it was obvious... Do you know what I am talking about? THe old Hawaiians used them as shakers in the hula I guess.

The platform is on the ginger terrace structure now, with the costco garage on top. It is going to take a larger tarp than the 20 x 30 foot we got from the hardware. It would have been much cleverer to just get the higher quality one in the first place. I have been trying without luck so far to find some guadua or brandisii to use for framing a larger tarp; we'll see what comes of that...
I started planting out Tim's first batch of peanut this morning. I guess I put in about 300 plants this morning. I will use the full thou just trying to cover the berm above the pond down there.
Eric and Sharesa both left for hanavana, did I mention that? Kind of a relief really... We have had two more inquiries from pontential wwoofers this week too, we'll see where that goes.

work on the ginger terrace consumes most of the time this week.
we did plant a hedge of alphonse karr provided by jen and the whispering winds nursery, where we were to have put the textilis. 13 plants.
have noticed that monkeypod seedlings are sprouting in mulch we've laid down, both in the green waste that we brought back, but also other places. can't complain about volunteer monkeypods eh?

I mulched the ASpers in the morning. 3 of them were planted into a patch of nahiku, so I did the obligatory attempt at sheet mulching the area with lots of carboard and some piles of green waste and rough mulch. the water line got kinked somewhere though, so halfway through the process I had to go walking up and down the hill looking for the problem. which was a real bugger, since it was all I had in me to go back and forth up the hill getting cardboard and mulch... At least, that area is one of the most inaccessible on the property and now it is largely planted out. Of course, hauling massive bamboo poles out of there, and buckets of cacao etc will be fun...
In the afternoon we put a coat of pink/beige acrylic latex on the plywood, more as a preservative than as aesthetic thing, but I suppose it is an alright colour. Will probably do a second coat today I suppose.

I've had a pretty lazy day today. It has been raining on and off all day, so I went and got this months bamboo's from the Timbercane boys, 9 Dendrocalamus asper's, popped them into their holes (which we had already prepared, down there below the dam wall) and put some peanut cuttings straight into their compost cinder amended holes, ran a drip line from the 1/2" line that already runs down there...
It is really nice to have some rain again!

Yesterday I took my mother back to the airport. Then I headed out to the Green Waste facility only to find that their tub grinder had attempted to swallow one too many rocks, and so accordingly the loader had taken the day off and was not available to fill up my pickup truck.
I chatted with the guy who picks over the pile of garbage over to the side, and got his okay to grab a few coconuts out of the pile, and also a nice sheet of plywood that had been a packing case...
Then I thought, well shit, I don't want to go home with an empty pickup, but it was still early and I didn't really have anything in mind, then I thought, "Well, now I have the extra piece of ply for the workbench, I guess I'll go buy that bench vise that would have been so handy on 8 million occaisions in the last two years, and maybe buy some paint to paint the plywood I bought yesterday for the Ginger Terrace flooring".
So, I bought the vice, and then realised, remembered how expensive and toxic paint is, and accordingly remembered that there is a paint recycling facility in Puunene where you can get free paint.
So there I went, and the nice old chook that supervises the work day program told me to help myself, and I did. I got about 10 or 15 gallons of different types of latex this and that, including a gallon of latex primer. I don't know much about paint... but figured that out of 15 gallons I should get enough that works well enough to, that Also scored 3 bathtubs and a solid tool handle.
The bathtubs will be catch tanks/filters in greywater recycling (the barn greywater still stinks) and water chestnut ponds... one we might even make into a bath, as it is a solid cast iron type that should clean up well.
On the way out I stopped at the HC&S sugar festival, looked at the displays of period photo's and watched some young hapa boys carrying a pig around a imu for a bit. Heard someone talking about feeding a lion at 11 o'clock, and my curiosity was piqued, but then I realised that it was only 9;30am and that I had better go home and take care of shit.
In the end I made Lorinda help me prime the plywood, managed to do most of it undert the cover of the shed, manouvering plywood around dead and dormant tractors and other junk.

tim, eric and I left the farm at 5:30am this morning and went to the badlands to harvest kiawe posts for a ginger terrace structure. we really did pretty well. if we hadn't have had the three of us, there is no way we could have got the 7 or so 10 foot, solid, solid, solid posts that we did. we had to leave two behind on account of a beehive. we tried to smoke them out, but they kept hanging around.
I will check back in a few days to see if they have vacated and hopefully I can still get them... Tim got stung just above the eye, but is okay.
we unloaded them and I cut them loose for the day, as their 8 hours was more than racked up. I got the weedwacker going to clear the work site, but when I went to change the string I realised that I lost the gearhead grease bolt... fuck! so I put it up, and put it on the list for Lorinda who is going to town tomorrow, and went back at it with a rice knife, only to get struck down by a wasp bite to the neck.
fuck!
and lorinda's friend phillip got stung on the head by a centipede last night. his face is all swollen and ridicilous. I guess the insecst must be as pissed off as us that it is so hot and dry here lately.

With the help of Tim, Eric and Sharesa (and the Ekocompost green waste recycling facility) we got the entire perimeter of the barn garden weeded and mulched by the end of yesterday. This is a first! Its funny - I have no almost no aesthetic temperemnet at all , at least when it comes to things like mulch. Eric, whose story is waiting to be told in these pages, made quite an effort to make it look nice. In a way, I am glad, but then, I would have been just as happy had he thrown the mulch randomly into those beds like a dogs breakfast. It is all going to break down in the end after all...
Learnt that the loader shuts down at 3pm, but was able to fill up on nice chips with the use of a bucket I had to pick up twin falls scraps...

Well, we got another load of mulch from the green waste before my mother commandeered the use of the truck to take her grandaughter shopping, but at least she helped unload the mulch out of the truck. So far we have added 2 red dwarf bananas, 1 mysore rasberry, 1 Red Mombin and about 20 cocoyams to the food forest bank down there, which is where the mulch went. I also put in the two betel nut palms that Ramana gave us, they were still little, but I bet they do okay. One is in the middle of Takako's food forest, the other is a little lower on the opposite side of the gulch. It will be standing right next to the G. maxima at maturity...
I spent a fair bit of time messing with the water system yesterday, finally putting in a line to water the Brandisii on Lillikoi lane. I had hoped to run a siphon out of the top pond to do that, but in the end tapped into the main line coming from the solar pump, because the level in the pond is still so low that pressure through the siphon line was inadequate. Or is that vacuum? I also drained the tanks from Geoff's roof and the shed catchment to water the guadua's in different spots. Did a tiny bit of thinning of the guadua on a few clumps, and pulled grasses out of most.
I used the purple cruiser bicycle a lot to move from location to location. At one point I finally broke down and tried to salvage a replacement pedal from Geoff's spare parts bike, but the thread size was different...
Spent a while trying to clean out the old hardening off area between that swale and the containers, which has gotten overgrown with grasses and seen the loss of a few plants that we didn't get out in time before the onset of the dry season... So, salvaging from amongst the dead was a bit dispiriting, but also gave some hope for the future. Looking forward to using the dioscorea/tahitian lillikoi shadehouse to propagate a bunch of oldhamii and burmanica, for instance...
last action of the day was to run a drip line down the burmanica hedge, which turns into albociliata and other stuff down the line. the burmanica seems like to be proving the most drought resistant of the bamboo's here, small leaves and all that...

