FALL IN HAWAII 2013

It must be fall!   All our band members are back home and coming to market to play so there were 10 of us two weeks ago and 8 last week.  We have about 100 songs on our play list and add at least one new one every week.  We only manage that many because we have the words and chords on the stands in front of us. The vendors have been generous with us lately partly because attendance dropped from around 160 (including vendors and kids) to about 100 last week so we have brought home more vegetables and fruit.

One of our neighbor/vendors gave us a Jackfruit last week (pictured right).
 This is only the second time we have had one of them so we decided to document it.  The whole fruit weighted 20 pounds, the edible portion of fruit was about 3 pounds and the seeds after baking and peeling were about 2 pounds.  We ate as much of the fruit fresh as we could and dried the rest.  The "nuts"  we chopped and are using in cereal, fruit salads and baking.
You can see fruit, nuts and guts all in the picture below.

For NATIONAL PLUG-IN DAY there was an exhibit of electric cars in the Home Depot parking lot.  I took our Think City and there were about 7 Leafs, one Ford Focus, one Mitsubishi iMEV, a Prius plug-in, a Volt and two Tesla Model S's.  That's quite a few considering that except for the Prius, Volt and Focus they all had to be bought elsewhere and shipped to Hilo.  I was told there are 60 Leafs on the Island.  About 100 interested people stopped by during our 4 our stint there.  The same thing was done in Kona the next day but I didn't make that trip.  Home Depot is the only free car charging station in Hilo at this time and they have two plugs.  Later that week I came to HD as a customer and found one charging stall occupied for the first time so when I plugged in there were two charging at once!
 And, yes, it has cooled off here.  The Ocean temperature has slipped below 80 and our daytime highs are no more than 84.  The nights at our house sometimes get below 70 and I've started planting the winter vegetables.

   For something different at the end of July I planted four water melon seeds without  much real hope for them where I had just buried the compost.  I now have 3 plants that cover about 240 sq. ft and spread 6-12 inches per day.  They've probably had about 1,000 blossoms, 30:1 males, but until less than 4 weeks ago no fruit even though they started female blossoms 6 or 7 weeks ago.  I decided the bees didn't like them so I started hand pollinating them and now even though I've still never seen a bee in them I have at least 20 melons going and maybe more that I can't see in the vines. The largest is 12" long and 30" around the middle and if you look carefully you can see it in the photo to the right.  I'm hoping the bugs don't get them and they ripen before they rot.  Where we lived in Washington we couldn't get a long enough frost free season for watermelons so this is pretty exciting.

The photo below is to give some idea of how extensive those three plants are.

Speaking of bees, the carpenter bees known as Hawaiian bumble bees that I have in a log hanging under the eves have not been a problem with tuneling the house-- so far at least.  However those big bees poop on our car and the bee dust blows all over everything.  Also a couple of them got into my carving logs.  So the plan is that some night I will wrap their log in a tarp and move them to a more remote location.  The problem with that plan, besides the risk of sting, is that they need to be in a dry spot open on at least one side.  I don't think they would like it hanging from a tree unless I made a roof for them.  They have been very good pollinators for our beans, lilikoi  and coconuts even though they don't like watermelons.

Last week end we made the best coconut milk ever.  The thing we did different is that we saved all the coconut water and poured  it over the ground coconut meat instead of plain water.  The added saltiness made the milk that we pressed out much sweeter.  We got a gallon of rich creamy milk from 15 coconuts and now, 6 days later, we have almost used it all - in cereal, pancakes, coffee, red chicken curry, and straight!  We have at least enough yet to be picked that we should be able to make two more gallons this month.

Two weeks ago we made what we decided will be our last batch of
lilikoi juice for this year.  This year we've used it for lilikoi butter, lilikoi/pepper jelly, mixed in bread and in pancakes as well as meringue pie, cheese cake and drinks.  We have frozen some, canned some and the juice in bottles in the frig will keep till at least the end of January.  The plants are still blooming so we will give away the rest of the crop.

