Other than Farm Blog

Eating locally produced foods became green trend now.  My wife is excited to cook and eat local foods for 1 week that involves me and my son and her mother too.  Personally, I don't mind eating 100% locally as long as food is good. so why should we eat locally produced foods anyway? beside to avoid cooporate industrial food culture, large scale chemical farming and global distribution and long distance trucking being great concern to us. fresh and has better nutrients because the harvest is at the optimal stage. less transportation, less fuel used farmer's market and food stand require less packaging. require less or no chemicals (fungicide etc) and irradiation to preserve for long distance shipping and even required by law sometimes. garden can store food in the landscape.  fresh herbs, perennial vegetables. wild harvest (fish, mountain vegetables, game animals) are typically not available at stores locally produced foods are better adapted for our f...

Eat Local Challenge start this Sunday.  It was a good timing so we decide to harvest 2 rows of taro, perhaps 20lb or so.  There are some big ones and small ones.  They are all good cooked together in pressure cooker with peel on.  Once they are cooked, they peel real easy.  We harvest taro once or twice a month so not so much different from our ordinary routine of harvesting.  Taro doesn't store very well, but they store well in the landscape. Natural farming crops are supposed to store well in ordinary storage condition so maybe i'm not doing something right.  Taro also contains much water, so likely to rot, but cold storage may improve.  Typically my grandmother was storing her taro in cool, but not freezing condition to keep it alive and keep it from sprouting until spring.  If I can get enough refrigerator space, it may store well. Photos show our harvest of taro.  Not too bad for using no fertilizer at all.  Natural farmin...

Thinking about Eat Local week, I came across some things that caught my attention that eating local seems like it's much more than just foods coming from local source. In many ways, we think it's hard to eat local.  Typically it's more expensive to buy local foods, they are not available at stores and it takes more energy to prepare meals from local ingredients.  Of course, it's easier to pop frozen pizza in the oven, or go eat out. OK, so if we live in a rural farming community like Hamakua coast on the Big island, where we are, it's still hard to get everything local because we have to plan ahead.  It's not very flexible.  Yes, once a week to farmer's market trip requires more planning than going to grocery store when we feel like it or when you can find time between work and kids demanding your presence. Yet, my greatest concern is that our imported food culture has forced the environment to adapt us instead of humans adapting the environment.  Like...

I have been reading this book on online book sites below, but got tired of staring at computer monitor, so I finally bought the book. Another title: "Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or: Permanent Agriculture in China; Korea; and Japan" Read online?  go to the end of this page. Book Description: F. H. King lived before petroleum era of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and visited China, Korea and Japan and put his observation of their permaculture system and organic farming practices into this great book. Lots of in-depth look on many different aspects of local lifestyle.  Many photos and illustrations accompany the text to make it easily digestible. There are many examples of low tech tools and techniques that they use in Japan, China and Korea although it might be too costly for us now, I am sure that we can get good insight. The book also discusses not only how they had sustained cultivation and farm-community designs for over thousands of years, but also me...

Holiday gift season. Giving a cow is still a popular program, but I wish there was some programs where you can give vegetable seeds or fruit trees to people who need them. http://www.heifer.org/ I don't necessarily think giving a cow, chickens or a goat is bad idea considering livestock can add foods to diet of those people as long as the environment is right.  When you give a cow or sheep, there must be grass growing naturally.  or when you give chickens, there must be enough feeds naturally obtained from the wild area.  Why not Cow, sheep or goat? Grazing animals require large pasture comparing to available garden space.  Unless there is large pasture area for animals to graze, it is not very desirable.  I have 4 sheep and they do not eat any grain feeds although they like them.  I share some of my crackers or granola sometimes, but they are on their own eating grass most of the time.  when grass is abundant and there is no garden space conflic...

I had a really good year with green peppers this year. I like slight bitterness of Hawaiian thin wall green peppers. Just as I like bitter melon too. Anyway, so I did a rot test . I found that as most green peppers left on the plants turn red and fall on the ground, harvested peppers did the same. They slowly dry and turn red. There are few that melt into slime. The garden space that I grew the peppers were of course used no-fertilizers. No chemical fertilizers, no organic fertilizers, no chicken manures, no animal manures. Only thing used was ground where leaf litter naturally decomposed on the ground so much like planting in a natural forest environment. Some people just don't get it. Understandable, I was like that too. Too much confidence in their organic fertilizers and natural things are all good. Once I said "using no-fertilizers even organic fertilizers" and a lady told me "oh, so it's the same. I only use chicken manure." Chicken manure i...

I was reminded by one of farm helpers we have that some vegetables that are stored at room temperature are not safe because of salmonella and other potential food poisoning. According to his findings, vegetables start to deteriorate after harvest and increase the population of potentially health hazard organisms. I agree with certain aspects. If chicken manure or other animal manure are applied, there is always potential contamination. This is one reason natural farming insists on using no animal manure sources. ----------------- So here is my testing method. Store vegetables at room temperature or in a refrigerator and see how long it takes for the vegetables to turn into slime. ----------------- I found that many vegetables I got from farmers market or stores melt into slime in matter of less than a week. Have you had any experiences looking through vegetables in a refrigerator and wondering why the vegetables go bad so quickly? Natural farming slime experiment showed that there ...

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.

This is a simple chicken tractor that I built with PVC and chicken wire. It's light and flexible and doesn't rot so it makes very useful in moist warm Hawaii weather. size is 4' x 6'. slightly flexes, but structurally sound enough. Add a little log and board for shelter. I designed an add-on unit for shelter and nesting box, but haven't got around to build it yet (for a year or longer now!) Simply we keep moving this chicken tractor to the next patch once the chickens clear the site. Then, after a few weeks we plant things like kabocha, a type of winter squash, which grows well in weed patch. We started with 10 free range chickens, and gradually losing one by one from neighborhood dog attack and other suspicious death. Once day I saw io (or Hawaiian hawk) eating dead chicken, but do they attack adult chicken? or perhaps mangoose killed it and io scavenging on it. Once the flock reached 4, I started to put them in the chicken tractor full time. I did with 10...

This turned out that it was not totally from scrap materials, but finally getting close to finishing the outhouse project. One of our recent farm volunteer said that he was interested in using scrap materials to do some building and claimed his adequacy for building skills so we did an outhouse building project. He designed the building and made extra materials list that we needed to supplement with. he proceeded with his design only to find out later that I had to fix a lot of things. I just need to add a door and it's done, but how do I keep the door light so it doesn't outweigh the entire structure. Black bucket keeps wood chips. It's just a big planting pot so it drains water from rain. Wood chips keep the flies and smell away. White bucket in the back catches rain water for washing hands and other uses. Once the hole fills up this structure can be moved (with 2 people). and some things can be planted there to remove extra nutrients. One common permaculture outhouse ...