While I was up at Foxglove Farm in April I made the final arrangements to go work for three weeks on the island of Hawaii helping with a 15 acre homestead in the making.  Michael told me, “you know no one will believe you’re working, they’ll all hear Hawaii and think sand and surf and sitting on the beach with a piña colada” or some such thing.  I did go to the beach, once.

    Actually, thanks to the generosity of my good friend Marisa, who was partly the inspiration for the trip, as well as Chuck, who was kind enough to hire me to help with his ongoing project to create a simple homestead on the island, I managed to take in a good variety of mostly food and plant related Hawaiian sites.  

    The first weekend there Marisa and I headed up to Volcano National Park, but not to see the lava, or crater, or anything like that.  We went up to volunteer with a planting crew helping restore native plants for under-story in a koa forest.  

    It was an incredible opportunity to hear a little history from the rangers, see the effects of cattle on the native forest, and get more comfortable with Hawaiian plants.  

    I also had the opportunity that weekend to see the Hilo Farmers Market in action that weekend, as well as the Makuu Farmers Market, very different scenes than the Portland Farmers Markets reflecting both the difference in climate and culture.  

    The following weekend Chuck and his wife Maty were kind enough to take me to the Waimea Farmers Market where I ran into a farmer I had met at Terra Madre two years ago.  

    I was impressed by their display of beets, chard and radicchio right next to the bananas.  Hawaii has this amazing diversity of micro climates ranging from very dry to very wet and consistently warm to cool depending on elevation and aspect.  All of this is within a relatively small geographic area.  I read while I was there that traditionally communities consisted of essentially thin pie shaped wedges of land that extended from the ocean up to the higher elevations so that some of every type of growing climate, as well as access to fishing was available.  Access up and down what was essentially the watershed was unlimited, but to travel around the island, across water sheds was restricted and required special permission.  

    Part of my reason for traveling to Hawaii was to learn more about the food production there, to visit farmers markets, farms, and friends, but mostly I was there to work.  Chuck is slowly creating what many of us dream of, a small, organic homestead on a tropical island.  This is probably something that is as much about the creating as it is about the finished product.  He’s in the early stages and so we spent three weeks working on basic projects like designing a simple gravity fed irrigation system for his fruit trees, cutting poles for a water catchment roof, setting foundations for a gate house, and clearing lots of fence line to exclude wild pigs  which have become a very destructive nuisance on the island.  

    Clearing guava to open up space for other trees and to make space for pig fence was the big project.  Guava, especially strawberry guava, or waiawi, is incredibly weedy, and is actually spread by the pigs, as well birds and roots.  We ran chain saws for hours cutting the thick stands out of other trees, making piles of logs, and brush piles with the branches.  As destructive as the sound of chain saws is the hours of clearing guava allowed us to free beautiful native ohia, and other less weedy species like silk oak, loquat, and wild coffee.  It was a great opportunity for me to become more familiar with the terrain and flora and fauna on the property.  The most amazing creature I saw was at the spot pictured above.  After cutting quite a bit of waiawi out of a big ohia I went to cut up the branches into manageable chunks.  There was the most amazing iridescent green and blue Jackson’s chameleon with two big horns and huge eyes sitting on the branch in front of me.  He much have been up in the canopy and taken an exciting ride down to the ground on the branch.

    This photo shows the high point on the property.  The entire property is on catchment water and has no utilities.  The water tank in the foreground gravity feeds down to the camp where I was staying, the tarp down the hill.  The right side of the photo is a section of guava that has been completely been cleared and is now open for mowing and fencing.  In most spots we cleared shaded alleys for the fencing so that mowing wouldn’t be necessary.  Chuck has planted many cedars and eucalyptus on the edges of the property where guava has been cleared for wind break, and as eventual lumber.  We took down a few eucalyptus, in the five year old range that were fifty plus feet to use for building a catchment roof.  He also had some beautiful cedar stumps  he was using for the foundation of a gate house.

 

 

The cacao flowers are amazing, so small and right on the trunks of the trees.  The pods start out as perfect miniatures and then grow to about the size of a delicata winter squash.  When the pods are ripe they’re harvested and cut open.  The beans are emptied into bins where they are fermented for about a week.

 

After being fermented they are laid out on screens to dry.  The dried beans are roasted and then hulled.  Then they are conched and mixed with the other ingredients to make them into bars.  The chocolate is tempered in a large holding tank and then pumped out into molds.  The photos probably just look like a bunch of big machines but they are actually quite small as far as the chocolate industry goes, about as small as you can get really.

 

 

One of the most encouraging things about visiting Hawaii was seeing that, like most other places I’ve been visiting, there seems to be a strong and growing awareness of the benefits of local and sustainable food production.  I hope this trend continues.  It seems hard to imagine that the island might be able to feed itself again one day but before European contact the population of the islands could have been over 800,000 and totally self sustaining in every way.  Today the population is roughly 1.3 million so perhaps that is still too large for total self sufficiency, but there is still huge potential for growth in the local food movement there.