Bianca's Field Study

This week I get to actually design 2 acres of a property! On Monday with Adam I finished drawing the plans for the hill. On Tuesday Jenny and Adam asked me to come up with a concept for two acres at the bottom of the property. This property ends at the back of the monastery school in Haiku. Jenny wanted to alot two acres for the kids of the school to come and use for educational purposes as well as allowing for a produce market and meeting space. The directions I was given were to include an Aloha Lounge for class meetings and a space for canoe crops to grow. If I haven’t mentioned this before, canoe crops are the original Hawaiian food crops that were brought with them on canoes from Polynesia.

So, I first determined the open gathering space which would be close to the school gate and easy to get to from parking up the road. This space includes the Aloha Lounge, an open tent structure with a hole in the middle for fires, an outdoor kitchen, picnic tables, and a tool shed near where workers might come to have lunch so that they can store their tools on the way. Then to the left would be a demonstration vegetable garden with raised beds and a hoop house for easy access for children. There would be a stone wall with a shelf for pollinator plants to deter vegetable theft and attract pollinators since there would be no beehive on site. I also included a structure for seed exchanges to get the children excited about growing their own food as well and trading seeds. Then to the top left of the acreage near the walkway from parking, there would be a picnic area with a spiral pathway, short covercrops to run through, and picnic tables under shade trees. This serves as a resting place from the long walk of parking and as a natural resting place for kids and adults to share food. The tips of the property near the parking walkway would be flanked in canoe crops for tropical aesthetics. From the top of that walkway some paths would branch off to trails for children to run around through the natural gulch that would be manicured for safety. Then below the gulch would be a wetlands area for Lo’i or kalo growing with boardwalks, bridges, and a lookout for easy access to all that a wetland has to offer. Since this zone sits at the near bottom of a steep, it would collect water from the rest of the property easily. Then to the right of the Aloha Lounge is a man made hill with park stadium seating to allow for a gathering place and create a stage for events. Up the steps is a spiral herb garden that can act as a meditation zone with stones in the center as well as a fun run around for kids. This also allows for easy access to each herb that needs to be cared for since they flank a wide path. Below this is a food “jungle” of canoe crops with many paths and treehouses connected by a bridge. Above the spiral garden are two zones of crops, one of root and floral crops and one for traditional row crops. This variety allows for a multitude of learning opportunities for the children. The left of the root crops taper out the rest of the hill so I put a big slide for kids to take advantage of. The root crop zone also has edible arbor pathways leading to a central trellised hangout zone. Fruits like lilikoi or floral vines like jasmine can grow here. The top right of the property has a bamboo grove for natural building crops and has surprise seating coves between bamboo bunches- a feature that I fell in love with at Laleima Farms in Kipahulu. Finally to the furthest right of the property starts a grove of demonstration fruit trees and a firmly populated grove of windbreak trees to prevent exploring further into the property where land will be leased for farm plots. Before any major groupings of sections I put small gardens that would serve as meeting places for school groups so that no one would get lost.

The last half of the week I scaled, drew, inked, painted, and labeled this design on an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper for presenting. Though this is a concept design, it will eventually be the backbones for a design that does work with the school and open opportunities financially and culturally to connect with the local community. This Farm Education Center would serve as an event venue for the school and incorporate farm education into daily activities. This would also be a wonderful place to host summer tours and camps for kids on the island as well as serve as a kid friendly wonderland to the client’s growing family. I am so extremely proud to have been trusted with this much responsibility and Jenny is already helping me to use this and more that I’ve done for her toward my Permaculture Design and Visual Design portfolio. My last task was to detail an outline of what had been decided for the website so far so that Jenny could continue working on it with a professional designer.

On Friday evening Jenny took Philip and I to an art gallery opening at the Hui Museum and to dinner where we ran into Spencer and celebrated the months that we spent together. It was a bittersweet ending to a truly magial few months, but I know I will work with Jenny again an I’ve made too many friends and connections in Maui to stay away for too long.

