OKK Open Air Market

In the past 3 weeks, all my spare time has been devoted to a community service project. You see, I somehow got into the position of being made the market manager for our town's new "farmers market". By the way, since not all the vendors offer farm products, I'm calling this an open air market instead of farmers market, but it's basically the same thing.

The Ace Hardware, who previously allowed the market to set up on their grounds, withdrew the offer. Ace contacted the area's community service non-profit group, O'Ka'u Kakou (OKK for short), who decided to take the market. So the past several weeks has been a mad scramble to assign a manager, design the market, prepare the grounds, do the paperwork, make signs, etc. This turned out to be a lot of time and work. 

The end result made it all worth it. Opening day saw 28 vendors set up, more than the original market. The town's coffee truck was there. A local group provided music. Everyone told me that it felt like a festival and they loved it. 

There were a few glitches that were fixed as the day went on, and the first day revealed a few design flaws. Nothing serious. Just needs a bit of tweaking. 

Wanna try a cup of Ka'u coffee? 

The second day is rapidly approaching. 8 more vendors want to join the fun. I'm looking forward to day 2, and simply hope that it doesn't rain. If you're in the area, you really should stop by. You can enjoy browsing the booths...talking with craftsmen, farmers, artists...sampling the baked goods and lunch fare...getting a drink at the coffee truck. The market will be adding picnic tables, so please take a seat under the shade trees and enjoy the music. Maybe we can convince some more of our talented residents to come out and provide entertainment. Any interested jugglers, mimes, hula dancers, street actors, and others out there?

Numerous flavors of island honey. Free taste testing! 

One of our vegetables ladies. 

Jams made from local Ka'u fruits. 

Fresh baked breads, a local favorite. 

Local grown mushrooms. What a treat! 

What could be better than fresh squeezed orange juice from our own local oranges! 

Fresh Mexican food.

One of the local musicians. They were great! 

No More Tall Banana Trees For Me

I decided to eliminate my really tall banana trees. First of all, they are difficult to tend. As the trunk grows taller, removing dead leaves and killing any banana roller caterpillars becomes impossible. Plus harvesting the bananas becomes dangerous for me. The trunks weight a lot, and I'm not always successful in cutting them down gently. One of these days I can see myself getting hurt while trying to harvest a banana bunch.

The problem that tipped my decision was that the coqui frogs were getting into them. With trees that tall, it was impossible for me to spray the frogs. So these tall bananas have to go. 

With chainsaw in hand, I buzzed the trees down. Cutting the trunks into manageable pieces, I carted off the trunks and leaves to the compost bins. I filled 11 bins!!! Needless to say, I didn't do this all in one day. Nope. It took several days of hard work. 

Digging out the mats would be quite an effort. Rather than doing that, I plan to simply harvest the regrowth for the compost bins. Whenever a banana tree gets too tall, I'll cut it up for biomass. If the whole mat eventually dies, well so be it.

This clump is beside the chicken pen. I also cut down the clump on the far side of the pen too. 

Banana patch along the driveway is regrowing.  

Since deciding to eliminate the tall varieties, I've been making an effort to propagate the dwarf ones. So rather than cutting away unwanted keikis, I've been digging them up and starting new banana patches instead. With the coqui frog invasion, I've shifted to short banana varieties. 

Hawaiian Landrace Limas

Just harvested my first beans from the Hawaiian landrace lima bean vines. As you may recall, I planted 11 beans in one of the greenhouses. That was way back on July 7th. Some seeds didn't germinate because they were old, so I ended up with 6 robust plants.

Those 6 plants took ever the entire 10' by 20' greenhouse. You talk about being an aggressive vine! I could have been more attentive and trained the vines better, but after harvesting the other limas on the left hand side of the greenhouse, I took the lazy approach and let the Hawaiian limas on the righthand side just cross over the ceiling and take over the lefthand side as well. 

So it took 6 1/2 months before the first pods dried down for harvest. Wow, that's a heck of a long time.

The pods I harvested contained 2 to 3 beans. 

In addition, this variety to big on growing leaves and vine, but very skimpy on producing pods. There's not many pods on these monster sized plants, at least not what one would expect as compared to other lima varieties. 

But the variety is unique. The lima beans are very interesting to look at. Large. Not all that plump. Longer than wide. Beautifully marked with black and white. It's the color and markings that I find intriguing. 

So pretty! 

If I were growing this to be a staple crop, I'd need to grow acres of them because of the poor yield. Other limas are far more productive. But I still like this variety. I think that I'll continue to grow it. It will be a novelty crop, rather than a staple.