Mamaki -Homegrown Tea

We have a tree growing wild on the farm that is called mamaki. It is endemic to Hawaii and historically has been used for a variety of medicinal purposes. But I just like using mamaki as a pleasant tea to drink. A tea made from the leaves is mild and tastes like a traditional green tea without any bitterness. 

In the above photo, the plant is wet from a rain. That's why the leaves look shiny. Mamaki is related to nettles and you can see the similarity in the leaves. Happily there are no stinging hairs! 

Because I have numerous mamaki plants around the place, I haven't bothered to formally cultivate it. Baby trees just happen to pop up here be there, and if it happens in a good location, I'll mark the spot so that I don't accidently hack the little sapling down. My original tree came up right beside the house, not the best place for a small tree.

 But I wanted the mamaki, so I left it there. It's roots came out from the base of one of the house foundation blocks, so I was adverse to digging it up to move it. Thus it stayed. But now I plan to hack it down to the ground after I harvest all the good leaves. I've got plenty of others growing around, most likely keiki from this very first tree since the birds eat the fruits and thus spread the seeds. 

Ok, the tree is destined to go. But  first I'm harvesting the leaves for future cups of tea. I plan to do the harvest over a period of several days, simply because I don't have enough room to dry all those leaves at once. 

I'm picking the nicest, healthiest looking leaves and tips of branches. The tips I'll dry "as it", then once dry & crispy I'll crumble off the leaves leaving behind the stems. For the individual leaves, I'll snip off the stems before drying. 

Once washed, I place the leaves on a rack well above my woodstove. One of my friends gave me this rack, an old kitchen pot hanger. I find it works great for drying stuff above the stove.........wet hats, shoes, jackets, etc. I often leave my bamboo steamer there so that it doesn't get moldy. 

When I have food to dry, I lay out a clean towel across the rack. The mamaki leaves dry beautifully this way. 

Once dry, I'll store them in a plastic ziplock bag in the freezer until I need some for tea. Mamaki tea with a leaf of mint added makes a wonderful cup of tea. 

Double Cropping

To make efficient use of available garden space, I sometimes double plant crops. By this I mean that I grow two crops in the same garden bed. Often one is a vertical growing crop and the other a ground hugged. Or one is a quick growing crop and the other a slow grower. These photos are taken in the community garden on my farm, where gardeners not only learn but experiment. 

In the above photo, potatoes were planted down the center of a bed. I let them sprout well before seeding the edges with peas. The peas were not planted very thickly so that they wouldn't shade out the potato plants as their vines grew. Here's another view.....

If I time it just right, the peas will be done harvesting just when the potatoes are ready to be dug up. 

The way these two crops grow together is that the peas must be a vining type, in this case, Sugar Snaps. As the vines run up the trellis, the pea plants no longer rely upon the lower leaves, thus giving space below for the potato plants. By the time the vines are up the trellis, the potato plants are filling out and getting bushy. So neither crop is interfering with the other's space. I choose a potato variety that has small bushy plants. 

The only tricky part is getting mulch around the potato plants. But the fencing has wide spacing, so I can apply mulch by the fistful. A bit slower than the usual dump method, but it works.

Another double planting opportunity is with the pineapple beds. Pineapples are slow growers, plus they have narrow leaves, making for plenty of space around them. It's a good spot for growing small crops, like radishes and short topped beets. It's simple to tuck in a few seeds here and there, 

Windstorm Postscript - Why Trees Talk

Several people have asked me, "What is making the trees pop, crack, groan, and chatter?" No, it's not the branches rubbing together. Nor is it one tree scraping against another. And it's not a hanging branch blowing up against the trunk. It actually is the internal breaks in the tree itself. Incredible and hard to believe, but I've seen it with my own eyes. I don't know if this happens to other trees, but it has happened to these particular eucalyptus trees on my farm. 

Just about all the time one chainsaws down a tree, the truck cross section is smooth and beautiful. I've always like the look of the wood, so it's something I take notice to. So I was pretty surprised when this tree was dropped. The trunk showed internal cracks. They initially weren't as obvious as in the following photos, but within 24 hours the cracks widen considerably and were very easy to see. 

This particular tree had its crown broken by the wind, with part of it twisted right off. I saw some of it happen as the wind swirled, twisting the tree this way, then that way. Amazing wind. I had no idea that the twisting had internally damaged the tree until the trunk was cut into sections. Whoa! 

So I figure that as a strong wind blows a tree like this around, the wood tends to rub along the cracks. That's what creates the sound. 

Now that we've taken some of the noisy trees down, I see that cracks exist mainly in the branches, not the trunks. And now looking up in the canopy several weeks after the storm, I'm seeing that numerous branches are wilting and dying. Perhaps the twisting and cracking was severe enough to cause the affected branches to finally start dying. I'm no expert on trees, so it's just a guess. 

Creating a Path Thru the Woods

I've decided on the location of the new rabbit hutches. It's up near the house along a section that is not being used for anything else, not even pasture. The ground had been cleared as part of a perimeter roadway by a previous owner, so all the major trees are gone. It's almost all shade all day long, perfect for the rabbits. Being within 200 feet of the house makes for easy access for taking care of them. But the only glitch is that there is a section of woods between me and that stripe of land. So what to do? Create a pathway for access. 

I first decided I wanted the path wide enough to drive the ATV on. So I scouted out a line where I wouldn't need to chainsaw down any major trees, plus didn't have super major boulders. I didn't mind if the path wasn't straight. If it meandered a bit through the woods, that actually would be rather nice. 

