Category Archives: gardening
Fruit Fly Warfare
It isn’t my nature, but I have been slinking around like a true guerilla with my sites on the fruit fly population. I wrote a 4 page essay on my findings, that I will spare you for now. I will unleash it on my readers soon enough. As some of you bundle up, and pour through your seed catalogs in hopes of Spring, perhaps dreaming about lands where there there is no true Winter, let me remind you, here in Hawaii we have the same brutal Agricultural pests as the Congo. I wish I were joking. One soon learns why 90% of our veggies are shipped in from Fruit fly free localities. Here in Hawaii we are in the heart of yet another fruit fly “bloom” (they can have 8 to 9 cycles within the Calendar year. ) I refuse to be defeated. Who knows, maybe outsmarting tropical pests will be my legacy. It isn’t glamorous, but it is true. OK back to the war…
Three waves of determined effort are necessary, and well, a continuous parts of your growing practice here in Alohaland.
Clean crop practice: I bag the stung squash in reused metallic coffee bags that my Starbuck’s Grounds for your Garden come in. I then place them in the sun for a couple hours before they are dropped into a sealed bucket where they will die and decompose in the weeks again.
Lures: The men are targeted and lured by the use of the right scent for the right fly ( sorry guys.) Though Oriental Fruit fly does not attack squash, they are on the property in large numbers, so I am taking them out for the benefit of someone’s crops. They may be feeding on a neighbor farm. The mean, but gorgeous Melon fly is my leopard spotted enemy. Cure lure is their bait. See reused cup trap image in prior post for the general idea. Homemade traps have cleared hundreds of males from the two varieties, with the bulk being Oriental Fruit Fly.
Bag…no double bag ’em: I have used my fledgling Blue Hubbard as a case study plant, trying out all kinds of strategies. So far, my vote is for a quick, but meaningful hand pollination followed by a parafin wax baggie, topped with a brown paper lunch bag. Driven by scent, this seems to be a good solution so far.
Fish composting and fish emulsion
This week feels like two. It is a hot week here in Hawaii. What better time to be carting about my body weight in fish heads? Yes, you heard me. Alright, so it isn’t an ideal time to be working with raw fish, but opportunity knocked, and I answered. The theme of the week is to make use of even more restaurant waste. What better place to make the most of the discarded fish bits from our beloved Ahi and Mahi Mahi? The Chefs have set me up with enough fish heads to enrich the new farm addition. I am getting my composting game in overdrive with the gloves pulled up high for this messy week….but I am ready and grateful for the challenge. And it should also be noted that I say a small prayer of gratitude for each fish that is added to the soil building project.
Fish composting and fish elulsion making are on the adjenda.
Dream Keeper- A new Hawaii grown variety
Dark green, with light green and gold freckles, Dream Keeper is a new organic squash that I created by cross-pollinating two strong C. Moschata strains. The result…a beauty that is virtually mildew and bug proof without sprays. On the inside she is as gorgeous as a Hawaiian sunset.
Sometime in my lifetime, many farmers forgot how to build soil
For hundreds of years, farmers built the soil as a foundation for the food that fed their families. A foundation for their future. A built-in daily vitamin for themselves that would be harvested in the months ahead. Then something happened when I was still measured in relation to my Gandpa’s knee. There were better ways, they were told. Better? Faster, more….but really it was the point of diminishing returns. More lackluster crops were produced in greater numbers. A strong line was drawn. Agricultural crops were now treated very differently from vegetable gardens. Farmers seemed to hang on to the build the soil method in the vegetable patch that fed their family, and in times of need, their neighbors. Why was that? Was it because that was the domain of the woman of the house? She held onto these methods that are methods that organic farmers still use today. Rotating, covering, mulching…So was it scale that was the issue? Probably. In the never-ending American push that bigger was better, we learned quite late that bigger was simply bigger. And the “better crop” was in the farmer’s own veggie patch.
My Seed Trials and Farm Journal
Chaos and order at the same time…but it worked, and I ate very well this summer
A Beautiful Harvest
starts
Squash and Awe 