eggs & tea blog

All over the island, feral pig activity has been on the rise. They come at night, slipping under fences and evading dogs, marauding through crops, tearing up the ground. They can destroy a garden overnight. In a few visits, a whole farm can be ruined. Pigs are all over Hawai’i, in many places where they were never seen before. There are lots of theories why, but nobody knows for sure. After the first few sightings of pigs here in Ahualoa, on top of the existing threat of loose chickens and flocks of wild turkeys, we built chicken-wire fences around both gardens. I thought my tea was safe.

I was wrong.

On the morning of June 3, 6AM, Ruthie was driving Deb and i to the airport. I glanced at the tea along the driveway… total destruction. The pigs aren’t interested in the plants – just the rich, moist soil, worms and grubs. Like a swarm of angry tractors, the entire tea bed was torn up, the plants ripped out the ground and flung all about, bare rooted. We were running late, there was no time to do anything but quickly put the tea plants back in the ground, desperately packing the soil around them and hoping for the best.

The next night, the pigs came back and uprooted a couple more plants. Jim built a small emergency fence around them. It held them off, but just barely enclosed the area.

A week later, a few plants had died – the shock of uprooting was too much. The orderly rows with 2′ spacing are now haphazard, and our best hope for a tea plantation – the few plants that made it to adulthood after hundreds of dead plants in the greenhouse – had been dealt a major setback.

The pigs came and uprooted the neighbor’s garden, then the pumpkin patch, then more. Now, all of us normally calm peaceful folks are talking about guns, traps, attack dogs, big steel fences. I got a fence guy to visit and give me an estimate: $1000 to fence a small quarter acre for tea, several times as much money to try to shore up the whole parcel, plus the hassle of gates on the driveways.

Related posts:

1. First tea, pruning, pig attack It has been a very busy time on the farm...
2. Tea fence completed! Over the past three days, a fence was built around...
3. Farm update Many bits of unrelated news this week: To deal with...
4. Guava stumps, more tea planting Now that the fence is up, i’m super eager to...
5. Tea update, planting and propagating There’s been lots of progress on the tea recently. Lots...

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 8:39 pm and is filed under crops, feral pigs, tea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.