Tea Update

Posted on April 16, 2008 by ben

Tea planting continues slow and steady. We’re trying to keep costs low, only buying a few rooted cuttings on occasion. There are around 250 plants in the ground.

My greenhouse tea are doing better than ever before. Here are a few things i found, over the past year, that seem to help them:

Spraying dilute neem oil (“bio-pesticide for organic farming”). Aphid and scale problems seem to be gone. Even the mite-infested cuttings i got did not spread or cause any trouble.
No compost in the potting mix. For whatever reason (pH? tannins?) the baby tea doesn’t like it. Dunno what’s up with my compost, i will be testing it.
More fertigating, primarily with dilute fish emulsion, and now also a little kelp meal. Apparently over-fertilizing is less of an issue than under-fertilizing – you can lay on the nitrogen, even for baby tea plants.

This is how my rooted tea cuttings looked a while back, when they were just potted:

Six weeks later, half of them are big and ready to go into the ground. That’s better growth than i’ve ever had before.

Spring Farm Update

Posted on April 16, 2008 by ben

Aside from the usual spring planting, here are some things that have been going on at the farm.

I dug several new beds above and outside the upper garden. In addition to the usual taro and veggies, i have planted some “hull-less” popcorn and a large bed with two different kind of peanuts. I bought the heirloom peanut seed from organic farms i found on LocalHarvest.
When all the stores were out of Azomite (which we use to add all the minerals our soil lacks) i got a bag of Kelp Meal instead. Expensive, so i use it sparingly, but seems like great stuff.
I ‘activated’ a gallon of EM and have started a number of experiments with it, seeing if it affects anaerobic composting and whether it helps to “balance” the rough compost. In addition to the anaerobic tests, there are number of pots with 5 corn plants each, with varying amounts of finished compost and EM.
On a tip from Tom Baldwin, i am now looking for some Azolla (aquatic fern) as a way to grow nutritious feed for my chickens.
I gave a talk on biochar at a local gathering of farmers, a seed exchange/potluck event held in Honokaa every other month. Lots of other biochar news, but that’s another blog post..
I gave a talk on How To Eat Local, at the Waimea library. Only a few people showed, but the talk went well. I hope to give the talk to a big audience at some point.

Here are the new upper beds as of a couple weeks ago. That brand-new bed is now full of peanuts:

Biochar – offset global warming AND grow more food

Posted on March 21, 2008 by ben

For the past few weeks, i’ve been getting more and more excited about biochar – that is, biomass charcoal as a way of producing carbon-negative energy and improving soil. I really can’t summarize the whole field here – just take a look at the Biochar Fund, International Biochar Initiative, Biochar: the new frontier at Cornell, Terra Preta, Carbon Diversion. The article Black is the New Green, from Nature (2006) gives a good overview with pictures. This is really the closest thing to a world-saving technology i’ve ever found – and i can’t wait to try it out on our farm. I’m looking around for a source of quality-controlled char, emailing UH and asking everyone i know, spreading the word.

Despite the rapidly-increasing awareness among researchers, environmentalists and technocrats, apparently still very few people – including farmers – have heard of biochar. Global warming has reached the mass consciousness, but not any realistic solution. That may change soon.

Ag books

Posted on March 10, 2008 by ben

My back failed dramatically last week (sacroiliitis) and i was unable to sit or stand for four days. A great time to catch up on reading, i finished two ag books:

You Can Farm, Joel Salatin. A great book on how to realistically earn a profit raising food in a healthy, humane, sustainable way, on a family farm. It’s fun to read, blunt, loaded with excellent advice, and definitely not for vegans. 🙂 Lots about chickens. One very interesting point Joel makes in Chapter 13: to have realistic access to markets, you should be within ~40 miles of a town of at least 25,000 people. Here in Ahualoa, we aren’t – all of Hamakua, plus all of Waimea, is less than 16,000 people. For people like us in such a rural area, selling enough products, and trucking it to markets, would be a real stretch (in time and fuel).

The Farm as Natural Habitat. It starts out kinda stuffy and academic, but there are some great chapters in here (all by different authors) on exactly how agriculture and biodiversity can and should coexist. Most of the book is about the US midwest, but there is also a chapter on Tule Lake in California, and the meadows of England. There are actually systems in place in the world where agriculture improves land for wild species, and vice versa – the farm doesn’t have to be a “sacrifice zone.”