The other problem I have is that the area is full of strawberry guava saplings. I actually encourage these saplings and harvest them for various uses. I coppiced the original trees years ago and now keep a thick growth of new wood so that the poles will be reasonably straight and tall. I don't mind sacrificing a swath in order to create a pathway, but the thick growth just makes for one more obstacle to deal with. 

Once I got an idea of where the path should be, I started removing the guava saplings right down to the ground. The ground surely isn't level here so there are holes and valleys that need filling in. Ah-ha, rocks! Yes, all the rocks that I'm removing from my patio project can be used as fill for my pathway project. Ha! 

So this is what it looks like after a couple hours of work. Yes, I got sidetracked off the patio project, but such is life. I removed a bundle of saplings out of the path and dumped wheelbarrow loads of rocks. So far so good. 

Yesterday morning I wanted to harvest more sapling poles and got carried away. Hack, snip, drag, drag. By mid-afternoon I had quite a pile of useable poles. All the little stuff got chopped up and moved to a biotrash pit. I was pretty pleased with the progress. 

Today I moved more rock to level more of the path and used some gravel to smooth out the rough spots. It looks good in the photo above, but what you don't see is that there are still plenty of mini hills and valleys to deal with, plus one boulder that needs a date with a sledgehammer. So the pathway still needs plenty of wheelbarrow loads of rock. But I can start using the ATV to deliver that rock to where they're  needed. Far easier than using a wheelbarrow! 

So the progress in this project will now slow down, because it's now just several trips of rock moving. How boring. But when the path is fairly finished, or when I start using the sledgehammer, I'll post an update. 

Standing Mulch

One of my friends is fond of describing my grass and weeds as being "standing mulch". Once mowed, it's mulch, but while it is still growing and green, it's standing mulch. I take advantage of standing mulch whenever I can. Other people seem to be quick to chop things down and haul the debris off to the dump. I'm more apt to utilize that debris. Let me show you an example. 

A couple of weeks ago I harvested a patch of taro that was ready. This gave me a number of "starts" for replanting. Since I had quite a few starts, I decided to create another bed. So I planted these taro starts and lightly mulched them with forest litter, then watered them well.  After 2-3 weeks the plants were growing new leaves and looking pretty good. Time for more mulching. 

Some small weeds were popping up, so first I removed them, adding then to the mulch layer. Now I needed mulch material. I could have created grass clippings, or I could have raked up some forest debris. But growing right next to this taro patch was some weedy brush that I wanted to get out of there so that I could expand this taro bed. 

So the simplest thing to do was chop that greenery up and use it as the mulching material. Those bushes and weeds are standing mulch for this taro bed. 

Using a handheld pruning shears, I grabbed handfuls of greenery and cut it. I could have used a machete but I don't trust myself with one anywhere near a tree. Wild women with a big knife! Eek!  I  just laid the chopped greenery around the bases of the taro plants. I'll let it dry out over the next 3 days then do another layer. Then next week, another light layer. Quick and simple. As the taro needs more mulch, I'll just hack more of the brush down. This creates easily accessible mulch plus removes brush so that I can make a larger garden. Super! 

The Next Project - Outdoor Patio

In the midst of all my other happenings, I've started the next project -- making the outdoor patio using the round slabs we've been creating out of the tree trucks. This is going to be a slow project because its going to take time prepping the area and making the tree rounds. 

First step, remove the bushes and flatten the site. When we moved here, I created a flower garden here. I used large rocks (small boulders) to make a low wall and outline the site, I filled in the bowl with lots of compost, making a fertile soil mix. Now I want to reclaim the soil and use it elsewhere. Around here, soil is hard to come by. Burying good soil under a patio is insanity. Best not admit doing that for you're sure to be labelled a lunatic. Daft for sure. People would be horrified at such wastage. So I'm currently digging it all out and moving it to other gardens. 

Because the house is perched on the edge of a lava flow, there is no room to get heavy equipment in the scoop up the soil and flatten the area. And I truly mean "no room". Even a mini excavator couldn't make it. Thus this is a job to be done by hand.....my forte. Give me a pile of buckets, a handpick, and a shovel and I'll move this "mountain".   :) 

Gee, I hope all this exercise means that I'll lose a few pounds. This has got to be better than a membership to a health club. 

Post Storm - Finally the Worse is Over

I knew it was going to be a long haul, cleaning up this windstorm mess. And it proved to be true. But we finally have all the damaged trees down, at least I think we have. Not all cut up and the slash hauled away, but at least down. My goal was to drop visually damaged tress, but also those the had audibly detectable cracking. The wind the past two days swayed the trees about, causing internally damaged ones to either pop, creak, groan, moan, or chatter. 

The problem now is that we have several very tall trees that are loners. They have lost their neighboring support system. That means that they could very well blow over in the next heavy wind, which could be next week or maybe 20 years from now. We just can't predict that. 

Since all the loner trees are eucalyptus, we'll most likely cut them down over time. A few are in difficult locations, so those we won't attempt to drop. We will let Mother Nature deal with them since those trees are far enough away from buildings and the gardens that they won't damage anything of value. I just have to remember not to build anything within their reach. 

I'm gradually cutting up the trunks and getting them stored for future use. The slash piles will take a few more weeks of work to get them all hauled into the biotrash pits. 

Throughout all this work I've managed to only injure myself once. No cuts, scrapes, or bruises. What a surprise! But I did drop a chunk of heavy wood on my foot and broke a toe. Eeeee! That hurt! Luckily it wasn't a big toe, so it will heal up. Not the first time I've smashed a toe, but I hope it's the last.