This post is probably most interesting to Bea. It’s time to report on the tree babies. A friend told me the adage: Sleep, Creep, Leap. It definitely resonated. I’m surprised I never heard it before. In the first year you plant a tree, it seems to sleep. The second year, its growth creeps. In the third year, it leaps. That might be a little accelerated here in Hawai’i, and it depends on the tree, but it’s an adage that helps with patience.
This year I bought a copy of the Ancient Hawaiian Moon Calendar Related to Fishing and Farming. If we’re going to plant, if we can, we might as well try to time it with when the Ancients would say it’d be a propitious time. The two vertical halves are divided by Wet Season and Dry Season. I tried to find out how to tweak the calendar’s applicability to the Kona Coffee Belt, where we have different rain patterns (our wet season is the rest of the state’s dry season, and vice versa), but couldn’t find anything. So we’re just going strictly by the calendar date, keeping in mind that the column headers, correlating with wet/dry, might not apply. If/when the opportunity arises, I’ll ask an appropriate person who might be able to answer my questions. Maybe someone at the Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden.
Below is a photo gallery of some of the trees we planted two years ago. To see each photo individually and read the captions, click on a photo and use the arrows to go through the gallery. There’s also one photo of the coffee trees planted last year that were challenged by pig attacks and two months of hardly any rain.
If any of you are really into the tree progress (maybe only me, Hubby, Bea, and UH) and want to look back, I had reported on these dates: June 14, 2021; November 29, 2021; and August 8, 2022.
Below are some of the babies we removed from our courtyard pig sanctuary and put into the ground out in the farm (on an auspicious day to the Ancients). The roots were starting to go below their pots, so it was time. I’m curious how the Ceylon cinnamon will do; one of the two seedlings I bought died a few months ago. I read up on how to harvest the bark and coppicing. It’ll be a few years before we reach that point.
We were lucky that we received almost three inches of rain on Thanksgiving evening (we got five inches on Thanksgiving 2020!), a few days after planting. Our visitors from California were excited about the rain. I was amused that the 12 year old boy was excited to check the rain gauge after a couple hours (1.5 inches in about two hours) and the next morning (2.75 inches).
When it rains hard, it’s fun (trust me!) to be able to quantify it. Someone asked on Nextdoor after Thanksgiving, “Curious if anyone knows of a website that updates our local, current rainfall.” The first response was a guy who said he gave up since rainfall differs 1/4 mile north or south. That’s the way I am about weather predictions. It’s so local, I rarely check the prediction. I just take a good look around and conclude that it might rain, and guess when that might happen. Or it might not. In any case, I responded with where one of our two official local rain gauges is, stated my caveats, and suggested the person get an inexpensive rain gauge. Ha ha!
Earlier this month, we had a second, little harvest of calamondin. This time the fruit was ripe. We had to do our first harvest in mid-August because the number of fruit broke the branch. You can see the difference in color (the size were a little larger now, but similar, though the photos are misleading because I filled the frame in both). We wanted to make marmalade again and taste the difference, but in the end we decided to experiment with making preserves, thinking it’d be simpler (it wasn’t).
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’re probably wondering about the pigs, right?! They gave us a longer reprieve over the summer, but the new Three Musketeers have been regularly, but not daily, visiting for over two months. They haven’t been as frustratingly destructive as pigs in the past. Yes, we’ve had more peace with the pigs. I think only one rock has been thrown since we resolved to make peace with them back in March. The young trees and plants we care about are caged in, and all of those have survived. We’ve even removed the cages from a few.
I had this post all ready to go, and now there’s bigger news … stay tuned.
I was in fact wondering about the pigs. 🙂
I hadn’t heard of calamondin before, so had to google it: “This plant is grown more for its looks than for its fruit edibility and performs well as a patio plant or when trimmed as a hedge.” Obviously you’ve eaten it, what do you think?
And this, “If you want to eat the fruit, choose firm, yellow to yellow-orange fruit. Avoid fruit that is soft and over- ripe. The calamondin fruit can take up to a year to ripen into an orange color. But the orange colored fruit is sometimes over-ripe and not as pungent. The answer to this is to begin to harvest the fruit when they are “half-ripe” and just beginning to show color…” which sounds like the photo of the fruit you harvested in June. How do the two harvests compare?
Questions! I have questions!
The 2nd batch of fruit was definitely better than the first. The fruit is never sweet, but the 2nd wasn’t as sour. I think this earlier post answers most of your questions: https://beaskneesfarm.com/2022/09/05/the-little-citrus-that-makes-your-mouth-pucker/