This week I get an opportunity to work on a paying client’s property. Jenny picks me up from the office early in the morning and we take a 15 minute drive to a 75 acre property. The drive from the gate to the house is well manicured and designed. There we meet Adam who is the property manager for the owners and the person that Jenny has been working with the most. The owners are a gay couple from Singapore with adopted twins who plan to stay on property a few weeks or months of the year. However, whenever they come they will bring a whole group of staff, family, and friends with them and the design needs to cater to these needs. Before we can get into the design projectary, we need to take soil samples. To take soil samples we must mark out 10-12 spots from all over a certain zone, dig past the top soil, and bag dirt from at least 6 inches down. Then it is all mixed in a clean bucket and a sample is taken in a baggy to be shipped for testing. Jenny and I went through the orchard, the spider infested agave, overgrown cane grass hills, and neglected farm rows to flag and pull out roots for each spot. Adam and Phil then went to each and took the samples.

After this we lounged at the outdoor lanai overlooking a bowl shaped hill, several gulches of invasive trees, and the sparkling blue ocean. Adam showed us plans for extending the already 3,000 square foot home to 18,000 square feet and it quickly became apparent that there was so much potential for clients that didn’t seem to have any kind of budget. Over the rest of this day and the next, Jenny enlisted me to imagine the hill before us as the central convergence for the family to play and adventure outdoors. She had started making plans for a wetland swimming pool near the front of the space, some type of structure to overlook the view from the top of the ridge, and a mandala garden. She also asked me to look into a way to connect these elements through an interactive and playful permaculture experience for both kids and adults. I was inspired to research adventure obstacles and fitness stations for the space that was left. I included maybe 25 ideas for different adventure elements that Jenny put into a slideshow for presenting to the clients. Along with that I researched wetland pools and we found a stargazing pavilion to sit atop the hill. Jenny gave me a printout of the base map and asked me to design the space with the elements we discussed as well as adding pathways so we could dissect each section into a new element. I added a living rock wall as a windbreak for the pavilion and mandala garden, trellises around the other side of the garden, boardwalk and deck around the pool, and a stone pathway through the wetland that Jenny and Adam loved and were sure the client would want to include in the finished design. It was exciting to have some authority over a very probable design and even more exciting to watch Philip include it in the digital design.

The rest of the week Philip and I worked on Jenny’s website, logo, and branding which consisted mostly of playing with web elements and fine tuning business cards.

The meeting we have been waiting for is finally here! In order to prepare for it this week I spend 14+ hours on Tuesday and Wednesday drawing and painting a large scale poster sized logo concept for the Food Hub. Making a visual brand will make people excited to see the potential future of this project. The logo that I came up with details a volcano erupting with a rainbow of Hawaiian grown fruits, vegetables, and other foods. Jenny suggested that I add the floral crown of Pele to honor the original creation goddess while using the image of a volcano. I found fingerpaints from the Wisdom Center below Jenny’s office to add the color and depth it needed. After this Phillip took pictures and digitized the logo, where we spent a few hours organizing the fruits to really look as though they were exploding into life. Phil then put the logo on a mock-up distribution truck, building, and on the welcome pamphlets and direction signs for guests. We stayed after hours to clean up the Wisdom Center, cut veggies, and prepare websites links and Jenny’s slideshow for the projector.

During the meeting Jenny spoke to guests on the necessity of creating a Maui Food Hub where too much of the goods are imported. She touched on food sovereignty, production, branding, and all the opportunities it would provide for young farmers and community integration. By the end of the meeting, people were talking amongst themselves on ways to motivate the community to support Jenny in her work and all the potential of building a Maui Food Hub and Permanent Farmer’s Market. A woman and I spoke about getting together an informational booth at the weekly Saturday Farmer’s Market to get people interested and to open up communication for connections and ideas for funding. Even weeks later, this meeting has kickstarted the community to hold their own meetings and provide more possible locations, allies, and support to really make this project a reality.

This week was short for me because I put in 24 hours within two days, so Jenny told me to take the rest of the week off and I spent it resting up from a very busy month and a half.

The work week begins and I’m ready to learn about the work involved in designing.  We establish a schedule for ourselves and we start with a discussion about what Jenny wants us to accomplish for her over the next four weeks. Both of us will help prepare for the Food Hub meeting next week and both of us will work on separate pieces of Jenny’s branding of herself. My main focus is to create a polished website that will attract clients, students, and organizations alike to call on Jenny for her expertise and magnetic energy for teaching, public speaking, design work, and climate change adaptation strategy. Before I begin this work- I start with simple tasks such compiling resources for Jenny’s permaculture teaching binders and cleaning up an existing reading and watching list.