I planted two fruit trees today, down there on the "bank" on the eastern side of the pond... One Kasturi, and one Lalee Jewo. These are both related to mango's, but are hopefully more suited to our wet climate, and are probably more primitive relatives... I did this after getting a load of mulch from the dump. I mulched the trees in well, then planted peanut around them, and pineapple tops under them, in sort of crescents to catch mulch ala the Maya Mountain Research farm method, and them spread the mulch around in the spaces between. In the next couple of weeks we'll see how many weeds come through the mulch, we'd weed it, then we'll hit it hard with peanut seedlings...

A long week, in which we discovered that the EkoCompost facility is giving away shredded green waste, and thus collect 8 yards of said material over 4 different trips. And in which we finally gave up on Gary's pond and filled it with organic matter and made it into a banana circle.
And in which we concentrated our efforts on weeding around the dome garden, and establishing a drip/leaky hose system for watering that garden. And in which many pineapple tops were planted in food forest sections and around the dome garden.
And in which we weeded back the bank immediately above the large pond and planted it to pidgeon peas, with the promise to ourselves that we will follow up with much mulch and many peanut seedlings when they have been well established.
And in which we changed the oil in the truck.

Haven't blogged much just lately, as I have been doing stuff with my parents who are visiting from Tasmania.
But, we've been doing stuff around here all the same. Major activity has been preparing holes for Aspers that are coming in the next weeks. Also clearing the bank between the two lower terraces in the gulch by the bottom pond.
Ran driplines to bamboo plantings; need to get more 1/2" pipe to continue that work.
The sunpump keeps pumping.
Hopefully we'll get some rains soon to top off our ponds and tanks...
We went on a boat this morning and saw spinner dolphins. bloody marvellous they were.

Another week with the wwoofers comes to an end. On wednesday our weeding program was partially interupted by a call from Greg. He was hoping to borrow the tiller to get some propagation beds for some Gigantachloa atroviolacea (a gorgeous, timber quality black bamboo) that he and Ramana had come upon at a wholesale rate, and needed to something with pronto. Of course, our tiller is still at the repair shop, but we decided that I should bring Eric and Tim up there and between us all we could get it done with hand tools. As it was, the plot had lots of roots so the tiller would have sucked at it anyway, and it was a good morning. I got them a load of cinders, and they put some extra good stuff like humates, and some charred, shredded coco fibres in the beds, so I am expected them to do really well! We will of course get a nice share of the atro's when they are ready, but they gave me a textilis gracilis at the end of the day as a token or whatever... which is cool, because I've wanted that species here for a while.
Sharesa and Tim worked in the garden thursday while Eric and I got ready to plant 9 Aspers that are coming next month. We cut back grasses and vines and dug holes on thursday. We also hauled rocks down there and filled in the spillway where it looked like it could erode and potentially break the dam. The majority of the Aspers from this round are going in underneath the dam wall, which ought to help stop erosion from there, I hope. I think we'll work on vetiver on the wall itself, where the wall isn't great boulders...
Friday, Eric went harvesting Lillikoi's and did a bunch of clearing around stuff in the gulch. The little mango that is always strangled by nahiku, and some coconuts up on the western ridge...
Tim fixed the wheelbarrow that I ran over with the truck, and made some small progress with the tractor, I think...
Lorinda has been doing a lot in the garden, I think, with Sharesa and Tim's help. I actually planted some lettuce seedlings in there last night...
Today, friday, I got a load of cinders, the majority of which went into the holes we dug for the Aspers. I went to the irrigation supply house and got parts for doing irrigation driplines for these bamboo's. After dinner I ran around trying to get lines setup for plants we already have in the ground. I guess in time, we will be able to reuse some of stuff in new places, although, a lot of the bamboo's will probably appreciate irrigation even when they are mature...

I started planting out sesbania sesbans and pidgeon peas on the terrace down by the pond yesterday afternoon, sort of against my better judgement, because I don't yet have the groundcovers to go with it, but we have them on the way in the nursery right next to that spot, and the trees are ready to get out of the pots. I space the sesbanias so that in lieu of an accurate map of the area, I can start to plan where the fruit trees will go, most of which require about 30 foot spacings... I actually handpulled a lot of the grass, it came pretty easily...

Yesterday we got the solar pump on line. It took about 3 hours to fill the 500 gallon tank at the top of the property. Pretty cool.
KNowingt that we had irrigation ability, we moved our attention to preparing the textilis holes and getting the dripline ready, only to have Malte come out and complain that he didn't want that high of a species right there. I thought that we had discussed this and that he had already accepted that was what was going there, and that he was having problems with another spot, so that was kind of frustrating and threw me for the rest of the day, which was annoying, since I had three workers to direct and had planned to keep them busy mulching and planting and watering that hedge.
So... we turned our attention to harvesting the salivinia from the top pond and mulching the barn dome garden, and seeing about culling the goldfish. Eric, Tim, Sharesa and myself all got into the pond and scooped the weed, and transfered it to the truck via a wheelbarrow and large buckets.
In the process we realised that the "goldfish" are in fact a golden kind of tilapia. The reason they are so small, I guess is that there are too many in there competing for food. So, I am not sure how to proceed. I think we will continue to try and drain the pond down to the point where we can cull the population down, but we probably won't try to replace them with the silvery blue variety we have in the bottom pond... and we'll probably start feeding them and develop a cantilever net system up there to harvest them too...
We also discovered how deep the silt is in that pond and began to try to remove it, and then realised that it would be much easier once we have drained the pond.
Of course, as luck would have it, the rains seem to be back now, 7mm last night!

Fairly constructive day. the top two swales got weeded by the whole crew, then the middle bottom swale was mulched by eric and sharesa after lunch. they also planted more peanut and pineapple under the coconuts in the new sugar patch above the barn ,while Tim and I worked at setting up the pole and frame to hold the solar panels for the pump, which came yesterday.

Tim spent some time this morning moving pots and weed supressing sheets of polycarbonate down into the gulch where he is going to propagate peanut.
Eric came by and did some more mulching and planting peanut/pineapple.
I tried to continue tilling the field immediately south of the barn, only to have the tiller start to belch white smoke furiously out the muffler. WHat could this mean? Does this mean that the valve is stuck? Does it mean there is a bunch of crap in the carb? Oil in the cylinder? Does this mean that something got terminally chewed up inside that small engine? Does this mean that it is actually a waste of my time as a Permaculture planter to be labouring behind a 24" tiller for days on end, and that a compact utitlity tractor could do the same work in minutes?
Well, anyway, I put the tiller in the barn and went back to planting peanut/pidgeon pea and pineapple tops, with the help of the occaisional light shower, and in the end I turned my attention to pulling weeds out of the peanut patches that were established about a year ago around the edge, and that were pretty much covered in grasses and hono hono (commelina). In the process I actually uncovered an Abiu that I thought had been lost forever.
I did the evening chores because Lorinda was in town doing laundry and getting a pallet load of compressed cardboard from a department store loading dock.

