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.