THE HARVESTS OF SUMMER

Although the seasons don't make so much difference here, summer is still the season people are most likely to travel to places that do have more difference.  Three of our band regulars were gone for most of the summer and others were just too busy so we ended up having only four present for two markets.  But those present included Barbara and Myrna who I have taken to calling my angels singing from heaven so I have always enjoyed accompanying them.  They have learned to harmonize very nicely on many songs.  This Sunday we will play pre-meeting at the annual community association meeting a couple miles down the road at Kolekole County Park.
Myrna and I and Richard and Nancy attended the Hakalau Paka celebration last Saturday where four bands performed short sets.  The youth surfing contest there was a great success again and we were able to talk to our county Mayor and County Council representative who were there for a couple hours.  I lobbied for porta-potties at Veteran's Field where the Tuesday "Food Share" is held.
We then left the Paka early enough to get a quick nap and dinner before heading to Hilo for the last performance of the annual Shakespeare in the Park presentation.  This year it was AS YOU LIKE IT set in the 60's.   Luckily there was no rain, the night was warm, and the performance was great.

Pigs continue to be an intermittent problem for everyone.  One neighbor who has a full perimeter hog wire fence still gets small pigs coming through the wire and then having a hard time getting out.   I finished fencing our south side recently but I am reluctant to do the rest because large falling tree branches would frequently do serious damage on the north side.  A few days ago our dog Taco cornered an adult pig in a "den" under an upturned tree on the vacant lot next door.  Its head was protruding and Taco was right in front of it barking.  I could have gone for a weapon but it was a rainy morning and our freezer is full so I just grabbed a stick and from the top side of the tree trunk I reached over and poked the pig.  The first time it ignored me so I poked harder.  The pig then whipped to the side and bit off the end of the stick.  I poked it a couple times more times till it turned and tried to break through the back of the cave so Taco ran around that way.  As soon as Taco was away from the entrance the pig shot out and ran for the hills.  As far as I can tell it hasn't returned since and that is fine with me.  A well trained dog seems to be the best garden defense for me.

Today, as I sit at the desktop, Myrna is re-arranging some furniture in the next room.  Suddenly she starts talking in an endearing way to some small creature.  It turns out it is a 2" WOOD GECKO that she is encouraging to hurry up and get out of the way.  I am so glad that she is not one of those people who are afraid of or disgusted by small allies sharing our house.  Although it is a nuisance cleaning up after them, lizards in the house keep our place nearly bug free.  When we first moved in the house had just been fumigated with CO2 to kill any termites that may have been present ( that is recommended to be repeated at 7 year intervals here) and that kills anything else also including several house geckos that we found.  Tiny new young geckos moved in very quickly and each staked out a territory and grew quickly.  As I tightened the seals under the doors and around the window screens prey became scarce and the number of house geckos declined.  Now we sometimes see Day Geckos (also know as Madagascar Geckos or Geico Geckos if you wish)  in the house instead but both are rare.  Outside Day geckos are becoming predominant in this area, I think because they will eat anything from nectar to fruit to insects to other kinds of lizards. 


 

 The current harvest at its peak is Lilikoi (passion fruit) and we have a bumper crop.  We make lilikoi butter, lilikoi/pepper jelly, lilikoi cheese cake, lilikoi meringue pie and various drinks.  There are at least five different varieties here and we grow the common yellow fruited type as they are most productive.  The vines will grow to 60 feet and live for years.  We have five vines on our dog pen fence and yesterday we juiced the largest batch yet.  The already expensive shipping rates have just gone up again this year or I would want to send some lilikoi/ pepper jelly to everyone but since I can't, here are some pictures of our processing day.

We have found that lilikoi juice is so vitamin C rich that jars of it in the refrigerator will keep at least 5 months if shaken occasionally but we also can and freeze some of it.  I use the juice in pancake batter, bread or even putting on my cereal.  The vines produce from June to December here.  As you can see there's not a lot of juice per fruit volume but the juice is so strong (think strong lemon juice) that a little goes a long way and that wonderful smell comes through in cooking.

The other fruit in abundance the rest of the year is avocados.  Our own early tree is bad quality but lucky for us, nearby friends have an early tree of excellent quality. 


As it turns out, I've been writing this about one paragraph per day as tropical depression Flossie has been approaching.  Up to the middle of the night it was heading straight for us with winds up to 60 mph.  Now, Monday morning, it is turning north towards Maui and slowing down some but we are still expected to get 8-12" of rain and 30-40 mph winds.  This could result in slides that may close roads or knock out power for awhile but probably will not otherwise affect us.  The winds are just now starting to pick up but the rain has still been light so far.
  

