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...

Been getting some nice gentle showers, and we got the seed finally so I have been planting up the swales... Put out about a dozen dwarf banana suckers, and actually planted three of the black sapotes yesterday. Lots of peanut, as well as the woolypod vetch and the cowpeas and some pidgeon peas with actual inoculant...
The weather forecast discussion tonight says that if certain trough activities continue we could be in for a big wet after all...

Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2006 8:06 am Post subject:

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Well, we had our fishing trip, and it was a mixed success... We rocked up to the canal at about 5pm this afternoon I guess, and the first fish I saw in those terribly foul waters was a big old spotty catfish. I got a bit excited and waved to my offsider, Bach, and I guess I scared the cat because he slunk away into the shady, murky depths of the canal and I never saw him again, and Bach ever saw him at all.
We had a nice big net, about 15 by 20 feet. We tied some ropes to two corners of the net, and threw it in. Then we threw chunks of the coconut bun we had procured earlier from "Paradise Mart", a filipino grocery store/restaurant nearby. Heaps of little tilapias came in and attacked the coconut bun, and with three throws of the net we got about 20 little tilapias. We used a 40 gallon garbage bin with a battery operated air bubbler to transport them home, and even though we got stuck in the horrendous Pa'ia crawl rush hour traffic, and the journey took more like an hour, most of the fish seemed pretty alive when we released them in the two ponds we wanted to stock...
So, no catfish, which was actually the aim of the adventure, but some fingerling tilapia which are supposed to be quite a hardy eating fish too. Will have to do some research on raising these guys. Hopefully we can get some fish dinners before too long.

Another 9mm rain overnight. I worked for Joan yesterday. She showed me a hive of bees in an old mango she wants removed, and said we could have the bees if we could get them out.

9 mm of rain. Somehow a tap was left open which drained the power. This is crazy! Burning fossil fuels because we are stupid enough to leave hoses on.
Well, I really want to put the Lillikoi cabin tank on a stand at the top of the property, and use the gravity for all our water. We will pump up when we have sun, and never use electricity to pump water when we aren't making electricity.
I have some 15 foot poles I could use. Greens might not like a big green tank in part of their ocean view but I am kind of out of patience with that aspect.

I put out three more guaduas in the extreme windward hedge today. That makes four, which at maturity should make a good spacing. I thought about squeezing one more in there, but in the end I think that four is good. I transplanted the Brandisii that hasn't done much there. I probably tried to get more divisions out of it than were there, 3, and maybe only 2 will take. We'll see.
Thought a lot about pulling up the albociliata's, but held off, as Greg did say he would help and he probably would help me to do a much better job. For the time being they are sheltering the little guadua's. It felt a little bit like a step back putting in these little guadua starts when the albo's are already getting established, but they will eventually be much bigger. Be interesting to see if the guadua's establish there a bit more quickly too. I never did find out from Brad what he did in the way of soil amendments, but I dug big old holes about 5 feet across by one and a half feet deep and filled them with cinders and compost, with dynamic lifter, seaweed meal, preplant plus and azomite, so I am fairly confident that when they get over the shock they will burst out of the ground. I also mulched the hell our of them with a whole truckload of straw between the four. watered them in with the 200 gallons of water caught off Geoff's roof...
Most of the koa's in that area are doing okay, but I noticed sadly that a few of the casuarina's, the "front rowers" have died off. maybe because they are getting the worst of the wind, and they are in tall nahiku...

3mm of rain wednesday morning.
I mostly just took care of the animals, which is a job in itself these days, in doing so I pulled quite a few weeds out of the garden beds and paths to throw to the chickens... Finally I locked Ruby Dingo in the house with Uzi and the other girls so that I could install the scrap of pond liner in "gary's pond". Maybe, if we put some milk crates or something under them, we can grow out some of the water chestnuts in that pond. I still have to properly bury some of the anchor trench, but I mostly got it in. There is some bank exposed with black plastic that I will need to cover with some sort of fabric, and then it will make a great perennial peanut rooting area...
Gusty winds continue as ever. Still waiting for the sesbania grandilora seed to mature...