Today was overcast, but by lunchtime we had still not had any precipitation worth recording in the rainfall statistics. I made a comment that we should record the number of days where we get no sun and no rain - obviously not brilliant for you when you are off the grid and rely on both of those things falling out of the sky for your basic necessities.
Anyway, after lunch we actually got a few light showers which gradually built up in intensity until finally around dusk we actually got some heavy rain. By the time of writing we actually have 5mm in the gauge, first time this has happened in a month.
Had Tim work on the tractor today, and where I failed to remove races and seals he succeeded, and after months of that thing sitting all taken apart and generally dishevelled looking we actually managed to put it back together again, and had just one surplus bolt at the end of proceedings. !
Unfortunately the battery has no juice after all that time and the carb has developed a fuel leak, probably from us jerking the choke cable around. If its not one thing it is another. Still, full points to Tim for doing a sterling job as chief engineer, for the 3rd friday in a row.
I ran the tiller for a while in the new sugar cane field, and weeded some of the peanut in that area, and directed our newest volunteer Eric, who moved woodchips over an area that has just has cardboard and rough mulch for a while, and then he put in some pineapple tops and peanut seedlings, so really a nice thing that it rained.
Lorinda and Sharesa worked with the goats and in the annual garden...

We have designated wednesdays as the group weedpull. we covered the bottom swale today, which had the least peanut planted in it. really not enough enough peanut planted in it evidently. still, once we had weeded the whole bed, it does look like their is a lot more peanut than before.
we took a break in the midday, I went to town to dump the trash at the dump/ do banking/get compost/rescue a single mother from her drunken abusive boyfriend and pick up goat food (Del's is now being managed by a very switched on goat aware woman who has a flock of 80 in Haiku), and I picked up food scraps from vegout and twin falls (sold a box of lillikoi while I was at it - ones I had collected whilst planting degluptas in the bottom of the gulch yesterday - lillikoi's into brandisii yeah!) and in the afternoon we spread mulch on the swale and planted a few more peanut seedlings and used up so much more of the last available pond water. we also put out about 20 more pineapple tops that we collected as part of the food scraps from twin falls. also picked up eric who is going to do work trade for us while marshall is away in mainlandland.
spoke to jim from sunpumps about the solar pump for our needs before I went to town, and moved some money to pay for the order I will make tomorrow...

Dug more tree holes in the bottom of the gulch, planted a leftover bradisii that had been waiting in the shade, and some more pidgeon peas around the degluptas, because I was down there watering the brandisii's anyway. in the afternoon got the weedwacker out and hit around the guadua and bali white stripe on the driveway, and went along the top goat swale, trying to clear some grass to give some of that peanunt that so underwhelmed in the photo's some room to move. you are right of course, the peanut up there really looks terrible. I was actually saddened to see a big patch that seems to have died since the drought. That really sucks. I would have thought that that stuff would be well enough established to handle this dry spell. Probably it will come back when it gets some water.
Lorinda went to a party the other night and got a few offers to borrow cheap pumps, she is going to pick one up today (I hope) and so we'll see if they can help us here a little bit.

A week in which the pump stopped working and it rained less than one inch... Certain plants that we put in after it stopped raining are really looking crap. Nurseries that used to get gravity fed from the top pond aren't getting wet anymore. Normally, you can forget to water plants for a few days here and they don't die. Not right now...
Several financial challenges have prevented us from ordering the solar pump that would solve this water crisis, I think, but oh well... The main problem being that we sold a gas fridge to a certain long term tenant, and before we had recieved payment we went ahead and bought an AirX wind generator from a neighbour, only to find that the tenant had decided not to give us the money for the fridge since they don't feel it gets cold enough. So, we have the generator to power the pump, but not the money to buy the pump. Sucks. Of course, same tenant is also already in possession of 200 watts of solar that we never actually said he could use, and that would have been enough to run the pump, so you know, I am pretty disgusted with the situation, but the truth is, we could never make the monthly payment to London were it not for the tenant in question so I am really as they say, "stuck between a rock and a hard place", or "it is six of one, half a dozen of another".
The washing machine packed it in, which I guess is a big blessing, since we are so low on water. Now we all just stink a bit more than usual.
We have been collecting a lot of scraps from Twin Falls fruit stand. Peak tourist season and mango madness has meant that they were creating a huge fruit fly scenario, which they just couldn't cope with, so our worms, chickens and goats are living well... And the sweet stench of rotting mango's is mingling with our own odours in what might be described as odiforous comingling.
Today I scored a crate full of pineapple tops, which is just what I've been looking for... Pineapple tops all over those swales should be good. Pineapple fruit all over those swales in a couple of years will be even better I suppose.
Spent a lot of today interviewing a potential worker called Eric, and then the remainder repairing the steps to the lillikoi cabin, which really should be replaced all together. Tim spent a certain amount of time repairing the sink, which had it been put in properly originally wouldn't have needed it now, and so on...
We did get a swale weeded this week, and we finished digging holes for planting textilis to hide the neighbours "barn".
Here comes suburbia...

Those photo's are a bit random aren't they? The nursery is looking dry, we having a bit of a water crisis right now... Dams drying up, pumps breaking down, tanks almost empty...
You almost can't see the london buses but they are in one of the shots.
You can see the goat swale you were asking about in one of them, right?
There is one shot of the hedge that we were starting on back in December 04. You asked if I was making a slip and slide? There is a patch in there where we ran out of peanut, and never got back to. It is gratifying to see that although it is all grass down in there, that the shade from the legumes etc has stopped the grass from reattaining its 6 ft height of yore.

Watered bamboo's, did some more weedwhacking of terraces in the gulch, made a bamboo cantilever fishing net for the bottom pond, slaughtered a yum yum. It didn't actually go quite so well as the first time. There was a bit of a struggle, in which in trying to make things as as peaceful for the goat as possible I managed to slice off the tip of my left thumb. How is that for instant karma, eh? Well, I can use a little break, some time to finish off Paul Theroux's "Hotel Honolulu"...

With the help of 2 wwoofers, Tim and Sharesa, we planted about 150 pidgeon pea seedlings in amongst the E. Degluptas on the Loomis lane side of the gulch.
Tim and I had put in a couple dozen more peanut in Takako's food forest before we got started on that too. We had to reprime the siphon out of the top pond as the level is getting so low that air leaks are making things tough. Oh, for that sunpump...
Still, we had enough water to water in the pidgeon peas, and still some mulch left from Coursen to do the pidgeon peas. Nice mulch too, a mixture of monkeypod, cassia fistula, madagascar olive and cook pine. POssible that some madagascar olive will came up from the mulch, but we can just use it as chop and drop.
Had to separate the yum yum goat who was getting harassed by sheba and moon and breaking loose. Had him tied out for a lot of the afternoon. At one point thought he was getting attacked by a pack of dogs and went tearing across the gulch only to find him snoozing on a bed of nahiku grass.
Did I record here that we planted 2 more black sapotes, 3 peanut butter fruit, and surinam cherry? Well, we did.
After the wwoofers knocked off, I got the weedwacker going and continued to clear terraces around the pond. Fed the fish some leftovers from lunch. That is really a good way to "dissolve tension", feeding the fish.
Raked a lot of the mulch from the terraces up to throw into the chicken run.

