A Flurry of Activity

A Flurry of Activity was Originally Posted on January 27, 2008 by lavarock

Lately there has been a flurry of activity and thus, no blog entries.

While my co-worker was away I took over extra hours at the condos, checking people in and performing island orientation duties. Each Monday we hold a breakfast event where we serve a breakfast and tell our guests some island history and what to see and do here. I serve my Kona Coffee, we prepare baked goods and offer fruit and juice.

Our Kona Coffee Farmers Association put on a fair at the old airport pavilion, offering information to farmers and allowing local vendors a place to talk about their products and services. Although I was working that day I did attend long enough to drop off a membership list and grab a quick slice or two of pizza! It was very well attended. There were some demonstrations and handouts and discussions.

Just after Thanksgiving, my friend Sandra went to Australia and visited a kennel there. She purchased two chocolate female puppies and recently went to Honolulu to pick them up. Unfortunately she had to make a second trip because the breeder miscalculated their age by a day and thus the airline would not carry them until they were older than 8 weeks. The dogs are named Franny and Zoe and are very cute, as you can expect with puppies and especially chocolate Labs. Their photos are now up on the AlohaLabradors.Com website. Also there are other dogs from the recent litters. A few of the puppies are about ready to be adopted.

My dog Koa is doing fine. I don’t think he will get much taller but now will start to fill out. I have not weighed him recently, but is over 55 pounds. He still can’t get into the truck easily because of the door height, so I continue to lift him in!

At the condos the corporate types decided they wanted to come out and fix up the office. They decided that there should be a local server to hold our shared documents. To accomplish this they installed a 3 foot rack on the wall in the office at eye height. You have to envision this, a giant black rack on the wall of what looks like a living room with 2 desks. They are now talking about putting in a counter just like a hotel lobby. What used to look like a nice living room where we greeted out quests will soon look like the smallest hotel lobby in the world. You would think they could have hidden the rack under the soon to be installed counter. The back room (what would have been a bedroom, will be turned into an office. There was not enough airflow there to put the computer and equipment.

Rather than use a giant server for storage, and when I say giant I mean PC sized; they COULD have done what I did at home and just added an external disk drive. Because I keep losing disks to heat, I purchased 3 external network disk drives which connect to a router or switch or hub. I’ll place them in the coffee bean storage room where the air conditioner is. Then all I need to do is run a LAN cable upstairs to be able to access them. The computer does not care if they are 3 feet away or 30 feet away.

I was finally able to get a lot done on the farm. It has been a long time coming and hopefully I can shuffle enough money around to get everything finished.

As many of you know, I am part of a project which offsets part of my cost to install water catchment tanks; thus keeping me from having to use locally supplied county water for irrigation. The funds have specific purposes and must be carefully accounted for. Meanwhile, I am having other projects simultaneously performed here which are outside the contract. All of them are geared towards getting lots more coffee planted and becoming a real coffee farm.

Last December I had 500 macadamia nut trees removed, which left about 5 acres clear of anything but rocks. I had a new driveway cut in, but it is not working as well as I had hoped. It is not packed down and has no dirt on it. Thus, when I use it, rocks move and bunch up. I’ll have to figure out some other cure. Also, in the past year, I got a lot of brush growing in that 5 acre area. Included were probably 50 or more papaya trees which in the past year grew to 12 feet tall and have produced some of the largest papayas I have ever seen! Some papayas were larger than large grapefruit! I have been feeding some to Koa and giving some away. I had a guy come in and clear the rest of the growth (except for the papaya trees) and am starting fresh again.

The excavator guy came by and laid the foundation for 4 water tanks (each 25′ by 6′ tall). There is a base course and then small gravel on top. When the tanks are assembled, there will be a sand cushion in the bottom of the case on which the water liner will sit.

When the pads were done, some workers came by and laid out a grid on two acres for my coffee. They are spraying orange dots in a 5 foot by 10 foot grid and the excavator uses a rock crusher (like a long finger) to poke into the rock, crushing it in a cylinder so that a coffee tree will plant there. There are currently 1200 of the needed 1500 holes dug as of today. I have been taking photos, but have had no time to put them online.

I finally got a quote from the water tank people and need to order the tanks. I have to have the pad part and the tank part completed and paid for before I can request reimbursement for it. The hole punching part comes out of my own pocket, but had to be paid upfront. Thus I have lots of money paid out but still have more to pay before I get that nice payment back!

The coffee plants I was starting in the nursery did not get the attention they needed and besides are pretty well root bound. These are plants I was raising from existing coffee trees that were on the property. With only me to schedule all the projects and work on them, some items just get left behind or never finished. New trees from a grower will cost at least $4 each and I currently need about 1200, so $5000 out of pocket for something I hoped to get for free. I decided on a type of planting and pruning which should be easier than old Kona-style pruning. I’ll plant in hedges and stump 1 row out of every three each year. Because the plants are closer together, The yield is about the same, but pruning is lots simpler. To get started however, I don’t plant all the rows the first year, I plant 2 and leave the 3rd one empty, then fill that row in the next year. That gives me a fuller crop to start than what would be even more obvious, that is planting the 1st and 4th rows the first year, the 2nd and 5th the next year and the 3rd and 6th the last year. It gets complicated so don’t expect to fully understand it. It is just that if I’m going to stump every 3rd row each year in rotation, I get into trouble if all the rows start out at the same height the first year. In the first and second years no tree is high enough to be stumped and the in the third year, all the trees are read but the cycle of trimming would have me wait another two years to stump that 3rd row and by then it would be very tall. Anyway, suffice it to say, not all rows get planted right away.

I have been helping the Kona Outdoor Circle on their website and doing a bit of work in their front office. Hey are in process of getting new office staff. Also they are about ready for their Pua Plantasia event which is a giant plant sale, auction and dinner.

At the condos, my co-worker Courtney is moving up north to Hawi and just gave her notice. My manager is out on disability and I am fighting a bout of sore throat. I am current resting at home and on antibiotics. I can barely talk and those who know me can attest, that is a very difficult time for me

I have been helping a neighbor with his website and a friend recently called me to ask for help with one he wants to set up.

By now you have heard (or perhaps watched) the Georgia/Hawaii bowl game. I guess it was too much to have hoped that the Warriors could have come from such a low rank to get into the bowl to begin with, then to suffer such a defeat. They kept their heads up even when their star player was pummeled from every side by Georgi.

The state and county and others are all investigating the water distribution channels on the island. Next to my property the road was covered with water when we got 7” of rain in a few hour period last year. Although there were many problems because of the flooding, still, if this had happened anywhere else but here, it would have been a disaster. Our island is quite porous and it will drain quickly straight down if given half a chance.

We had a guy in shorts up on Mauna Kea go out hiking at the 10,000 foot elevation and hours later a blizzard and many inches of snow fell above him. They never found him.

It is a unique place in which I live. We have 2000 degree lava flowing just 45 miles away from where a guy froze to death in a blizzard. We have 11 of the worlds 13 climate zones and it seems like Disneyland when you drive around the island, passing from one climate to another as quickly as you would go from Frontierland to Tomorrowland. We could just as easily have a massive earthquake as a tsunami. We are in the middle of the Pacific and the most remote landmass in the world.

And we would rather be in no other place!

Until next time…. Aloha!