This immature male Jackson Chameleon, native to Kenya, was asleep at night on a fern by the guest house steps.  Even touching it did not awaken it.

2013 SOLSTICE

      As we approach the solstice each year the morning and afternoon sun comes in our North windows a lot.  If I'm home and in the house I try to keep up on closing the windows and drapes to keep the house cool.  For the most part I manage to keep it cooler in the house than outside until the afternoon breeze comes up around 3:00.  At that time I open the windows except on the west where the setting sun is starting to creep under the wide eaves of our house.  In this way we are well satisfied with living without insulation or air conditioning.  In fact, adding more solar panels to the south facing roof has helped block some of the sun's heat from our house so management has gotten easier.  Also I reframed and reroofed the front porch in a way that increased coverage a little, also helping shade windows.
    Last entry I mentioned my "fruit and root" salad and today a friend sent a weight loss product ad that reminded me of it.  Here is my response:

So you think I need to lose weight?

Yes, I did need to lose weight 9 months ago.  About mid September our Pomelo ripened its first fruit and yesterday I picked the last of the season's pomelo.  We've always noticed that we lose some weight while we are eating pomelo but this season we have coupled them with another weight control food, Yacon root, which contains a non-digestible form of sugar.  Throughout the last 9 months I've nearly always had a "fruit and root" salad in the refrigerator consisting of about equal parts of pomelo, banana, papaya and yacon root.  I find it very refreshing and I don't have any trouble keeping within my healthy weight range when it is available.

The photo to the right is of fruits of the day, clockwise from the bowl; sweet 100 tomatoes, papaya, one banana, more sweet 100, one Celebrity tomato, one avocado, half of a yacon, and half of a pomelo.

     The above reminds me again of how much I love the long seasons of our fruit in the yard.  Here I never need to rush to get ready for the next planting season or the harvest or the preservation because the seasons are so long and there is always fresh fruit and vegetables in the garden.  Of course we still buy our favorites sometimes when they are not in our garden but it is nice to know we could get by without them.  We tend to have more surplus bananas this year and I continue to dehydrate them for shipping to friends and family but as the USPS has raised prices again, I may do less of that.  Let me know if they are really appreciated.
By the way, it looks better and better for our coming avocado crop to be our best ever even though one tree has none.  I just picked the first one and it was early March when I picked the last of our winter variety.

At this stage the sweet 100s (four plants) are 11' tall.

Vanilla orchid with flower above the cluster and young beans hanging below.
 I hand pollinate the flowers of the day whenever I think of it so I am getting about 60% bean set. 

Our house as seen from the highway 

From the front, sweet potato, pineapple, taro, papaya. sweet 100 tomatoes 

Our little weekly flash market, which is only open from 4-5:30 each  Tuesday has
grown to about 140 people and offers a wider variety of produce, dairy products and
 prepared food than it started with.

   Our new addition to the PV array on the roof and the original units are now being tracked online via an "Envoy" device that tells me the daily, weekly and to date totals of production for both the whole array and for each individual panel.  This will allow us to know if at any time in the future a specific panel or, more likely, Emphase mini inverter goes bad.  This morning it is 8:45a.m., we've generated almost one kilowatt on this very cloudy day, and the individual panels range from 59-70 watts output out of their peak of 240 watts. We get peak output around 6 hours if it is clear skies.
Here all our lights are compact fluorescent or LED, our hot water is solar, we need no heating or AC so how we cook our food is a more significant part of our energy bill than for most people so I was interested to read recently about magnetic induction cooking.  Complete ranges are available but VERY expensive however some of the countertop induction cookers start about $59 on Amazon.  They do not themselves get hot but work by fluxing a magnetic field in ferrous cookware.  We decided to try the NESCO 1800 watt unit.  Our main frying pan is cast iron and when I checked our stainless steel pots and pans with a magnet I discovered over half are the magnetic variety.  This cooking method is supposed to use about 1/4 the electricity.  I'll report in the future how we like it.

I forgot to mention in the last entry that we put down a new floor and painted the ceilings in the guest house.  Those of you who have stayed there know it needed it.  Our next scheduled guest isn't till the last two weeks of November so I hope to see a couple of you before then!

Aloha!
 