I had a pretty classic headless chicken day today. Started out I spent an hour and a half pulling weeds out of the bottom swale. It has really started to get weedy. Will have to get onto it so that the peanut doesn't disappear under the grass in one season...
Then I set about mulching the brandisii in the gulch. Used 50 gallon garbage bins to haul woodchips from the truck in the goat pen down to where they were needed. In the process I spotted a bunch of new running bamboo shoots, and whacked them off with sickle I had with me. Did I mention that I had started to purge the phyllostachys? It is really interesting to see it respond. Basically about 10 days I cut off everything that I could see. I probably missed about 10% of it. The shoots that have come up since are pretty good size! I imagine that it will keep trying to shoot and gradually the shoots will get weaker and smaller until finally either it dies or I do...
I planted one more Brandisii down there in a hole that I had previously made for a cacao and never got to. Had the hose siphoning water out of the top pond so I watered all of the brandisii's again as I gave them a good mulching. Still have one more to put in down there. It is going to be fun gradually reducing the christmas berry/java plum/guava canopy as this stuff starts to rise up.
Then I went up to the nursery and potted on the rest of the textilis and 20 odd pheasant wood (cassia siamensis). Spent quite a bit of time pulling weeds out of pots. If we don't get 10 ml tonight I am going to have use the tank water to get the pots wet, as the whole nursery has gotten dry. I hand watered from a bucket out of the goat roof catchment 50 gallon barrell the things I potted, plus the grafted trees we bought from frankies...
went back to get my sickle and shovel from the gulch, and ended up pulling weeds for another hour in takako's food forest. pruned some pidgeon peas and mulched the abiu and the canistel and a cacao.
dug some holes around the windward perimeter to put degluptas. tried to dig holes under the hao, but golly it has roots going everywhere down there. I think you'd need a stump grinder to dig a hole in there.
decided not to plant as I didn't have the hoses to reach out to edge handy and would spend too long fucking around to get them. so, I scooped a little salvinia out of the top pond and mulched the brandisii's up there. gave them some more pond water, and used a knife to pull the grass off the gliricidia and that areca palm or whatever it is. so good to finally have started clearing that terrace...

Recieved 20 Brandisii from the Twin Falls Bamboo Propagation Action Committee, and even had some help from one of its directors planting them on Friday evening. 11 I think it was Brandisii went on the terraces at the entrance to Lillikoi lane, we stopped at the stairway down from the pond. So, when those guys get up, it will be quite the imposing driveway entrance on that side if you get what I mean, what with the the Guadue as on one side and the brandisii on the other.
The rest went down into the gulch, in and around the timber tree plantings on the ocean side of the ginger terrace.
I also started work on the holes for the textilis hedge that is going in soon.

Doesn't show much but this is the delupta planting with gliricidia and pidgeon pea interplants.

Looking across the gulch to the north east at "Takako's food forest". You can't see the abundance of weeds that need to be dealt with, but you can see the peanut beginning to fill out and the bananas, gliricidias and sesbanias doing their thing on the upper part of the slope

This is the Inge next to the Dollhouse, with a mango in the background. This tree probably doubled in size in the last 18 months, and has lots of fruit on it at the moment.

If you look closely you can see a blue fish. It is one of the tilapia we scooped out of the ditch in Kahului. They are getting bigger, and they have spawned probably a hundred or so little fingerlings.

YOu can see that the nahiku is running rampant over the sign at the entrance of the property. Oh well. The red flowers about to bloom are that Indian Coral tree, a thorny erithrina.

Spread more woodchips this weekend, just below the top swale below the barn... this will I hope give the peanut on that swale a free ride... I also weeded the actual swale, and planted more peanut, and some pennyroyal. Go the creeping groundcovers.
Sunday I put in about 30 E. deglupta's plus pidgeon pea seed and Sesbania sesban seedlings, in the area between the Guadua hedge and the cabin/old schoolhouse.
One big bottle of pidgeon peas got molested by weevils, so I broadcast that into long grass in a few places. Be interesting to see if anything comes of that.
Ruby was hanging out with me while I was planting, and together we had to run Shiloh off. I swear I should get a gun and shoot that dog.

Nearly a month of no blogging.
Well, it has been a wet month for the most part. I have scrambled about a little bit trying to plant out some of trees and so on that really needed to go in the ground, even without having areas really adequately prepared...
I don't know if I mentioned in an earlier blog, but somewhere along the line I made the decision to start putting the cacao down in the bottom of the gulch under Java plum and Xmas berry. It is quite a hike getting in there, carting plants and soil amendments, but the trees that have gone in so far seem to like it down there. I also put in two Dendrocalamus, an asper and a brandisii, on opposite sides of the gulch but quite close to the bottom...
The other day I put some Malabar Chestnuts out along the swales, being careful to try to prserve the ocean view for the barn. Of course ultimately those things will get very big, so after Brad and Takako are gone someone will have to decide if looking at the ocean from that Lanai is important to them as the side branches pf that canopy start to intrude!
Of course I bought a truck, and have been bringing home loads of this and that. Yesterday was a nice load of Ficus benjamina. Actually finished early enough to have time to spread it on some cardboard in the between the swales. Of course, however much mulch I can get, it is never enough, and see that there is still a long, long way to go!
In the morning and the evening before I ran loads of cinders out to the Twin Falls propagation nursery. We struck on a deal where I will take them materials every so often in exchange for plants. So far, I have 8 plants coming to me from the exchange... Probably will get 8 more textilis and plant them in a hedge to hide from the new barn next door!

It has been some time since I added an entry...

You know, I think I never mentioned that we planted out the remaining Guadua's from the silly bamboo/palm thatch prop house leanto against the container. A bicolour and a couple more full thornies went out into the extreme windward zone, mixed up with albizzia's and qld maples, and all that gliricidia. They looked a little shaky at first but with all the rain we've had they came back well. The prop house is covered in tahitian lillikoi vine and it has some fruit forming right now. Nothing much in the house itself except for a few deglupta's.

Lately, most of my work here has been about the deglupta's potting them into the 1 gallon bags. We have nearly 500 at that stage, with maybe a hundred or so more still at the tiny seedling in 4 inch pots stage. We probably could have made more, but went for the quality over quantity approach in the end, prefering not to mess with each and every root system too much.

Last few days I have begun to place cacao plants in the very bottom of the gulch. The ones that I put in the very light shade of Takako's food forest seemed to be struggling with the sun, (or what we've had of it) so I decided to put them down in the bottom of the gulch, since there is already a canopy down there, and it is free of the grasses that I would have to fight in most other locations... I also put a Pterocarpus right down the bottom there, so we'll see how well he does there. I think he is the last of any substance from that propagation of seeds that came from the Honolulu Zoo. There are a couple more in the nursery but they aren'y really doing anything. Also, got a good hole ready for one of the Dendrocalamus Brandisii's, that are in the nursery ready to go out. In a great moment of serendipity I waded through a bunch of ferns to a spot that looked good, but wondered how I would get the necessary soil amendments all the way back there without killing myself - and as I was clearing back the vegetation to dig the hole I discovered an old dope growers stash of pots and nice mix which I guess will work. I came up here for some lunch, and after this I will head back out and plant the bamboo.

