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...