Pictures from around the farm

Were bringing blogs back! Yeah! Okay, we don't want to overload you with blogs all of a sudden, but we are so excited that we figured out how to work this thing again.

This post is going to excite all of you foodies and gardening nuts. Here are some photos from a day in the life of a wwoofer at Hale Akua Garden Farm.



Beets! Mississippi Market represent



Big beautiful beets!



We sell Turmeric locally, and also to Rainbow Grocery coop in San Francisco



Chard grown in joe's garden, lehua





Beets and fennel



Lovely Grace garden



Ginger drying in the seedling room



Joe has harvested hundreds of pounds of Ginger!



Biochar demonstration at the Ma'a Conference. http://www.mauialohaaina.org/schedule.htm



This is the view we wake up to every morning from our room!



This is our swimming hole which sits on top of a 200 foot waterfall!



Vegan chocolates from friends back in MN!



The parents!



the rejects :(

Nearing the end

With only two weeks left on the farm I put myself up pretty bad. Now we know are sickles are sharp after one sliced clear to the bone on my ankle.




Chels has been taking good care of me!



Last weekend we spent a few days with the newlyweds on their honeymoon. We started with a tour of the farm, followed by a hike through a bamboo forest, and then we went to a barefoot bar on the westside for happyhour. The next day we went snorkeling at a few great spots south of Makena. Mahalo Tamma and Fitz for the great weekend.



Fitz admiring the view from the condo.

Below are a few pictures of our most recent trip to Kipahulu.





Chelsea and Lala on our hike to Waimoku Falls in Kipahulu



One of the places we camped in Kipahulu, "coconut grove"





Waking up and watching the sunrise in paradise



Playing around in the amazing banyan trees



Now that I finally found out how to upload pictures from my damn iPod hopefully we can catch you all up on some of our past journeys.
Love,
joe and chelsea

Crazy new fruits!

Hello family and friends! Since chels has been doing the posts as of lately, I decided maybe I should do one too. What could I talk about? Oh, I know, all of the amazing fruits we have been eating here! 

Okay, here is a list of fruits we have been devouring.

Coconuts: around these parts people call me "coconut Joe", and even "coco-dill-nuts". Fresh coconuts are probably the most delicious things on planet earth! I usually try to eat one a day. I have recently started making coconut hashbrowns. I have gotten pretty good at handling a machete!

Lilikoi: otherwise known as passionfruit. Please see our good friend cheezle's blog post about the three kinds we have.
 http://dembedirtytoes.blogspot.com/2009/11/ll-lilikool-ladies-love-lilikoi.html

Ice cream banana: large slight vanilla tasting banana. Mana foods in paia have these

Apple bananas: These are what we have on the farm, hundreds of them. They are oh so delicious and have been the base of so many delicious banana breads and muffins

Cuban bananas: naturally, these babies are red. we only have one tree on the farm. Good flavor, same size as apple bananas. 
 
Rombutans: spikey little ufo lychees! Pretty tasty! Wikipedia these guys

Atemoya: cross between a sweetsop and a cherimoya. 

Longan: another type of lychee. Really good taste and grape/ eyeball texture.

Cherimoya: our new favorite! Cut it in half and spoon it right out, or blend it up and put in the freezer for a half hour! Yum! The outside of the fruit has a strange resemblance to reptile leather. Rumor has it these are good after taking mushrooms 
 
Cactus fruit: or prickly pear. Interesting taste

Malabar chestnut: We have a couple trees on the property.

Persimmons: Oh my! These buggers are awesome! I like them when they are still a little hard 

Ice cream bean: What a treat these are! Long pods containing 4 to 10 black seeds inside. The vanilla tasting fruit surrounds the seeds and it is so delectable!

Durian: lala bought two at Mana Foods that she shared with us. They were about ten dollars each. Really rich, and full of flavor. Extremely ripe smell.
 
Guava: These are seriously everywhere. Nobody eats them because there are so many and they are not that great compared to all of the other fruits.

Strawberry guava: These guavas are awesome! They are small in size and red. Like guavas though, there are a lot of trees

Avocados: !!!! Everywhere! We have arouns three varieties on the farm. The normal small ones we get at the co-op in Mn, and bigger more buttery ones that turn purple when they are ripe. There is also a variety that is as big as your head. 

Tangelo: we have a couple trees on the property, they are best used for fresh squeezed orange juice in my opinion.

Tangerines: we have a tree that is going off right now. They are so good, they make great snacks. I take these with on weekend adventures.

Starfruit: when green tastes like green apple. Also good with trader vics rum!

Breadfruit: lala has prepared this a few different ways now. They are really tasty when they get overripe, and you can make a custard out of them.