The choppers have been around a lot, seem very curious about the trees I have been planting. Yesterday a guy on a rope was hovering above some of them and I started off in his direction to see if he wanted a bit of an ethnobotanical tour, but he flew away.

Still finding stuff in the long grass... Today it was a couple of small rolls of barbed wire and half a dozen half rusted t posts. They were underneath the mango that is underneath the java plum growing next to the nursery... I was cutting back some grass to make pooka's to plant some of the many tahitian lillikoi's we have in one gallon pots that I need to move in order to make space for all the eucalyptus degluptas...
Things have been pretty wild lately. Propane shortages, lack of sun and solar power... Sheba the shegoats has gotten all sick, so we have had to employ a range of vets and medecines...
Half of the chooks were killed by dogs one morning last week. Pretty sure it was Ray and Loki's dogs, of course, Ray didn't think so, but Loki was quite conciliatory. She gave Lorinda a bunch of food, and a really cheap deal (?) on some meat goats that she needed to offload!
I don't think I have blogged since I moved another albociliata to the driveway, or did I? Did I write about planting the hedge of multplex alphonse karr and the malay dwarf? Well, that went in just south of the barn as I have probably discussed here before.

Summer is coming back to us with lots of lightning and thunder... and a strange phenomenological event that occured just yesterday, was that I saw a pair of Chukars wandering between the barn and the clothesline yesterday. I've seen them over in Makena side before, and actually on the Hana Highway between Haumana and Holokai, but never on this property...
I have been doing the lovely headless chicken thing around the property this week, gradually getting a little bit of a lot of different stuff done.
Today I potted on 18 Sesbania grandifloras into one gallon pots, and maybe 12 Eucalyptus deglupta into one gallon bags, I planted 50 cocoyams on the middle swale, I planted about 30 leftover perennial peanuts in Takako's food forest, and some what do you call them, Brasilian spinach or Alternanthera sissoo, in there as well. I tried again to get the tractor shed barrel collection to all hold water in unison once again, and I squirted penetrating oil into the pitman arms on the 8N. I dug a hole and buried sister meaty (her head was ripped off by Loki's chihuahua) and did some more of my sawdust really thick sheet mulch vs nahiku grass experiment. I planted a pterocarpus indicus at the top of the driveway...

So, we have been buggering around with non-P/c type stuff. Showing people around etc. Yesterday we went on a mission to Lahaina to look at a cheap piece of crap F150. The 4wd worked, but no windshield wipers or signals, and no harnesses or anything to wire them up. So we passed. Couldn't really find a good spot ot park to pick the small mangos at the catholic school, which is the only tree that has really ripe fruit yet. But it will be a good summer over that side for mangos I think.

Before the rains tapered off I put in a bunch of trees that hopefully will grow well and prevent views of our gulch from maltes barn, or more to the point, will hide their barn from us as we move around the gulch... PLanted about 10 moluccan albizzias, 1 marang, 1 pterocarpus, 2 casuarina, 3 qld maple, a litchi, a coconut and a malabar chestnut. THey are all pretty close together, so that hopefully will encourage them to grow up quickly, and reach full canopy quickly... then once they have had a headstart we can seque in bamboo's and rainbow euc's.
Simulatneously put in a bunch more peanut in takako's food forest, also some cacao and hawaiian chili plants.
and, a hedge of multiplex alphonse karr in "roo's paddock" which is the space between the barn and the containers, yeah?

Yesterday Lorinda and I took down the tank that was catching water at the Lillikoi cabin. Lichen helped me take apart the gulch solar show. Or was that the day before yesterday? No, it was yesterday... Last night, before and after school I picked up parts to put them back together again.
Sort of amazed myself at getting the soldering for the shower manifold right the first time, although I had to go borrow Malte's torch, because the one that I bought last summer inexplicably crapped itself. Also managed to get the steering wheel off the tractor. Realised late in the day, what a fairly overwhelming task it will be to rebuild the steering box. Oh well, I don't have much to lose at this point.
I cleaned the tank, inside and out, but just as I was getting ready to take it up the hill the truck ran out of gas. Ha!
My plan to divert the greywater is still on hold, as I realised that the reduction down to 3/4" pipe is almost certainly going to get clogged and back up into the sinks and so on... So, I don't I guess having an opening that we can use to flush it out will be necessary. I settled on this position after bailing out about 50 gallons of really festy water. Fertilised the monastery bamboo's, the amplexifolias and the jakfruit...

Yesterday was a good day on the farm, not least because the sun came out for a while. Also the baby goats started to frolic, which is really a pretty amzingly beautifil thing to see.
First off I milked Sheba. She was a complete bitch about it. She kicked so much I had to tie up both her legs. She tried to sit down on the job so much I had her tie her collar to the top of the milk stand. In the end she only gave me one cup. Still, it tasted damn fine in the coffee, and I expect she will get a bit more relazex about it as we progess...
Spent a few hours in the nursery next, potting up more of the deglupta's and cocoyams, and propagating a a tray of sesbans, and then I got busy building a rain catching roof for the 20 000 gallon tank on the hill. Even with all this rain it has been getting grained faster than I can pump water up there, (electricity being scarce in periods of rainy weather) so the obvious solution is to use some of the recycled roofing and timber that we have scavenged to catch some water. There is actually a pretty big clearing next to the tank, so that a 15 x 15 foot roof fits in there where noone but green harvest helicopters will ever see it. I got the frame put up yesterday, and when I get some roofing screws today or tomorrow it won't take long I expect to put on the tin.
I thought a lot about building it with secondary functions in mind. It did seem like a bit of a waste to use all that material and not get a dwelling or an animal shelter out of it or anything. I suppose it is possible that is could be a shelter for goats, or even pigs at some stage, or a wwoofer could hang a hammock under the roof and sleep up there... It could also be a shed for batteries/inverter if we put a wind turbine up there one day.
Well I guess I better get ready to go milk that she-goat.

Yesterday was a good day on the farm, not least because the sun came out for a while. Also the baby goats started to frolic, which is really a pretty amzingly beautifil thing to see.
First off I milked Sheba. She was a complete bitch about it. She kicked so much I had to tie up both her legs. She tried to sit down on the job so much I had her tie her collar to the top of the milk stand. In the end she only gave me one cup. Still, it tasted damn fine in the coffee, and I expect she will get a bit more relazex about it as we progess...
Spent a few hours in the nursery next, potting up more of the deglupta's and cocoyams, and propagating a a tray of sesbans, and then I got busy building a rain catching roof for the 20 000 gallon tank on the hill. Even with all this rain it has been getting grained faster than I can pump water up there, (electricity being scarce in periods of rainy weather) so the obvious solution is to use some of the recycled roofing and timber that we have scavenged to catch some water. There is actually a pretty big clearing next to the tank, so that a 15 x 15 foot roof fits in there where noone but green harvest helicopters will ever see it. I got the frame put up yesterday, and when I get some roofing screws today or tomorrow it won't take long I expect to put on the tin.
I thought a lot about building it with secondary functions in mind. It did seem like a bit of a waste to use all that material and not get a dwelling or an animal shelter out of it or anything. I suppose it is possible that is could be a shelter for goats, or even pigs at some stage, or a wwoofer could hang a hammock under the roof and sleep up there... It could also be a shed for batteries/inverter if we put a wind turbine up there one day.
Well I guess I better get ready to go milk that she-goat.