FOUR YEARS IN PARADISE

       This month marks the end of four years since we closed on this house!  Each year we have made some major improvements, first we added solar hot water, second year we put on nearly enough PV panels to supply our electric needs while still remaining grid connected, the third year we bought the THINK electric car and put its 120 volt charger on the wall and this year we have finally added 8 more PV panels to make up for the added power our car consumes.  Electricity here costs about 40 cents/ kwh so our car, was taking about $90/month.  Now we should be back to having surplus power credit with the utility 9 or 10 months of the year.
 Each year I've been improving, enlarging our small gardens and adding more varieties of fruit trees.  As a result I've had less grass to mow each year and more vegetables for the table.  This year our winter garden was the best yet - largest broccoli heads and kale plus the most pickings of string beans (in fact they are still coming on).  The soybeans have not germinated well however so we won't be having many of those this summer.  The Sweet 100 tomatoes are about six feet high on their way to 16' and I suspect I've allowed them to keep too many branches to be able to keep the fruit size up as I would prefer but so far they have big fruit.  All winter long we have been eating "fruit'n root" salad which I make from roughly equal parts of papaya, pomelo, bananas and yacon root.  We've usually had surplus of all four but now the there are only 4 mature pomelos left in the tree - such a refreshing fruit that we will miss them while the new crop grows from the current 3-4 inches to 7-9".  All the varieties of avocados bloomed heavy this winter but only half of them set fruit heavy, however the best  one has a great crop on that we hope to be eating from September to late December and there will be enough of the early varieties for our family at least.  This will also be the best year for our garden's pineapples which are mostly the extra sweet low acid white variety.  And the purple sweet potatoes just keep coming! 

This month I made the somewhat surprising decision to cut down our nearly 90' tall Durian fruit tree.  It was not very productive having only 5, 3, and then 0 fruit per year, although the fruits were up to 8 pounds.  There are no other Durian trees near us so lack of cross pollination may have been it's problem but another aspect was that it was located between our two breadfruit which are a nearly year 'round basic food source that we both like a lot.  Cutting this tree will allow the breadfruit to branch out lower where we can pick them and also gave us a spot to plant a cacao tree.  Additionally, Durian fruit are capable of killing people when they drop not only because they are heavy but also because they have spikes two to three inches long!   It was no easy matter, however, as the tree grew a few feet from the south fence line at a point where the property is only 80 feet wide, the guest house is just east of it, bananas west of it and other fruit trees in striking distance.  

 Because the Durian had larger branches to the south it really wanted to fall over the fence to the south so first, using my extension ladder and a belaying rope tied to the branch being cut, I cut a couple of the large south branches.  Then I tied a strong rope from about 28' up to my pomelo tree, to the east of where I wanted it to fall, with just a little slack and put my guest, Adam, there.  I then cut a notch aiming for a gap between the mango and the guava that I use for growing vanilla orchids on.  With Adam keeping the rope tight to feel for movement I made the back cut till the tree started to move  - the wrong way.  The rope would keep it from falling the wrong way but we found out that even with both of us pulling with all our might we could not get the tree to come over north.  So I had to get my other good rope (thank you Clyde) and go from the rope we were pulling, around the mango and to Adam's car.  I was very concerned that the second rope might break so we only pulled with the car a little at a time till finally it came over.  One branch of the mango got knocked off, 10' of vanilla vine broke off (which yielded 6 new vanilla starts to give to someone) and we lost three small branches from an Abau tree.  At 48' from the stump the tree dropped less than 2 feet off from the target and although it extended at least 10' past the north boundary, that is the vacant lot and no damage was done.

Last night our Hakalau Jam band was asked to play at a private birthday party for about 100 people.  Most of our regulars showed up and we had a good time and ate way too much desert.  The party host is a vender at the Hakalau market and he lives at the 1,600 foot level.  We are into a bit of a rainy period (which we needed) and at that altitude we were right in the clouds.  The site was prepared with a big quonset shaped tent which mostly kept us dry so we even stayed out past our usual bed time.  Today I've been a bit slow but it was worth it.

Besides being drier than usual the weather here has been very mellow with even less temperature variation than normal.  One day the low was 74 and the high 79 f.  I've not taken my pocket thermometer to the the Ocean with me but it feels like we already have mid-summer water temperatures.