15 mls in the gauge on tuesday morning. I was wrong about the rain yesterday; it rained pretty well all day...
I didn't get to do a lot of work on the property yesterday, being busy taking care of Lorinda and Lichen who have both been struck by these nasty flu's with fevers. But Bach potted up about 8 trays of peanut, and seeded some Eucalyptus deglupta (rainbow eucalypt) in the nursery.
I cleaned the flue on the gas fridge in the gulch, and hooked up new tanks when the girls were napping. Later I started clearing grasses below the greywater bananas, for a possible water chestnut paddy...

Rainfall I think, went like this: Friday 0, Saturday 6, Sunday 3, Monday 2. We are actually gettting a little reprise right now, but it probably won't add up to much more than 3 or 4 mil's for the day.
We have been getting a lot of cloud and a little rain. And lots of wind.
The batteries were dangerously low on Saturday, so we shut down the inverter for most of the day. Geoff who is running on the electric fridge was very understanding about transferring perishables into his cooler.
Luckily I passed Chris Cookman on the road coming back from dropping Lorinda at the airport and he promised to come around as promised to "dial in" the generator. I had almost decided that further adjustment would be futile, and was getting seriously depressed about the $1600 cost of a new one. But he came around and with a 1/8th turn adjusment of the governor adjustment screw got it to where the inverter will accept the genny's output. So, that is sort of cool. Still wish we had a fancy biodiesel kind. Cookman sells one that is warrantied to run biodiesel for $5000...

So, Lorinda went to Oahu twice this week to take examinations to get into teacher training. That is how dedicated she is to us owning our piece of land... In the process she managed to pick up some terrible sickness, which has meant that I have been the primary carer for her, and Lichen, and our new dog Ruby Dingo. It is all a bit of a handful... Ruby and Uzi are definitely having some issues, but I'm sure it will all blow over. People laugh at me when I say that Ruby is the property's new guard dog, because she is sort of small and sweet looking, but she is ten times Uzura's size and her bark is somewhat more intimidating.
Oh, and Lorinda also brought back water chestnuts, so now I am going to do some quick research and find out the optimum way to get them to grow...

rainfall for friday 06 january was 6mm...

Now that we know where the swales are, Bach and I did some digging yesterday for holes to put in some more bamboo's and big windbreak trees North North East of the the proposed food forest area.
Oh, and first we planted the Gigantachloa arundinaceae "Maxima" down there in the gulch in the hole we dug a couple of months ago. It was a bit if a shenanigans. We got the red truck stuck half way up the hill and had to cart the compost and cinders and mulch and newspaper by hand and wheelbarrow quite a lot of the way. But it is in the ground finally, and looking good...
As well as digging some pretty big holes around the back end of the swales we got a bit of a production line going to plant out a big patch of gliricidia as a secondary primary windbreak... I mean that in that it is behind the roadside hedge of casuarina, bamboo's and koa, but before the next patch of bamboo's... Anyway, Susan wielded the rebuilt husqvarna weedwhacker and cleared enough of a patch of grass that the post hole digger could do its thing, then I moved in with the tractor and bored a hole. Then Bach came at each hole with a cultivator and roughed up the sides of the holes, threw in a gliricidia cutting that had been soaking for a week, and backfilled the hole with a little compost cinder mix thrown in. We put some newspaper and mulch around most of them... If only 50% of them take, we will replace them with sesbanias, calliandras, cassias and pidgeon peas in the coming months. They are on a six foot wide grid, with about 6 rows of 6 -8 cuttings. Full canopy would be a while in coming at that spacing, but it felt pretty good...
We also set up some small rain catching barrels underneath Geoff's gutters, so we will have auxillary water supply for these plants, and the bamboo work we'll be doing here in the coming weeks/months.
Went to the pound to let Uzi and the red cattle dog have a "dog to dog". The red dog wanted to play with Uz, but Uz wasn't too interested and snarled at her a bit. Even so, the people at the pound still said we could have her if the home inspection goes okay. So, we might have a little guard dog here pretty soon.