Yesterday we went and looked at a too good to be true f350 dump truck 4wd for just $7500. It was all the way over in Lahaina and the guy was adamant over the phone that it had no big issues. As soon as it got to over 45 mph the front end start shaking violently. The guy was a big fat property developing bufo/snake man. I pretended to be pretty clueless (it isn't that hard for me to pull that off because it ain't that far from the truth) and it was just pitiful to see how dishonest he was prepared to be in order to get me to buy the truck. "Oh yeah, you probably just need to get the wheels balanced and that will all go away...". What an arsehole...

So anyway, I was pretty excited for a while there yesterday, at the prospect of having a 4wd dump truck, and a 4wd tractor with which to really rock this thing out... Oh well.

On a brighter more down to earth note, I collected a bunch of Pheasant Wood seeds the other day. This is a legume tree with very good quality wood. Had Bach clean and sort the seeds yesterday morning while I took a load of sugar canes up to the fruit stand.

The baby goats have all survived and are doing pretty well.

Not much blogging ltely because we've had incessantly cloudy weather just lately, so computer use has been a bit minimal, but today's events were kind of momentous... Sheba had her kids this afternoon at about 3pm! 3 cute little ones. Two bucks and a doe. Because Keoni and Jerise are moving to Kauai Lorinda wants to call the doe Kauai, and because there is a Kona storm brewing Lorinda wants to call the two bucks Kona and Storm. I would just as soon call the bucks Paradise and Mart, and we will probably give the doe to Loki for the breeders fee anyway, and she doesn't even name her goats so who cares. Lorinda went and got Loki because we didn't know what the hell we should do for them... I went in there and sort of tried to help them find their mothers teats, but not sure I needed to really. Loki gave them the seal of approval and cooed and clucked over them with us too.
Another big deal that occured today was that Ruby caught her first rat and was very proud about it. The vet actually said that if Ruby chases rats there is a good chance that Uzi might unleash some of his Jack Russell nature and start chasing them too. So there is hope.
Did I mention that Mingo had to go to the vet the other day? he had an absess from fighting Malte and Jen's cats. Hope he got a few good ones in.

Lots and lots of rain just lately. The swales burst their banks in a couple of places on Malte's side, I guess probably because we planted them up later. Still, they had to go somewhere. I tried to get him to think about extending the overflows to his gutter, but he still wants to make a channel in the middle of the gully... Oh well...
I spent all of yesterday pretty much sorting pidgeon peas and stashing them in jars, waiting for the ground to dry out enough that I can drive the load of mulch I made last week around to the pidgeon pea/peanut patch I need to mulch next...

The Eucalyptus deglupta count is getting up to the 5 or 6 hundred mark, and there are so many more to be potted up...
I picked up a bunch of plants from Ramana's the other day to complete our trade for the Burmanica's. He was very generous and gave us heaps of nice stuff. Maybe 30 or 40 Jaboticaba seedlings to pot on that he was too busy to do anything with. Two african oil palms, two areca palms, a Bambusa malingensis, 2 Bambusa textilis, a Gigantichloa luteostriata, and a Gigantichloa sumatra... So, still no latiflorus, but he did promise that he would give us a couple of cuttings when his plants are ready in a month or two...
Today I gathered mulch material from the gulch again and put it through Greg's chipper. Got a good truck load and now I am beat...

I don't think that I noted that the other day, whilst moving things out of the nursery into wind and sun hardening positions I noticed that the membranaceous was about to throw a big new shoot, so I decided to plant it out underneath the top swale next to the Java plum, so pretty much in the middle of the "gulch" up here on the ridge... It has been raining pretty well ever since so it is getting a good homecoming...
Um, today I worked all fucking day at trying to make enough mulch to cover a few square metres... I don't mind, really a few square metres in a day is pretty good progess... Still, it got me thinking a lot about having the equipment to go around trimming trees for people and getting paid to collect mulch to bring back here...
I remember looking at Geoff Lawton on one of his visits home to Tagari Farm when we were sitting dow to lunch and he had been working his arse off... I think he had taken his third huge big plate of food, and I looked at him and said, "Oh, you're hungry eh Geoff?" His reply has stuck with me, "You've gotta eat, mate!". Another time, I was sort of bemused by his behaviour and he gave me a similarly impassioned rejoiner... I said to him something like, "You're a crazy fucking hard worker aren't you Geoff?" and his preply was all about "I'm interested in square metres per day Rich! That's all I'm thinking about! I'm not thinking about how tough I am or whatever, I'm thinking about how many square metres per day I can get under ground covers and productive sustainable systems... !".
Today I was reminded of those words because after feeding the animals in the morning, I spent a greater part of the day pushing wheelbarrows, hacking down arundodinax cane grass with a machete, and harvesting heliconias and that flowering thing that sort of looks like tobacco, from down in the gulch, chipping them up and then spreading them on top of newspaper around the pidgeon peas and perennial peanuts that we put in a couple of weeks ago. The peanut was looking pretty shithouse, but maybe it will come back now that it has some mulch...
I also ended up talking to tenants for more of the day than I had wanted, but that is the way, right?

Well, a lightning visit from Uncle Brad sort of changed our rhythm for a little while, in a good way, of course. It is always nice to be taken out to eat at the Hana Hou by your benefactor, after all.
We also had a chance to review the status of various aspects of the project, face to face, which is of course a bit more susbstantial than email or phone communications...
The on ground stuff that has been happening lately includes another replacement starter for the aerostar, and the continuing intransience of the 8N's steering wheel, which is the first thing that has to be removed in order for us to replace the bearings in the steering box...
We also planted the two Guadua amplexifolia (amplex meaning to wind around, or clasp), which will sort of connects the line all the way from the Oldhammi hedge behind the barn now, and the Monastery bamboo's, the brandisii and the Guadua "less thorny's" behind the dunny...
We also started potting on the eucalyptus deglupta seedlings. We have about 250+ in 4 inch pots so far. Probably we will have about 1000 or so this round. I did some sums last night, and figured that if we do do 1000, and pot them into 1 gallon plastic bags with the basic 50/50% cinder/compost mixture, with 1 cubic foot = 7.48 gallons, and there being 27 cubic feet in a cubic yard, well, we'll need about 5 yards of potting mix to do it. That would cost us about $200. So, 20cents a tree, not counting the cost of the four inch pots used so far, nor the labour, but still a pretty good price, when you consider that this nursery http://www.forestnursery.com/ doesn't even grow their deglupta's to that size, but would charge $5 a tree for a smiliar quantity of other species... Now, if we plant each tree into a hole twice the size of a 1 gallon pot, with that hole being mixed 50/50 with topsoil and a cinder/compost mix, well, I guess, that would cost another $200 near enough, and would push the price per tree up to 40cents each, of course, without any labor or costs associated with mulching, weed suppression and pruning. Still, while it isn't advisable to count your board feet before they are milled, that still seems like a winner, eh?
I guess we need to research a little bit about foresting delgupta's... What spacings, are they allelopathic to other forest trees, what trees and bamboo will grow well with them? What pruning regime if any is necessary?

