Scratchin' out a Living

Chickens in the garden. Sounds like one of those incredibly clever, green, sustainable ideas doesn't it? After all chickens eat bugs, scratch up weeds, devour noxious seeds and even fertilize the garden. What's not to love? Well i'll tell you a dirty little secret. Chickens are dinosaurs. When you unleash them on your garden they will gleefully peck a single hole in every tomato,  dust bathe enthusiastically in newly seeded beds, pluck tender bean seedlings right out of the ground, and trample baby lettuces. Bah! 

Lucky for me many smart gardeners have already worked out how to safely harness chicken power. Check out this freshly cleared swath, courtesy of the chicken tractor.  

Here's more or less what that row looked like before the hens worked it over. This patch is next but all the trellising needs to be pulled up first to make room for the tractor.

He pounds the t-posts in only just past the flange but they are still tough to pull back out. Ah, but wait. See the red thing? It's a t-post puller! A handy tool to have if you are like me and enjoy rearranging your garden. I bought mine at the local feed supply store but i wish i had seen this nice galvanized one first.

The chickens have finished their work now and are relieved to be back on pasture. Scratching out a living, they complain, just ain't what it's cracked up to be!

Once in a blue moon

Resolutions are so overrated, don't you think? This blog has been dark since January and the garden has been skittering along on auto pilot, offering small harvests and lessons on neglect or maybe resilience.  Pipinola, asparagus, limas, kale, volunteer tomatoes, and giant onions have been the main players over the past few months. But now August is moving on and the garden is in need of some serious resuscitation.

It's tempting to overhaul and replant the entire garden at once but i've learned that slow and steady is far more sustainable so i'm taking some time to rearrange my seed collection by moon phase. I'm deluding myself hoping that honoring the lunar cycle will help me stay on top of all the little tasks that go along with tending an annual based vegetable garden. Linda does a great job blogging about that here. Or you can check out the sidebar for tips on planting by the light of the moon.  Which, by the way, is full tonight for second time this month. You probably know that the second full moon in one month is called a blue moon, a rare event. The next one isn't until July 31, 2015. Now there's a deadline i can work with.

Aloha Twenty Eleven

I make at least one resolution every New Year. Sometimes I nail it, sometimes not. I've got a few on my list this year, one of them being to post more often. I enjoy looking back over the year and seeing what i was up to. Here are a few things i didn't get around to talking about last year.

January
New plantings of kumquat, olive, white sapote, mango, egg fruit, pulasan and rollinia.  

First tangerine! Early winter

February

March
Soissons Vert
Thin walled, full pods

Perona
Fleshy, thick walled pods. Shell beans? Really?

April

Popping chickpeas
They deserve their own post!

May is always my favorite month.

Those awkward teenage years ; )

These papayas are HUGE!

Early July
It grew!
We havested buckets of lilikoi this year.

These banana flowers look like little orchids, don't they?
 This is an 'Ice Cream' banana, one of the tissue cultured plants UH is producing in response to Bunchy Top Virus. 

Olena
(Turmeric). Dead easy to grow and a snap to harvest. Part of the tropical herb garden.

Galangal
(Thai ginger). Another plant from my tropical herb garden.

November
They were ready in time for Thanksgiving ; )

December
Cajun Belles-Sweet mini peppers with just a little kick. Recommended.

Husky Red cherry tomato.
Slow but steady producer which is OK  in these cooler temps.

Happy New Year!

The rains will start soon

Summers are a slow time in my garden. It's the rain, or more precisely, the lack of rain. There are a few plants like tomatoes or maybe cowpeas that will survive and even bear without supplemental water if they are already established but even these thrifty plants appreciate a good long drink every once in a while. 

What i got on Craig's List...milking sheep!

I want more from my summer garden so i've been adding a variety of drip lines and emitters to my collection over the past few weeks. They are slowly starting to appear in the garden and should give me a jump start on the fall season. Not a big one, it's an La Nina year and the rains will start soon, pushing the real pay-off back to next summer. Which is fine because i plan to be busy with other things next summer. 

Say hello to Big, Bossy Belle

As you can see, i was busy with other things this summer, too. I learned about fencing and feeding and fecal testing, yuck! I learned how to get sheep over the Alenuiha'ha Channel and into my back yard.  I learned about dreching and hoof trimming and wool clipping. Yes, clipping because i really can't call what i did shearing and neither should you.  I built a shed and a stanchion and bought a milk bucket. And i learned that sheep are clever and brave and naughty and overly fond of browsing rose bushes. No wonder i didn't have time to water my garden!

And cute but bratty Blossom!

Last week i started the fall garden. The Purple Podded Pole beans are back, planted alongside Emerite and Tarahumara Purple Pole beans. I direct sowed some arugula and a dozen Japanese salad turnips. The turnips should have gone in a few weeks ago in order to roast for the Thanksgiving feast but we'll enjoy them when they are ready. Seeds were started  in tray, as well. Spigarello, fennel, bok choy, and three kinds of cauliflower. I haven't tried to grow cauliflower before so this will be a new experiment. It will be a small trial, just two plants each of Graffiti, Snow Crown, and Charming Snow which is just 60 days to maturity. I also started a few Variegated Collards, some Golden Chard and some kohlrabi. I tried kohlrabi for the first time last spring and really enjoyed it. I hope to have some successive kohlrabi harvests this winter. It looks like the Cripsy Blue gailaan  and the Anuenue lettuce failed but the Syphos butter lettuce is up along with the Soloist chinese cabbage and the Burpee golden beets. I am still waiting for the Oriental Giant and Matador spinaches to sprout. The Gator perpetual spinach i grew this summer was the most spinach-like chard yet so I don't know why i keep banging my head against the spinach wall. I'll be starting a new tray this weekend with Romanesco cauliflower, Blankoma white beets, Touchstone Gold beets, leeks, scallions, and cilantro. I'll be laying down some horse manure this weekend or next and then the transplanting will begin! Hope i have time to post some garden tours this winter, it's really a great record keeping tool. 

three little figs

An old cane house perches on the edge of a windswept Haiku pineapple field.   You might not notice it if you happened to drive by. The old house is timeworn but well maintained and boasts a tidy greenhouse and a great old fig tree. A few times a year the woman who lives there sets up a sign by the road and sells banana bread and fig tree starts and other once useful things she no longer needs. I drove by one day, on the advice of a friend, and left with a fig tree of my own.

Do  you recognize these figs? White Kadota and Brown Turkey are kama'aina fig trees, grown here for well over a century. So my tree could be a White Kadota fig.  Or it might be a Brown Turkey fig.  I don't know a fig about fig trees so i'm just guessing. Lucky for me, there's Ken Love.

Ken Love is a farmer who live on the Big Island. He knows a lot about fig trees. He was involved in the 12 Trees demonstration project and was later awarded a three year grant to study the best fig varieties for Hawaii. I'm going to learn from him.

If you can't make it to Haiku you can still grow a fig tree of your own. Plant It Hawaii distributes 3 gallon figs through Lowes, Home Depot, and Kula Ace and Chung's distributes 6 inch figs through Walmart a few times a year. No yard? No worries! Figs are a good choice for a container, too.

(These figs were picked in early July~i'm a little behind...)