Other than Farm Blog

Got up a little too early again. Still dark in winter. so I started 2 batches of bread recipe with millet grain and rolled oat. I've been trying to finalize my ongoing millet grain bread recipe. I like the crunch of millet and oat add texture like oat meal. A little more chewy. 5 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (or bread flour) 2 cups warm water 1 tbsp yeast (or sour dough starter) 1 tbsp salt 3/4 cup molasses or 3 tbsp sugar 1/2 cup millet uncooked 1 cup rolled oat add some herbs as you wish. I added fennel. Rosemary is good too. Just like regular bread recipe. Mix ingredients and knead it to good consistancy. Let it rise for 60 min. Punch it down. Shape it for baking and let it rise again. Bake: 350F for 20-25min when wedge cut, or 35-40 min for loaf. I also made a rye bread on the side, but maybe someday I will share that recipe too.

Now it's 3rd day harvesting taro and finished harvesting for the season. Taro is an amazingly beautiful plant. It shakes its heart-shaped leaves in the wind like hula dancers in a charming manner. Gentle yet precise. Its stems rise straight out of the ground to support the leaves to receive the sun's energy. Painters on a calligraphy paper these stems should be painted in a single stroke without hesitation. That's the way to depict its beauty. Dryland taro is different from wet land taro. Taro farmers in paddies squat like sumo wrestlers ready to fight and continue to break the feeder roots around the corm and pull up the main root which most people call "Taro." I personally like dryland Taro as I am a farmer of a highland. Standing water is not my preferred area. I thrust my garden fork right in by the foot of taro root and swing it sideway to snap the feeder roots and use the leverage to bring the root above the surface. Each root is unique in its size a...

Morning at Mauna Kea Tea starts early as if every farmer is born under the same destiny to get up early and work. The days are getting shorter and the growing season is getting closer to the end, yet warm days and never ending loads of work await me. Am I just putting too much on my plate? Walking through the tea fields, I can't help noticing the tasks waiting to be done. so I do a few things as I walk down the hill as if it gives me any contentment of actual work being done. In the end realizing that it is not just a few plants that needs attention, but thousands. Why did I choose the hillside to farm? Why did I have to make it so much more inefficient? For the amount of extra work that goes in, is it really worth it? Only people saying, "You've done so much work. Your farm is looking beautiful," further continue my labor intensive farm landscape. Does it really matter how the farm looks in regard to how it tastes? Maybe it does. Having the image of the farm...

2 sunny days so I tried using solar cooker. You can definitely feel the heat in the reflector funnel when I stuck my hand in. Even in a cool condition it heats up pretty good. I could get the temperature up to 180F, but it didn't get past that. I used a small black pot with glass lid. Replacing the lid with black lid might improve a bit. I just used sweet potatoes sliced about 1/2 in thick. After 3 hours it got soft, but doesn't have that high heat cooking kind of puffed softness. 2nd day I tried using larger pot with more vegetables (sweet potatoes, winter squash, parsnip, beets) but the temperature stayed at around 150F. The lid was shiny silver. Reflecting too much light? Same set up as the day before. Winter squash was soft and good to eat, sweet potatoes got soft, but somewhat fibrous. Beet and parsnip were crunchy. Need more cooking. On the original website, they say it gets up to 350F. How can I improve it? I also noticed that the sun shade was thin and flopp...

I just built a solar cooker. Real easy and simple. It's so much more efficient to directly utilize the energy than to convert it to electricity first. The challenge is our climate. It's hard to get good sunshine in Ahualoa so I made it extra large solar unit. I'll find out if that works. Here is the recipe if you want to try. http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Windshield_shade_solar_funnel_cooker Fairly cheap to build. Only thing I needed to buy was: Large reflective sunshade Velcro Plastic Oven bag (19in x 23 1/2 in) Reynolds - Turkey size I'll use a bucket and a metal shelf from an old oven that I happened to save.

OPEN FARM DAY was nice and sunny. It was nice to talk story and visitors got to see what we are up to. People kept asking us if they can come stop by and see what we are doing and we finally got to set a day aside and just do that. In the end it is up to those who purchase and consume tea to decide whether our tea is good for their purposes. We do our part based on what we believe, but good to hear what people are concerned about and what they want and to incorporate their views into our practices too.

We live in convenient and highly efficient world, but that made it easy to poison ourselves too. Nitrosamines have been known to natural farmers quite sometime. Not only ground leeching and contaminated water source, vegetables that we eat also tend to accumulate nitrate which turns into nitrosamines in our body. That's one of the reason many natural farmers do not use fertilizers both organic and chemical sources. Nitrosamines are known toxins in human body. "Nitrosamines are also easily generated under strong acid conditions, such as in the stomach...." as de la Monte points out. How much nitrate each type of vegetables accumulate under fertilized condition? Spinach is a well known one. Babies are sensitive to this. In Germany, many babies lost lives from eating spinach that contained high level of nitrate. there is a correlation between increased fertilization and higher level of nitrate concentration found in vegetables like spinach. Mr. Kimura of Natural Apple...