We spread sawdust and newspaper in garden pathways, and picked up a couple more bags from Vanover cabinets. Still waiting for the motherload of fine dust to come out of his hopper...
More beets were planted in the old zinnia gallery and a new dome bed was planted up.

What a couple of days... That bloody van. Jeez. It has eaten another starter...
Wasted most of the day trying to figure that out and got a lot of grease all over me...
After lunch I just decided to give up on it and go mulch the pterocarps and albizzia's that I put in last week, using the mulch that I shredded yesterday, which was an accumulation of several months worth of goat fodder... While doing that, I drained Geoff's roof tanks onto the guadua hedge and decided to plant another one in one of the big holes we dug last month. I had put some cinders in last week when I borrowed Geoff's truck, and today there was some sand/compost blend left in the truck from the other day at malte's and when that came out with a mix of gliricida/pidgeon pea chips I realised that I had a good amount of material for the super hole for a bamboo. I added a bucket of goat poo's to the mixture too. I think it will do pretty well...

Okay, so putting the several months worth of prunings through the borrowed chipper, used perhaps a gallon of gas, and took about an hour and a half at least. So, it was quite a lot of labour all together, when you count all the trips to feed the goats. In the end we mulched about 5 trees with it. Bit of an anto climax. Sure would like to have one of those bigarse chippers that can grind 6 inch trunks up...

I also lately weedwacked the field above the barn, and today I raked it off... now that our thinking is more to make it a raised beds sort of market garden, instead of a cacao based food forest, I am thinking to move all the williams bananas out to the edges so that they serve as windbreak and don't well, get in the way...

What a couple of days... That bloody van. Jeez. It has eaten another starter...
Wasted most of the day trying to figure that out and got a lot of grease all over me...
After lunch I just decided to give up on it and go mulch the pterocarps and albizzia's that I put in last week, using the mulch that I shredded yesterday, which was an accumulation of several months worth of goat fodder... While doing that, I drained Geoff's roof tanks onto the guadua hedge and decided to plant another one in one of the big holes we dug last month. I had put some cinders in last week when I borrowed Geoff's truck, and today there was some sand/compost blend left in the truck from the other day at malte's and when that came out with a mix of gliricida/pidgeon pea chips I realised that I had a good amount of material for the super hole for a bamboo. I added a bucket of goat poo's to the mixture too. I think it will do pretty well...

Okay, so putting the several months worth of prunings through the borrowed chipper, used perhaps a gallon of gas, and took about an hour and a half at least. So, it was quite a lot of labour all together, when you count all the trips to feed the goats. In the end we mulched about 5 trees with it. Bit of an anto climax. Sure would like to have one of those bigarse chippers that can grind 6 inch trunks up...

I also lately weedwacked the field above the barn, and today I raked it off... now that our thinking is more to make it a raised beds sort of market garden, instead of a cacao based food forest, I am thinking to move all the williams bananas out to the edges so that they serve as windbreak and don't well, get in the way...

Today I felt mostly overwhelmed and underpowered. In the nursery I discovered that the rats have been into not only the peanut sprouts but also the calliandras and the sesbania grandifloras... It is my own fault for not being more careful about providing habitat for them, I suppose, to an extent, but it is still pretty frustrating.
Of course, I was back to weedwacking to keep "Roo's Paddock" down, and so I spent several hours doing that, feeling worried about whether or not I will be able to repair the tractors steering and pissed off at the bastards who stole the first weedwacker. Ie, if we had had the good weedwacker all winter we would have kept on top of the grass much easier and the edges wouldn't be so overgrown with nahiku. Maybe...
Anyway, this morning I stuck little pieces of bamboo into the ground all around the lower chicken paddockl in an effort to stop them getting out through the smaller holes. Also pruned off the pidgeon peas in that part of the garden, gave the pods to the birds over the fence and through the remainder of the stems around the papayas there.
Planted another 27 pidgeon peas after Roo's tractor.
Fed the goats sesbania sesban cuttings and picked up a bunch of pidgeon pea stems to be mulched.
Thinned out some corn, transplanting some of the thinnings to a new bed.
Fixed a leaking water line...

We finally got around to finishing the goat house roof... We actually did a very ramshackle job, sticking bits of 2 x 4 in here and there where the bamboo looked like it was going to die soon, and so we could nail up a piece of wood that would hold a gutter. We added some pieces of the fibreglass roofing, which is pretty dodgy... But hopefully the guttering will run most of the water away from the goats feet, and reduce the muddiness in there... So, I didn't get the upper container covered, as there simply wasn't enough of that kind of roofing left to do it properly. Walking around up there though, it is getting pretty thin and I guess it will be leaking sooner than later, so I will be keeping my eyes open for something for that...
After lunch we removed most of the remaining fibreglass to a spot in between the swales to suppress the nahiku and be a floor for a new nursery area. It will get a little afternoon shade from a Java Plum, and it has hose access from the new line that went in yesterday. We moved down a bunch of trays full of 4 inch pots using the red truck.
We also dropped in pidgeon pea seedlings and peanut cuttings in an area we are going to sheet mulch this morning, that should give some windbreak for the proposed dwarf citrus orchard... And then the sun went down and bad light stopped play.

Today I woke up pretty late as I didn't get to bed before midnight. Struggled up to the nursery to get everyone wet, and was then pleasantly suprised to see that the corn that Bach planted last friday had come up. No carrots yet though...
Then I tried to get on with the water system, and besides a few interuptions managed to get it happening by about 2pm. One of the interruptions was one of those classic Permaculture things, where you set out to do one thing and you get led away on various interelated tasks... I had to prune back a lot of pidgeon peas just to be able to roll the pipe out, and there was some nahiku grass popping up that I really had to pull before I did the chop and drop in that area... so, I guess in effect I spent about an hour weeding and mulching the two Bambusa oldhammii's in that part of the windbreak... after the water system was in place I gave those two plants a good drink too. They are just starting to leaf out, am expecting some good action from them in the next few months...
After lunch I brought in two loads of mulch... I could probably rake up about another load or two from what I cut the other day before the steering on the tractor went out, but it will be tough raking as it was the first very rough cut... oh my god. I can feel a lower back spasm coming on. Oh for a 50 hp tractor with an 8foot landscaping rake. sigh....
I also mulched a couple of the Inge's over on the other side of the gulch. They and the Jacarandas I planted in there, well, back in November I suppose, they are doing well...

I thought today, about making metal plant tags and inscribing some sort of code on them which would identify when they went in the ground. It would be nice to compile some kind of research database like that as we have discussed before. Of course, it is yet another task, and it is hard enough getting them in the ground, and fed and watered and mulched, without adding the whole extra dimension of being a database to boot... Still, we should give it a go...

The fork and the rake fell off the back of the truck on the second load out of the gulch, so on my way back I took the ladder down to the secret mango tree. It will be such a cool little hideaway I tell you...