The Food Hub meeting that Jenny will be hosting is an essential turning point for the future of this project. The concept so far is for a co-operatively owned Food Hub and permanent Farmers Market for the North Shore of Maui. The Food Hub would operate under its own label and would have commercial kitchens for Maui grown value added products to be made. Then if the farmer’s market were in the same location it would allow for much easier transport of these products. Jenny wants the farmers market to be made from a 2-3 story Ibuku bamboo structure which would serve as a beautiful tourist hot spot to shop for local goods and grab lunch at locally sourced cafes in any kind of weather. At night this structure would turn into a stunning venue for farm-to-table meals, events, and even weddings. Properties that need to be considered would also have room to allow for farming, especially for incubator plots that would connect the farmers of the co-op to mentor young or financially strapped upcoming farmers. These incubator plots would also allow new farmers to brand their food and products through the Food Hub next door.

Jenny had advocated for this project in the past, especially for its promise to increase locally grown food trade to push out the inconceivable amount of imports that Maui currently relies on. There was funding allotted for her initial time building the framework and for the start of the next steps to making it a reality- but the project’s supporting organization went through political clashes and the newly instated head of the organization released the grant and county money back to the donors. Therefore this meeting is going to be the pinnacle to see whether the community desires it to happen and what solutions can sprout from new alliances.

In our design projects Jenny gave this project to one of the groups and they drew up very creative, thoughtfully mapped designs. She wanted to showcase their work for the meeting to get people excited about all the possibilities that this project can offer, so I made sure to streamline their design and redraw what needed to be cleaned up. My favorite part of this was to imagine and draw different techniques for how people may one day utilize the incubator farm. I pinned up the designs to her office walls to properly display the students’ designs as a real presentation. Beyond this I began to work on her website by organizing an outline and familiarizing myself with wordpress code. Over the weekend I conceptualized a logo for the Food Hub that also would make it’s debut on every bit of the presentation for the Food Hub meeting… but more on that to come.

I have never had so many different fruits in my life- let alone with so much variance in less than a week.

We’ve made it to Whispering Winds Bamboo in Kipahulu aka the remote jungle side of the island. On Sunday we drove an hour and a half through the most breathtaking windy roads embanked by bamboo forest, coastal shores, and waterfalls. After a while, the only marketing system comes in the form of food trucks and fruit stands. We stopped to get the world’s best coconut ice cream from a stand on the way. After we arrived we dressed up to make our way down to a neighboring farm and eco village, Lokahi, for their open mic night where they open their kitchen, “Cafe Attitude”, to the public. Each plate costs $20 donation, so I split mine with a friend and I am so glad to not have missed out on this farm’s notoriously wonderful vegan plates. We met some friends from the island who just moved there and a few people from our class performed original songs.

The next day we discussed more information for our upcoming design projects and dove into an interview with my team’s client, Spencer. We are working to design a property that he will be leasing nearby in Kipahulu. After lunch we went on a partial tour of Whispering Winds Bamboo, which has so far been the most effectively managed food forest yet. Here they harvest and process bamboo for building materials as well as a collection of fruits and flowering trees. Just on the tour I tried bright pink guava, breadfruit, zipote, and even more that was picked of trees and passed around with names I can’t remember. Aftwerwards the woman of the land here, named Virginia, opened coconuts for us to snack from and drink while she showed us how to process jackfruit, which we also ate. Then we helped her pick the edible parts from “scrambled egg fruit” which turned into a kale fried vegan “egg” dish. Virginia also brought us avocados and goods to make guacamole while she cut and fried breadfruit into french fries.

This week Jenny also taught us more graphics for mapping and showed us a slideshow for eco architecture including living roofs and innovative buildings. Speaking of architecture, Evan taught us more about different natural building styles and all the recyclable and resourceful materials that can be used to build structures. Utilizing the natural resources might include coconut palm thatched roofs or clay cob houses from mud and straw. This excites me to actually build with resources that are available and reap the rewards of ingenuity that comes from the flexibility of natural building materials. Rich from Whispering Winds spent time with us after dinner to talk about biodynamics, a practice of farming that had been held on this property for a long time. Biodynamics combines utilizing astronomy and ritualized compost preps. On Thursday we walked through the orchard with Jayanti, a permaculture nursery owner from Maui, while he taught us what to look for in a potential tree to graft. Then he demonstrated different grafting techniques which combine ways to slice the scion wood and combine with the root stalk. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for the rest of the lesson due to feeling sick from the hot humidity that day and spent the rest of my time reading about ponds and working on the base map for our design project.