Papaya: two kinds on our property. 

Mangoes: local and delicious. The trees are all just starting to flower again!

Eggfruit: another wierdo fruit. Orange skin and flesh with a sweet taste and yolk texture. 

Also been eating fresh ginger, tumeric, and sugarcane from the garden!

I wish I could have posted some pics of all these great fruits, but please look them up yourself and see how beautiful they all are.

well hello again.

so, still no picture function available but yall are lucky i have the copy/paste shit down so i can at least copy a *u* because a ton of the keys still dont work. including the apostrophes and parentheses so thats why i dont have any, i really do know where they go, i like grammar and aint stupid (most of the time anyway).

so christmas is over! new years is next! my parents get here wednesday afternoon and we are going to take a few days off of the farm to hang out! we are VERY excited. gary and cindy! i am assuming there will be lots of wine and booze and beaches and lounging and i am looking forward to it.

today was just another monday on the farm. SLOW. mondays are typically compost days and today was no exception. first joe, jared and i flipped one of the compost piles in lehua. the pile is totally ready, it IS compost. usually when we flip them they are still kind of smelly and wet and there are tons of big sticks, chunks of crap and bugs. this one was basically dirt (GOOD dirt!). easy to flip (flipping consists of moving the pile from one spot to the spot directly next to it...putting the top on the bottom...etc. self-explanatory). THEN we got to build a new pile. it was a good one, almost six feet tall!! hopefully it will be a good one. we were a little disappointed today because the first pile we were going to flip was not good, it was just a pile of shit still (and woodchips). it was the pile jared, sarah, joe and i made our first week here. beginners. we concluded we did not have enough nitrogen (green leafy stuff) in the pile. too much carbon. oh well...next time.

well...thats about all that happened today. OH maybe not. joe and i also went around and harvested a shitload of avocados and clementines, a few passionfruits (they are almost done for the season and i want to put a sad smiley face here but the colon key doesnt work either, great) and other unknown oranges, and ONE starfruit (because a neighbor keeps taking them all, bastard we are gonna get him, maybe steal them back while he is at yoga).

it was fun. we have a new guy here, his name is david. and a girl that came almost three weeks ago, lala, and they are both doing the FARM challenge. only eat stuff from the farm. it is so easy here, we just get lazy of course. anyway, their enthusiasm for the challenge has made me realize how fricken lucky we are to have all of these vegetables and fruits all around us. there are seriously a hundred avocados in the tree right outside one of the gardens. how much are those back at the coop now? hmmmmmm? exactly, not free. this place is amazing. we are in a tropical paradise overlooking the green hills of maui, the ocean and a 300 ft waterfall. SPOILED!

since i havent figured out how to get pictures back on here, i fired up my old webshots account that surprisingly still exists! NO WAY. havent used it in like four plus years. here it is...ill start posting pics here! love everyone and MERRY christmas (late!)

http://community.webshots.com/user/chels82666


chels

works? doesnt work? who knows.

so, i have been having technical difficlties lately. one being my keys are starting to not work (the u being one of them, seven key, apostrophe key, eqals key, mins key...etc) it is very frstrating. maybe its ants? i saw ants crawling out of my computer a couple times, assholes. if it was, they have no idea the damage they have caused. AHHHHH. anyway, besides that severe issue. my internet doesnt work correctly. most of the pages i open crash. i got this one open by putting some /html after the link and sometimes it works. it took about 2 hours to figure that one out. still cant post pictues though. BuMMER.

so, that is why we havent posted in so long! computers suck! we are going to call joes trusty brother michael and he will solve everything because he is a genius (right mike?).

all in all, the farms still good, having fun, nice weather (way nicer than mn, ha!) and its almost christmas!!!!!!!! yay!!!!

tons of pictures to come!

love, chels and joe

the rains have arrived...

this is what today was like in a nut shell
sun hemp sprout forest!
joey planing MORE sun hemp
lettuce, yum
hoein in some rye seeds
joe and his sprouts
our cover crop seeds! mustard, rye, alfalfa, clover and sun hemp
chard!

me spreading some cover crop seeds in the never-ending rain


forgive us followers, it has been two weeks since our last blog post. OOPS. so, we got to the island and it was sunny and there were a few rains here and there, but basically no rain. sometimes a few sprinkles at night. and we were warned of the rains. and finally, they have arrived. today we spent the ENTIRE day working in the rain. it never stopped! it went from a sprinkle, to pouring, to misting, to pouring, sprinkling, regular rain, sprinkling, cats and dogs...etc. it was ridiculous. we were FREEEEEZIIIINg good thing we have a hot tub we can sit in for an hour and get our body temperature back to normal.