I drained the 50 gallon tank on Geoff's roof to the three Guaduas I transplanted the other day after that, in the meantime I rode the purple cruiser back and forth to the black sapote's where I dropped in some pidgeon peas in rings around them so that we have a nice mulch crop for those lovely diospyros trees...

So, tomorrow there are so many things that I would love to try to achieve, but who knows what we will actually get done. I am afraid to make a list because it would be ridiculous.

Okay, so on Tuesday I went to work for Joan, and she sent me to Kahului to run various errands... which was cool as I got to do some stuff for this place a the same time... stopped in at the irrigation supply and got the fittings needed to run lines out into the new ocean side of the barn food forest development.
Oh, before I went to Joan's I got up really early and watered the nursery and as much of the swales as I could get without dragging hoses... maybe this was impetus for me to get the hose points set up properly as it has been dry and I have been barely keeping up...
I tried to order the bearings and the manual for the tractor but it came to more than we had in the cheque account so I had to put it off until we could deposit some more in there, which I was also able to do whilst running Joan's errands, one of which was to go to the property maps section of the county building and search the numbers for the whole haiku area, as she is working on a committee that is working on affordable housing... of course, I had a look at the maps for this property and was interested to see that EMI owns .2 of an acre within the boundaries of this property? Brad, did you know that? It is the "New Haiku Ditch" so, I wonder if they have an underground line going through this place. WOuld love to know what you know about this...
In the evening I did actually do a little grocery shopping, and I did get a load of paper, although I could have fit more in the van if I had been really committed to the idea... Maybe writing lists out helps to focus me on what I need to achieve for the day...

Here is a novel idea. I could start writing a blog each night with a list of things I would like to do the following day. It would make an interesting comparison with the reality of what I actually achieve after the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are flung in my path...
Today I had high hopes to slash a bunch of trails in the gulch with tractor and weedeater, seed a bunch of perennial peanut in the pots ready to go in the nursery and plant about 50 or 60 pidgeon pea seedlings, both near the black sapotes we put in a week or so ago, and in a windbreaking formation south of the barn...
I had a fair bit of mowing done, and had actually cleared a path down past the pond on the lowest terrace, which is something I have been dying to accomplish, when the steering gave out on the tractor. It would turn to the right, but no more than straight ahead to the left. There I was with the tractor pointing at the the pond. It was all I could do to reverse backwards enough to realign the wheels and then go forward again, using the brakes quite as much as anything to avoid dropping the tractor in the pond or sliding into other parts of the gulch...
So, I got it back to the tractor shed amazingly enough, and spent an hour or two trying to track down manuals that will help me figure out how to rebuild the steering box. Called a place in North Carolina that will send us everything we need and give us over the phone troubleshooting advice if we get stuck, which is amazing, and testimony to the passionate nature of 8N fans...
I fiddled around with the automatic goat waterer I picked up from the garage sale on sunday, but couldn't get it quite right and got fed up.
Then I took off with the weedeater and did some tidying up for the gulch denizens and lamented the sad state of many of the fruit trees down there... It is amazing how fast the grass will grow... more reaffirmation that we should do things right from the beginning and avoid a treadmill of fossil fuel useage.
Late in the afternoon I worked on the trail to the secret mango treehouse and looked at possible bamboo nursery scenarios down there... weed whacked off the weeds that were competing with the perennial peanut plantings around the edge of the pond... collected a whole wheelbarrow full of lillikoi from the "zone 5" that is the below the pond portion of the gulch...

tomorrow I will get up very early and go and water everything if it doesn't rain which is almost a certainty, then I will get on the phone and order the manual and bearings for the tractor, then I will go and work for Joan, and then I will go to school and do a quiz on the history of civilization... then I will do some grocery shopping and then I will fill the back of the van with newspaper for sheet mulching. then I will come home and describe how far off my predictions were.

Prepared lots of four inch pots to plant more peanut, and went on a recon mission up to Kula to look at some tractor implements. This guy wants $800 for a bunch for things, a rear blade, a box scraper, a ripper, a lift type of rear forks arrangement, and a roatry tiller. It is a good deal, except our 8N isn't really geared for the tiller, apparently, and he will only sell it all together. And there is no hay rake, which is what we want the most... If I can scrape the money together though, I'm gonna get it all... who knows, Brad might get a good job and buy us a nice tractor that can use the tiller!

Yesterday we finally penned off the lower section of the chicken forage and set the chooks in there. Bach planted corn, carrots and coriander in the tilled up beds outside their main pen, while I tied up and arranged fences. Later we planted chilli's, basil and beets in the "zinnia gallery" which no longer has any zinnia's in it. Bach harvested about 10 pounds of sweet potato's...

Didn't get a whole lot done yesterday. I had done a hydrometer check of the batteries, expecting them to be nice and even, and in fact they showed some serious stratification. So, with the rainy cloudy weather setting in I decided to run the generator... And it wouldn't start... Seems the condensation had fouled it up... Spent quite a good while trying to start it with no success... Pulled the spark plug, tried to clean it, about 10 times. Eventually on Pat's advice I drained the fuel system and cleaned out all the possible places that the fuel could get clogged or warterlogged and tried to start it about ten more times and finally it ran... So we recharged the batteries up and equalised them, and I spent the rest of the day lying in, wishing that I could get over a sore stomach and achey glands. Pretty sure it isn't the bird flu, just winter in Huelo...

I had intended to take spend this morning taking apart my failed rake and reconstructing the mower and cutting trails in the gulch... But it started raining good at about 8am, so I changed tack and started whacking in a few trees.
Planted a few dozen more pidgeon peas in a couple of blocks that will serve as windbreak for this proposed citrus orchard, also, stuck in some albizzia and pterocarpus indicus that were ready enough, in the area above and below the bottom swale over the north east corner. And the two teak trees that were given to us by the neighbours, I dropped in over by the buses, where they will have some protection and competition or impetus to grow upward from the albizzia that is doing so well over there, the maxima and the sesbanias...
I also did a bit of organising in the nursery, moving out the last of the penaut cuttings to hardening off positions etc. getting ready to seed the peanut seed that we bought from kula hware nursery.
Yesterday was the dump run from hell, and picking up heaps of bags of cherry and mahogany shavings from the cabinet maker...

another day of planting peanut and pidgeon peas, and cover crop seeds, interupted by a report that the inverter in the gulch system had died. went and checked and sure enough there was no reviving it. chris cookman had one luckily, and after a time of waiting for him to deal with other customers, and watching his cat do tricks we got the new inverter on tick and had it wired into the system. probably we'll have to give that system new batteries sooner than later.
sigh.

Bach and I planted all the rest of the peanuts we had ready to go out, plus more of the cover crop seeds. We also put out turmeric pieces, cassava and sugar cane cuttings and pidgeon pea seeds. Also some buckwheat and some random good bug flowers... It was windy and drying, so we really had struggle to keep everything wet down... We have a had a couple of half decent showers since the sun went down, but I do hope that we see some more tonight.
Bach also helped me measure out some dimensions and ocean view sector details, so we can figure out how many dwarf fruit trees we;ll be wanting...
Tomorrow we have some more cover crop seed to do, and we'll set out a bunch of pidgeon pea seedlings, probably...