Wednesday the 4th we had no rain. Thursday morning 8mm, and it is still coming down this morning for a while. Whoo-hooo!

Wednesday Lorinda went to Honolulu to take an exam so I was Dad for the day and Lichen and I had a lot fun cruising around the island, hitting playgrounds and beaches and farmers markets and making contacts for the project.

We found some kangkong (ipomea aquatica) a plant that will go off here, and provide abundant fodder for chickens, ducks, pigs, fish and humans, from a Chinese lady who gardens in Haiku. Also, we met Corey Channel, and he talked my ear off about possibilities for growing gourmet mushrooms in the food forest. He remembered Brad fondly and was still a little skeptical about the idea, although I think mainly because he thinks in terms of big production. When I reminded him that we were thinking in terms of supplementing the diet of a few people that lived here, he thought that it would be worth a little bit of initial trouble to get the cultures going. Personally I think that it could be enormously successful...
Then we met a another Haiku local called Billy ... who brings in dwarf citrus and avocado, and I talked to him a while. Just yesterday, Lorinda and I were shooting sight lines and came to the conclusion that fruit trees in front of the barn can't go much taller than about 10 feet without interferring with ocean view. These grafted dwarf varieties aren't cheap, at $50 each, but I did ask him i we could get a discount if we bought a lot of them, and he said yeah, although wouldn't specify how big of a discount he'd do for how many trees etc.
We also SAW catfish and tilapia in the canals in Kahului and we are amped up to net some and introduce them into the botttom pond...
And we met a red heeler at the pound and applied for her to be our family dog, farm security officer.

Seems like the rains have come and gone again already...
Today, I potted up 30 odd mulberry cuttings for the chicken fedge, mulched the rest of the peanut I planted yesterday, dragged hoses around and got them into position for watering the swales, and then raked, pitched and hauled mulch around. Talked to Brad from London on the phone for a while this morning while checking emails and the weather etc...
Brooke went to town for us and found that the seed still wasn't there, and that it was sent parcel post instead of priority so it won't get here for three or four weeks. I tried to call the seed company to see what they wanted to do and was forwarded to the voicemail of the customer service dept. If they don't get in touch with us and give us satisfaction, I swear I am going to embark on an internet based smear campaign that will put them to rights.

Started planting out top swale on monday thye second of january, with 3.5 inch pots of perennial peanut (arachis sp.), pidgeon pea seedlings, a few hawaiian chili plants, some comfrey and a monstera deliciosa. Some of the peanut pots had volunteers or juhnny come lately sesbania sesban's (I probably reused the potting mix from trays of sesbania propagation efforts that I thought were all finished) so I dropped them in a little further along so as to save the "ocean view". Also put in one inge sort of in the middle of the "gulchlet" on that top swale...
Also picked up the last lot of mulch from the top paddock, and experimented with the hay rake, which unfortunately was a bit of failure. It did okay with the nahiku but didn't stand up to the longer stuff.
I really should get along and water all that lot from yesterday...
Until I get a calndar to jot them down, rainfall on January 2 was 28 mm, January 3 was 2mm.

Spent a lot of yesterday working on building a rake to drag behind the tractor. Finished it just as the last light was fading. Of course, overnight it has rained pretty well for the first time in 3 weeks, which is a relief in that the tanks need it, but it would have been nice if it had stayed dry long enough to experiment with the new tool. Peanut propagation is almost maxing out at about 2000 3.5 inch pots. It will be fun to actually put a massive amount in the ground one of these days. Especially now that the rains are back.