A front is blowing in to Maui and it’s been pouring rain the last few days. February’s a month of storms. After the program ended, I had a paid gig in Haiku for a couple of days helping to establish a food forest (already that Permaculture Design Certification is paying off). I repotted noni trees and planted ground peanut, a nitrogen fixer and erosion control plant. Then I successfully hitchhiked the road to Hana and made it out to Kipahulu, where I’ll be for the next five weeks. It’s the most remote part of the island, an untamed jungle.
On Tuesday we cleaned out the quonset in preparation for the bamboo bike building workshop next week. The quonset is a barn structure that houses most of the bamboo and the bamboo treating machinery. There was a thick layer of dust and rust over everything, but with six of us working hard sweeping, scrubbing, and organizing, we managed to get it done before lunch. I spent the afternoon propagating macame, a tree whose leaves sell for a high price. Somebody ordered five hundred of them and there were none potted up, so we very gently separated the seedlings into four inch pots.
On Wednesday I finished potting the macames, as there were still about two hundred more to go. Then Maria and I went up the hill to harvest pigeon pea seeds. We planted about four hundred of those into yellow seedling tubes before lunch. In the afternoon we went to the upper nursery to tend the bamboo plants. We weeded, fertilized, and mulched them, in addition to weeding the weed cloth around them.
On Thursday I harvested thirty eight pounds of turmeric and three pounds of ginger. We dug, cleaned and processed them and laid them out to dry in the greenhouse. Afterwards, we planted about four hundred more pigeon peas. I spent the afternoon weeding the lower nursery, a seemingly unending project but very meditative.
It has been such an incredible learning experience to be a part of a successful, mature farm even in this first week. This community is paying its bills by growing food and lumber. The work is unceasing, but leaves you feeling a strong kind of tired. It has been great to put what I learned in the design course to use in the real world: I propagated vetiver and lemon grass at Ahimsa Sanctuary Farm, I propagated macame and pigeon pea here; I harvested turmeric at HAPI, I harvested much more turmeric here. Looking forward to what the next four weeks will bring.
Mahalo!