{"id":40,"date":"2007-05-14T14:22:43","date_gmt":"2007-05-15T00:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/?p=40"},"modified":"2007-05-14T14:22:43","modified_gmt":"2007-05-15T00:22:43","slug":"nancy-redfeathers-kawanui-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/2007\/05\/nancy-redfeathers-kawanui-farm\/","title":{"rendered":"Nancy Redfeather’s Kawanui Farm"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Saturday, Deb and i made the long trip to Honalo (mid-Kona coast) to attend a morning tour of a mini-farm. The event was called Eat your way to sustainability<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“See a real life model of organic sustainable home food production, value added products, and income crops. Includes tour of vegetable gardens, coffee orchard of 12 varieties, and fruit\/nut\/spice orchards, coffee tasting from our many varieties, home juice production and tasting, and seed packets from our very own seed saving to get started!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was indeed a great visit, all that and more. (I did have to grapple with the irony of 4 hours of gasoline driving for a 3 hour class on sustainability.<\/em>) It is just 1.2 acres, yet intensive enough to produce a lot. The house is at the top of the land, with a view looking down on the top half of the farm area:<\/p>\n

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Here we are getting a tour of the intensive ‘test garden’, where seeds are grown and varieties are tried. The compost was interesting, done in-place right on the bed. They do not use any manure inputs, it is not hot, but a ‘cold pile’ composting which is still plenty fast enough in a tropical climate:<\/p>\n

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I absorbed several hours of fascinating information about how various vegetables and fruits can be efficiently grown in that specific climate – Kona at 1400′ elevation – some of which hopefully also applies to us – Hamakua at 2600′. Most of their crops certainly grow faster and larger, big eggplants, giant beets! I don’t know how much of that is due to elevation. And they had a lot of crops growing out in the open (peppers, squash, tomatoes!) which we could never do, fruit fly would get them.<\/p>\n

Nancy served us some cornbread which was, incredibly, corn she grew and ground herself:<\/p>\n

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I must underscore how rare and precious this was, given that Hawai’i grows basically no grains or legumes.<\/p>\n

One of their fascinating crops was the Mysore Raspberry. There are no berry crops that do well enough in Hawai’i to produce abundantly, but this one is apparently good for a tropical environment:<\/p>\n

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There’s way too much to relate from our tour – the interesting greenhouse practices, the best coffee i’ve ever tasted – it would take a whole book or website. Overall, i was both inspired that so much was possible, yet also frustrated that our own attempts to grow food have been so much more work-intensive and less productive. When so much is specific to location and climate, i might spend decades just trying to figure out how to get high productivity out of my Hamakua land. I guess i can just forge ahead and improve gradually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Saturday, Deb and i made the long trip to Honalo (mid-Kona coast) to attend a morning tour of a mini-farm. The event was called Eat your way to sustainability: “See a real life model of organic sustainable home food … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crops","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ahualoa.net\/eggsntea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}