one of the most exciting things that has happened in the last two weeks is that we MOVED INTO A ROOM!!!! finally. just before the rains started. it's not just rain, it is the wind as well. SO WINDY here. i guess we are on an island in the middle of the ocean, not much for windbreaks out there. we even have a bathroom in our room! no midnight bathroom searching excursions alone in the dark, scared, almost falling into the pool. terrifying.

last week we had a "spa night" where a lady that works on the farm, Mohini, brought a bunch of crazy shit (clay salts, fennel, basil, ginger, hawaiian clay, cocoa, tons of other spices, flours and vegetables...) and we mixed up some body and face scrubs! it was awesome (the picture with all the bowls on the table...)

farm work has been going well. a few weeks ago we learned that all of the soil on the farm is shit (or lackthereof...ha!) and we pretty much have to start over. the managers ordered 40 tons of compost to try to enrich the soil and kill some of the billions of pests we have that have gone crazy over the last two years. we have also been mulching and planting a lot of cover crops (sun hemp, clover, rye, alfalfa and mustard). they grow so fast! it is exciting to see them all sprout. we have pictures! harvests have dwindled significantly but this makes it much more manageable and less chaotic every friday. we still feel like killing each other after friday harvest. it wears off in a few hours. we still have carrots, beets, okra, eggplant, basil, parlsey, cilantro, taro, chard and some kale. we should be starting to harvest the turmeric and ginger soon!

last weekend we traveled to the western part of the island. we drove around the north shoreline first and made our way around the entire side of the island. it was the craziest road we have ever been on, makes the hana highway look like cake. we stopped at a few lookouts, the nakalele blowhole, a cute valley town, saw a mushroom rock, a sweet beach (DT Fleming beach) with good waves for surfing if we surfed, and ended with a six pack of maui brewing co. beer on the beach for frisbee and a sunset. we pretended we were real tourists instead of having to go back to the rainy, superass windy other side of the island with lots of bugs and mud and farmwork. we were with a new guy at the farm, thackary (who also had the rental car!!), sarah and jared. the day was incredible. as if it wasn't good enough, we also got half way home, decided we didn't want to cook and turned around to eat at flatbread (a pizza place in town, doesn't beat pizza luce though, no way)! it was great. the only negative was that when we got back we watched apocalypto which is a horrible movie. mel gibson blows worse than the blowhole we saw on the northwest shore today. quote of the day by thackary: the nakalele blowhole is nature's bidet.

joey swimming on one of the last days we remember sunshine :( haven't been in the pool since (only the hot tub, it's rough)
grasshopper-gecko showdown on the ceiling of our tent. gecko ended up backing up and disappearing, wuss.
joey gettin some more coconuts
town view on our saturday escapade to the west part of the island





the nakalele blowhole


taro growing in the water! our taro on our farm is NOT grown in water (except when it floods)

halloweeeeeeeeeeen

soooooooooooo. last friday we went into town (paia) and a bunch of us ate at flatbread. it is a cool pizza place with a stone oven and good beer...etc. they also buy some of our produce from the farm...including the carrots that joe had harvested and cleaned THAT morning. it was pretty cool...eating it hours later. anyway...we got the awesome organic salad and the vegan pizzzza yum.

saturday was halloween...joe was a pirate and i was supposed to be his parrot, but i looked ridiculous. a smurf/clown maybe. the plan was to go to lahaina where there is usually a crazy halloween bash. wasted people everywhere, craziness. i wasn't that excited, kind of scared, as usual. people told us it has been lame the last two years because they are crackin down on the craziness. we hitched there and yes, there were a bunch of wasted people there. we were being corralled down the sidewalks by people and police. then we went into a bar and it was like spring break halloween maui. we weren't feeling it. so we left the group we were in (they had tons of fun) and hitched back to paia where it was hoppin! there was a drum circle, dancing, coolness everywhere. it was our style halloween. shoulda stayed in town!! all in all, we got to sleep in our tent instead of a random beach/alley which we had planned on. good halloween! warmer than yours! HA.

anyway...sunday we first stopped at twin falls (which is the last photo...) and then we went to a neighboring farm and got a little tour and then went swimming in the waterfall pools they have close to the property!! it was awesome. joe said it was a waterfall amusement park. there are the princess pools (which aren't very swim-worthy more for wading), then higher up is the queen's pool which was awesome, and then the KING'S POOL which was incredible joe says and it has a swing to jump in the water with...i guess it was amazing (sarah and i didn't go to the king's pool because it was late in the afternoon and there were 800 billion mosquitoes). it is our new favorite hangout. there were also coffee plants on the farm tour! we don't have coffee on our farm :(