On Friday we had optional field trips to Stephen’s farm and Lokahi. Stephen’s farm could be reached by walking down to the edge of Whispering Wind’s property. There we were greeted by a kind man with his child at his hip and an outpouring field of neatly spaced fruit trees and springy ground cover from peanuts. Stephen works this land for himself and family to live off of, so we were extremely fortunate that he would give our class a tour. So far, his land has been one of the most aesthetically pleasing permaculture implementations and absolutely abundant after he started planting 20 years prior. He also utilizes natural building with bamboo and clay for amenities like an outdoor kitchen and outdoor shower/laundry room. It’s so beautiful to see the diversity of land use for different desired outputs. Out to Lokahi, the gardening overseer, Chuck, showed us about a natural Korean farming technique called Jadam. This technique of making a compost “tea” to encourage microbial growth has been widely embraced by farmers living on the Hawaiian islands. In fact, the Korean innovators behind the technique travel here to give demonstrations. The gardens seem to love the extra attention at Lokahi, since all life is bursting with pollinators and strongly rooted vegetables.

On Saturday we visited a production farm called Ono farms. They are the most successful pemaculture model on Maui for producing and selling bananas, papayas, and a handful of other plants. They started planting trees 20+ years prior and have since set the prices for those to be organically grown since they were the first in the market. It’s really inspiring to see what patience and good ethics can do to change a whole market to have access to and want more organic goods.

As we leave for Hale Akua, I am saddened that so much has passed so quickly, but I can’t help but take in all the wonderful beauty of Maui and the opportunities she still holds after the last week of the design course passes.

Within our first moments here we were told what a magical island we stood on. Mama Maui is a lush, thriving forest bursting at the seams with biodiversity and life. This island has almost no plants with intimidating thorns, barely any are poisonous, and almost no predators to speak of. We have all had a few nightmares about finding the infamous centipede coiled up under clothes in our tents- but even their sting can only hurt temporarily. Even the spiders with their boxy horned bodies cascade along beautiful webs that decorate the outdoor dining area and leave us to eat in peace.

There has been a positive force around the sentiments of community living like “many hands make light the work”. We have been graced with people who harvest each land we are staying at to incorporate diversity in each dish. We eat together three times a day, talk about the foods we are eating, how they were grown and harvested, and where to find them on the property. I am looking forward to helping the cooking process so I can also start making use of all the nutrients Maui has to offer. After each meal we wash our own dishes and split into various tasks to sanitize and clear the small cooking/eating space. We have learned to be responsible not only for ourselves- but for the well being of eachother as well.

After breakfast we begin lecture- which this week has been held in the Moloka, a round, carpeted and opened up “hut” next to the very forested hill. We are taught by Jenny Pell and Evan Ryan who continue to provide solution based learning for the foundations of permaculture and how to apply them for different situations. It’s amazing that the teachings of permaculture are meant to transform mindset as well and can be applied socially, emotionally, even spiritually. Our lectures have always included a component of action or observation, or even a combination of the two to check our understanding and encourage our thought process toward permaculture design.

The next half of the day consists of some kind of “hands on activity” which is where we help with the workload for the place we are staying. This week the main project has been to clear out and replant the chunampas area which is part of a creek. In 4 days the place has been completely transformed- I was able to contribute with weeding and replanting a bed of taro and tumeric. Throughout this week of hands on activities I also drew observations of how to harvest sugar cane and tumeric as well as peeling the tough skins off of manioca root.

After dinner we might have optional activities for us- this week that consisted of community interacting “ice breaker” activities to get to know eachother, a documentary called Seeds of Permaculture, a slideshow about permaculture principles, examples, and some of Jenny’s story, and many of us went into town for an open mic event to be more immersed into the culture of Haiku, Maui. On Saturdays we have potlucks and invite the community over to be a part of the feast- many musicians from open mic night came last night and there was music around the bonfire.

I write this in preparation to pack up and leave this beautiful valley at Haiku ‘Aina Permaculture Initiative and move on to the next farm. Hopefully we are leaving bucket toilets far behind us as well. I am grateful for time spent so far, and looking forward to experiencing more reasons to fall in love with this gentle jungle island. Until next week- Mahalo.