I finally got the process right for making the biochar in a barrel with the woodshavings. This is the second barrel's worth of char. It basically takes 8-10 hours to get over 90% of the wood to char. There is still some wood shavings in tact even after that long, but too much longer and too much of the char starts to turn into ash I think. But I think there is not too much uncharred wood to use as an amendment, especially since it is so fine and has so much surface area that it will probably break down quickly. We will give the citrus a good dose of nitrogen anyway.

This out of focus caterpillar has been having a go at the citrus trees. Lorinda and Lichen have been squashing them. I wanna know what they are. I wonder if google will ever have a function where you can put a photo in the search bar and it will tell you what it is?

Haven't seen it here before, so we might have brought it in on the citrus...

I'll take it to the extension office today and reconfirm my prejudice that those people are worthless.

New dog proof chook run. I think I have broken my back wrestling with the 30 foot section of fencing with the vinyl inserts you can see around the back. The whole outer fence is buried, as is the inner sanctum, and I am going to pile heavy logs and rocks around the base too to further deter the canines.

Oh, I guess I should document here that the bamboo goat fence fell over yesterday. Not entirely, you understand, but it was leaning at 45* angle when I spotted it... We have had some ferocious winds lately and the african tulip posts that have been carpenter bee condo's for this past couple of years finally snapped at the ground level, so basically it was the horizontal bamboo poles wired onto the kiawe posts at the corners that were holding the whole thing up...
The new chook pen is going to be smaller than the goat yard was, so that section of fence was going to be redundant now anyway... I started pulling it down and I guess I will use it to start charcoal fires or something.
Oh, yeah, yesterday I had my most succesful attempt at charring the woodshavings yet. I still stopped the process too early. I guess it was smoking for about 5 hours when I turned it off, and probably 60% of the material was nicely charred. 20% was just sort of blackened, but not actually charred, and the remainder was still whole. A portion at the bottom was probably ash actually. I guess next time I will try to leave it for like, 7 or 8 hours and hopefully I will have something I can use as a soil amendment.

One aspect of life on the farm that I have failed to document, though it has been a daily feature for the last few weeks, is the activity of the trail bike club that has taken up residence in the gulch between hoolawa rd and honokala. Seems like they have two sessions a day, from about 9am to 11am, and then again in the afternoon any time after 2pm. They are really loud. At first I felt like I had entered the Maui version of the Peter Weir film, "the Cars that Ate Paris", or more obviously, "Mad Max", but as with most annoying things I have gradually become accustomed to the noise. I guess at least they aren't breaking into any houses... of course, if I owned that land I might be less than impressed at the erosion issues... I do fantasize idly about getting dressed in camoflauge and hiding in one of the christmas berry thickets with a wrist rocket...
Yesterday I broke into the pile of e.robusta chips that has been curing in the swale above the citrus grove. Quite paranoid that I was picking up nahiku cuttings that had invaded the pile, I carefully sifted through it as I spread it onto the peanut cuttings in the citrus grove... Put the remainder that was choke with nahiku around the two oldhammi's adjacent who were also already choke with nahiku...
Made more peanut cuttings.
Got some calls about the tractor from the bulletin, so I cleaned up around it to make access easier. In the end the guy never showed up. Another fellow who is on Oahu right now sounds pretty serious about looking at it next week though.
Dug trenches to bury fencing for the fort knox chook pen.
Turned the chook/goat compost pile. Was impressed at the transmogrifcation. It was still quite gruesome, of course, but not as bad as my worst fears. Compost is a crazy, wonderful thing.

coral ginger

This afternoon while I was watching Lichen so that Lorinda could attend a meeting with DoE people, we wandered around the bottom of the garden and picked some flowers. You remember the walk you, Jay and I took around Honokala in 2004? That piece of coral ginger we yanked out of the embankment on the side of the road? That plant had a dozen flowers on it, some of which are on the kitchen table right now. I think they are one of my favourites. There is something to be said for hanging out with a little girl and picking flowers.

Flame earns his keep.

"Flame" earns his keep.