Chickens and Irises

Posted on March 3, 2008 by ben

It’s been too long since we blogged our chickens, so here we go. Egg production has finally come back up, after the molt and the short days of winter. The irises are blooming near the coop, so i took some pictures:

I also made a new video today, of our chickens devouring a freshly opened coconut, and put it on YouTube along with the ear of corn and sunflower videos.

Experimental mulching

Posted on February 22, 2008 by ben

Currently, there are around 235 tea plants in the ground. They are looking quite exposed, with all the vegetation cleared away, just little baby tea standing all alone. The intention was to mulch the field, to keep the weeds down and hold in moisture. But how? One suggestion was to just cover all the ground with macnut husks, a popular and easily available mulch here. But, i was a little unsure. Husks might have a fair bit of tannins, which might inhibit the tea a little if used right around them. The other consideration was erosion. A month ago we had some tremendous rainfall, and one of the exposed baby plants was actually washed out. I worry about loose mulch going straight downhill, even with the mild terracing effect of the contour rows.

So, i came up with an idea. White ginger is growing abundantly next to the tea. I used to think of the ginger as a weed, but now i think of it as a nice-smelling, fast-growing resource. I’ll cut and lay the ginger stalks around the tea plants, making a kind of lattice, then apply the mulch on that, with macnut husks down the rows and compost/manure closer to the plants themselves.

Here are some pictures of the beginning. Sorry about the odd color balance, it was late in the day in the shadow:

It looks a little funny – the tea used to stand out, now you can barely see it among all the mulch. But, it seems to work as i expected – the husks and stalks hold each other in place, and it’s still easy to walk down the row.

Roots on cuttings from our own plants!

Posted on February 11, 2008 by ben

It’s been a little over two months since i started a few cuttings from our own plants. I looked at them today, and found that a few have started to grow roots! I’ve had so many cuttings fail, that this is amazing happy news. If this really succeeds, then we’ll no longer be at the mercy of professional horticulturalists. Here’s a good one:

So far, of the 18 i started, there are 6 rooted, 2 dead, and 10 still in limbo. Very encouraging!

Compost sifting

Posted on January 30, 2008 by ben

Recently i’ve found myself spending an awful lot of time out by the compost piles, sifting the rocks out of the horse manure and twigs out of the rough compost, using a simple wire mesh. It’s slow, and takes a lot of energy. Hoping to find a better way, i searched the internet. There are a lot of different ideas out there.

Homemade Compost Sifter Screen Sieve shows the basic idea of making the screen slide, so you don’t have to hold it up. That’s the guy in the picture (that’s not me, although that’s exactly how i’m sifting now). Here are some detailed plans for how to make it with a slider, and some other people show how to build it with wheels. Some other people have built a rotating drum which looks nifty, and google even turns up some patents on that design.

Then, at the higher end, there are some big designs with serious motors, multiple screens, the sort of thing you’d want a front-loader to move your compost with. That’s out of my range.

So, i think we’re going to try building the slider approach, perhaps a bit bigger so it fits on the cart, which is bigger than the wheelbarrow. It’s a lot of work sifting an entire pickup truckload of manure!

Tea update, planting and propagating

Posted on December 2, 2007 by ben

There’s been lots of progress on the tea recently. Lots of planting going on, including one big push on Nov. 12 when i was able to hire two guys, and we did around 40 plants in 6 hours. As of today, there are 172 total plants in the ground! The soil amendments have evolved, the current mix is equal parts mature compost and sifted horse manure, with small amount of azomite, organic 6-6-6, and greensand.

Getting them into the ground is important because in the greenhouse, they just don’t do well; they seldom root, and even if they do, after a burst of growth they start dying. I’ve written before about the dismal (~20% at best, ~2% typical) success rate i’ve had with starting cuttings. On some advice, i tried two trays of cuttings, inserted at an angle, in 50% shade. This is the result:

Yup, that’s only about 7 still barely alive. There must be something about rooting that i am really not doing right. Is it the soil, the temperature, the root hormone, the humidity? Fortunately i’ve been able to buy a few more rooted cuttings from Aileen, and this week, for the first time, i was able to take some branches from our own plants(!) and start cuttings. Following the professional horticulturist’s lead, i am trying them in oasis root cubes:

I hope rooting in the cubes work better than soil!

Final stump! (I hope)

Posted on November 4, 2007 by ben

Unable to find any hired help, i went out myself to take out the last remaining guava stump. A half hour of swinging a pickaxe, digging and sweating later, my back hurt and the stump looked unaffected. Another hour the next day of gruesome battle, then finally, on the third day, i got the sucker out.