Peanut gallery operations have continued lately. Each rooted piece of "peanut grass" is a small step towards liberation from fossil fuels and yoke of the graminaceae. Cuttings have been coming out of the nahiku ridden Guadua planting on the driveway, just below the carpark. Some pretty good cutting material out of there actually. It is interesting that the peanut has coexisted with the nahiku, better than I actually thought it was doing. I hope that we can get it to bounce back from the cuttings and not let it get too swamped by the grass before it does.
Have had to start watering the planted "long cuttings" in the dwarf citrus grove, since the rains have abated for a while, and the wind and sun is drying things up again. Its a relief though, because we were started to get muddy and running low on the solar power.
This afternoon the truck was finally released from the mechanic. $3055. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUCH!
Still, that sense of powerlessness in the face of so much rampant tropical grass sort of relaxed its grip on my psyche a little bit just looking into the bed and imaging it full of mulch that won't grow. Stopped by Greg Jones' place on the way home ostensibly because Lichen wanted to meet the kitties Mama, but Greg wasn't around, so I also couldn't really get too far in scoping out the wild coffee situation which was part of my alterior motive there. His place is looking great.

Sunday I spent the whole day making peanut cuttings, or potting them into 4inch pots.
Monday planted long cuttings in the citrus orchard..., and harvested sugar cane and bananas to sell to Ramana.

Continued working on the impregnable chook shed, and started on the fence line of the pen. Did some mowing in the gulch and pulled some weeds down there while I was at it.
Made another compost pile using the chook shit and mulch that won't be getting the scractch treatment from any chooks in the old chook paddock...

Mowed grass around the barn. Set to work setting up the goatshed as a chicken coop.

Got a call from Joan in the middle of the goat butchering the other day to say that she had a few trees come down and I would I be able to help her out some time.
So I go over there yesterday and she'd actually already had some guys come and clean up the fallen stuff but she wants me to cut down some branches that may fall on some buildings. Sort of think she might have gone the other way, but anyay. She made me drink cups of coffee and we talked about our respective trials.
Then she had pick some avocado's to sell to Cindy at Vegout, and insisted that I keep the money as well take the Avo's home. Gave me some flavoured coffee's that she got for Christmas that she will never drink.
I promised to return when the truck was running to help with her pruning jobs.
Planted a bed of cassava and a bed of taro huli's that Keoni gave us. I guess it is a variety that can grow in wet paddy or dryland. Listening to Bill Mollison in 1983 on mp3 the other day, he was saying that most taro was grown dryland in old Hawaii. Not sure how he knows that, but he was pretty emphatic. I chopped up four banana stems to mulch the taro bed.
Pruned lower branches of a sesbania on the goat paddock side of the garden, gave them to our remaining goat. There are couple of calliandras under it that would probably take over pretty fast if I took it out all together, so I think I will do that gradually. First I might experiment on it by raising the canopy as high as it can go with it, to see how it responds. There is a bunch of stuff doing well under it, gardenias and hibiscsus, pineapples, sweet potato and peanut.

What a miserable day yesterday. It started out pretty good. It actually wasn't raining in the early morning so I went up and turned the compost. Decided to head down to the house for some breakfast afterwards, and thought, oh I'll get the goats some fodder on my way, since there were quite a few branches of gliricidia, cassava and pidgeon pea hanging over the trail.
When I got to the goat pen I realised something was up when they didn't immediately make a run on the fodder. My first fear was that they had succumbed to bloat from too much peanut leaf the night before, but no, they'd been mauled by wild dogs. No wound significant enough to cause death, but two of them Sheba and Kauai had just given up and died anyway. Chocolate the castrated male was in shock, but okay.
It was only when Lorinda came by to get chicken food and I was skinning and gutting Kauai that we realised that the dogs may have got the chooks too. Sure enough, they took out about 20 chooks, leaving us with 3 hens and one rooster.
It is pretty devastating. I don't know how to put a gloss on it. It just really sucks.
I think I am going to build a Fort Know Chicken Coop in the old goat house by the containers, and we will lock them in there every night. It actually won't take that much and I think I can get it dog proof. It will be a straightforward way to collect the manure too. Perhaps in time we can look at building a really solid dogproof mobile chook tractor.
Sigh.

More peanut all day.
In the rainy spells when I ran out of cuttings and didn't want to get wet I organised the hand tools a bit, and recycled the wheels of an old cart onto the plastic wheelbarrow hull. Now I will have to find something to replace the wheelbarrow hull which was covering the valves near the driveway!
Harvested two more cassava's. Moved and spread a bit more lime. Fed the goats clippings from the peanut cuttings. They seemed happy about that.

Proposed pig wallow/pond site. Steps to fruition: 1/move pile of lime to citrus paddock. 2/ harvest cassava. 3/ consume cassava to replace energy depleted in steps 2/,4/ & 5/, 4/ dig out hole, 5/ build pig fence & shelter.

The plantains, mulched with vetiver, peanut prunings and cassia/pidgeon pea, some ornatmental ginger.

Here's the new peanut propagation shed, replete with couch and bench. The red and green wires running behind the bench near the post are for the 12v light, solar panel deal. At least I can be out of the rain and away from the domestic scene to engage in this time consuming meditation. See, John Williamson "All Australian Boys Need a Shed".

This is several the other weeks "long" peanut cuttings, probably a couple of days work there, just covering what, 30 square feet of the citrus orchard... Well, in the long run (like, in 10 years) we'll come out in front with no mowing etc, reduced need for fertilisation etc.

Gigantachloa maxima in the middle ground, compost/cinder in the background, Canis rubius dingus in the foreground...

Planted out three plantain suckers downhill of the chicken paddock between the coconuts this morning.
Ramana called asking for sugar cane, so that took up a few hours in the middle of the day, getting a couple of hundred pounds of sugar cane ready for the stand.
Spent the afternoon weeding in the noni/coffee zone, until a big downpour saturated me a while before sunset.
It has been cloudy and rainy a lot lately...

Just call me Mr Perennial Peanut. Finished potting up the short peanut cuttings from the other week. Planted out the long ones, down there in the future citrus orchard... Managed to get three rows in! Crikey!
Oh, I also harvested some cassava from that spot opposite the chook house, above the swale, next to the smaller pile of lime... I have this idea that I am going to move the lime, harvest all the cassava, then dig a big hole, then get that pig from Loke and get it to wallow around in the hole until it is a pond. It will be a good spot for taking up the excess water from the shed roof catchment, and if I can dissuade Ruby and Bono from frolicing in there a great little water chestnut pond it might make...

Planted the G. maxima that I had air layered from the one Greg gave me last year, along the driveway where the Guadua's are... Its hard to describe exactly where it is... I'll take a picture tomorrow if I remember. Put peanut cuttings all around it. It was drizzly on and off all day, so in spite of the pretty ferocious winds I think it was a good day for it.

Other than that I made new peanut cuttings and planted up old ones... Did some pruning of the gliricidia's that were getting hammered by the winds, and took the top out of one that was looking like it was going to heave over in the wind.

Oh, something I could have discussed on the phone was the idea to convert the truck to run on vegetable oil. It would take a few hundred dollars to get set up, and a certain amount of time and energy to collect and filter the oil. But then we would greatly reduce our monthly fuel costs. We probably put $100 or more a month into that thing, so it would probably be well worth it... I am quite confident that I can make it work, and fairly confident that it can be done in such a way as to not seriously compromise the lifespan of the vehicle. At least, there are people who have done it that have gotten many 10's of 1000's of miles without fuel system related problems.
I don't know that I want to experiment on my own investment though... Is that unreasonable? I know it shows that I don't necessarily have the courage of my convictions. Anyway, say I spend $150 a month on fuel. At that rate, if you buy the truck from me for $6000, over three years you will save that amount, and perhaps have a lot of the property sheet mulched in the process...
Heck, I've been thinking about paying Earl Calasa to deliver us some loads of green waste in his big dump trunk. I haven't checked his price for that, but it is probably a lot more efficient than me hauling loads. (I would still bring back cardboard, compost, cinders, etc)

A dissapointing day in many ways. Took the truck in to get the repairs done and the quote ends up twice as much as I had figured and it won't be ready until the end of the week.
Several of the errands I tried to do by bicycle turned out not to be open, lots of shops closed 1st and 2nd...
Stopped by the "community garden" that kevin tried to start at the college and was told by the custodian that he was going to lobby the admistration to "discontinue the program" since the people involved had never come to pull the weeds and it was a waste of water. I did get a couple of tomatoes... I tried to explain to the guy that it was a kind of garden that aimed to be as productive as possible with as minimal inputs as possible. His responses were, "That is minimal inputs!" and, "That isn't how you garden!".
At the enrollment I did get into the Hawaiian History class that I needed special permissions for. My textbooks were outrageously expensive.
Cycling around was kind of fun, but when I found out I would have to come back days later for the truck, and tried to ride into the trade winds to Paia, I got a sore arse.
Thankfully Geoff was there to give me a cup of coffee and play me some GW Bush parodies off the internet and Lorinda was already in Haiku to come and get me. Geoff is bringing the bike back later in his truck...

More peanut cuttings today. Started sickling back the long grass behind the barn, (between the barn and the oldhammi hedge) because there are long peanut cuttings in there to be had and there is some chance, however slim, that I will have time to get in there and weed the regrowth grass and get a nice peanut bed happening there.
I also mounted my VW 12v light and put the panel on the roof, and even put in a switch. I think it is going to inspire me to find some better lights. Maybe some LED's.
Harvested a bunch of bananas.
Turned the new compost heap while Lorinda watered it...