Aloha mai e Poliʻahu

Last week I managed to have a day which included both a little walk on the slopes of a snow tipped Mauna Kea (the highest mountain in the world, measured from the ocean floor), and a swim and snooze with honu (sea turtles) on a tropical beach.

Aloha mai e Poliʻahu!

Mauna Kea is the home of Poliʻahu, the goddess of snow. Poliʻahu and Pele are not very friendly to one another. I did find Ohia lehua in bloom on the slopes of Mauna Kea.

At Anaehoʻomaalu bay I swam for a while in turquoise water with at least three honu.  Then I slept for another while on the sand.

When I woke the honu had pulled themselves up all around me.

Another sea creature came fairly close to shore. At this stage I have no idea who it was (though it looked big enough to be shark, but there was no triangle fin). I saw a flash of fish tail and a sizable long dark shape cruising the reef.

This is a picture of a honu coming up for air. Spot the honu in the centre of the pic

My return journey was particularly tedious. I ended up in the pau hana traffic. Teach me.

Who would have thought I would be the first to post pics of snow this northern winter?

An elegance of botany

More front garden glamour shots.

Finding the back forty

I hired some muscle with expensive tools to help me clear the couple of yards of overgrowth to my back boundary. 

 This adds a little bit to the garden - mostly I am thinking of it as a wildlife buffer zone. Maybe some bamboo. Maybe a fence.

There is an African Tulip tree which could emerge as a specimen tree once the smothering creeper dies off it and it gains some foliage back. 

I had to prune a couple of red hibiscus bushes back hard. I am hoping they will come back stronger now that they are not supporting vines. At least I know, now, where the back boundary survey stakes are.

The chimera: zero waste

I think a lot about rubbish: the waste which contemporary living generates and how this is especially heightened on an island where space is visibly finite.

My view from the front of my house is six or seven, always-full, garbage bins, generated by one household. Aside from the fact that our community association asks us not to keep stuff on the easements along the edges of the roadways, wind and neighbourhood dogs sometimes redistribute scatterlings from this heap onto the street and my front garden.

Hmmmm. Where does all this go when it goes away from my view? Landfills on a volcanic island? As an aside: how does one household generate this amount of garbage on a weekly basis?

The county solid waste facility where I go to get free mulch has a whole hillslope of discarded household appliances. Another one of general garbage. it makes me feel very weighed down, sad and despondent to see these mountains of garbage.

Another thing I think a lot about is making compost to feed my plants.

My breakfast of fruits (much of it locally harvested for free or donated by friends so costs me pennies, literally) usually generates a huge mound of biomass for composting. Score!

The powers that be try their best to restrict imports of biological kind which could upset the ecosystem.

Just a few blocks from the solid waste facility is the harbour where vast containers of "consumer goods" are unloaded, to be distributed to the big box stores and thus trickle down into every nook and cranny of our lives.  Surely this is just as much of a threat to the island ecology as invasive biological species. In my opinion.

Wouldnʻt it be lovely if there could be a ban on import of all plastics onto the island?

Nightmare vision of the day: our stuff and love of getting more stuff is suffocating us.

I donʻt have overarching solutions. Just drop in the ocean babysteps: I pick up plastic every time I am at a shoreline and recycle or dispose of it in a better place. I recycle, repurpose and reuse as much as possible. I carry shopping bags. I try to buy from bulk foods and try to chose the option with the least packaging. I try to eat raw, fresh, unprocessed. I compost.

And I am slowly sorting through my emotional padded cell of stuff.

Especially as we head into the silly season of excess consumption I ponder these things.

Please, if you are going to buy things, buy from small, local, homemade, handmade artists. Give donations, experiences like a museum or art gallery admission tickets, gym subscriptions or services and healing sessions like massages or chiropractic adjustments. Pay someoneʻs way to a workshop.

No garbage token gestures. Please! The ocean is broken already. Thatʻs our amniotic fluid!

Rant over.

Hammer horror

Sometimes, in the twilight damp around about dawn and dusk, there are nightmare creatures in the garden.

I have to fight my negative response on first meeting with this frightful being. Critters are good and healthy in a garden, I tell myself.

Well, it turns out that my visceral response was probably accurate. This species of flatworm preys on earthworms amongst other things.

I am trying to build soil on lava rock with loads of mulch and compost. Earthworms are an integral part of the plan. I am not sure that I need these Indo-Chinese native land planariums in the mix right now.

In my researches I also discovered that it is extremely difficult to kill these predators. One source had that they can regenerate from a single cell. That is pretty amazing. The recommended strong spray of orange oil seems such an easy, sweet smelling solution. Melting a creature is a daunting concept, however.

Partnering with Pele in creation of land is not for the fainthearted.

It is Halloween after all: not a time for the squeamish. The garden produces little side shows of horror all of its own. Just to keep the balance.

Blooming marvellous mornings

Mornings in the garden continue to amaze and delight with their passionate flowering and beauty of emergent shape, line and colour.

I bought a Lilikoi plant (Passiflora edulis) at a Farmerʻs Market: all that expanse of freshly painted front picket fence was asking to be useful.

 No sooner had the roots got into the earth in the little pocket I created, than we had to have that talk, my Little Lilikoi and I, about oh, you know: the birds and the bees.

A flower burst forth. Way too early for these kinds of things, Little Lilikoi! You are too young yet for all this fruit and seed making stuff.

The mysterious beauty of the flower was a delight in its own right. When it does fruit, I believe this is going to produce the dark purple fruit. I look forward to the added dimension of colour in the front garden palette.

At another Farmerʻs Market I bought an orchid for the container which I had fashioned out of a piece of palm frond from the garden. I am not sure how long this container will last but it works for now. Being greeted by purple orchid blooms at the front door is just how I imagined living in Paradise would pan out.

  

And of course those bananas and little Hawaiian hot peppers bloom and swell. Real local feeding, with a little spicy heat, in my future.

Note: Just for a little balance: the price I pay for all this beauty is little red fire ants, mosquitoes, Albezia trees, feral cats using my newly minted garden as litter box, smothering by invasive exotics of all ranges of fauna and flora persuasion. And road construction. Even in Paradise. The single route from where I am to anywhere else is being widened. This means a lot of delays. Sometimes it can take a couple of hours to go two miles. Life on an island.

Establishing the taro patch: a big brother to watch over me.

I found some plants labelled "Taro Asst" at a big box store recently. I donʻt usually buy plants from big box stores but driving home I noticed one of the "Taro Asst" sitting in the passenger seat alongside of me.

At Hale Mahina, I divided the mysterious plant up into a backyard bed, ready made with lava rocks, pineapples, wood chips and mulch.

As I straightened up from tamping down the last plant the rain came down. In buckets. It was as if the taro was being welcomed to this piece of ʻaina (earth).

Since there was no botanical name, I do not know exactly what variation of the heart shaped leaf plant this is. Is it edible? For leaves, or root for poi?

 Kalo (taro) is know as the Big Brother in Hawaiian cosmology. The story is told in the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant,  of the first born, the still born child who, buried next to the house, grew into kalo, the plant which feeds the Hawaiian people.

Before humans, must come food. In the order of creation.

Thresholds

There is only one door to Hale Mahina. No back door.

On a random day recently I found a spray of purple orchids, a lizard and two anthuriums just hanging out, passing the time at my threshold.

I am in good company.

To be honest - apart from the lizard, I have introduced the other front door liveliness. Anthuriums never fail to make me smile. I am collecting colour and variety there.

Dubious marketing

I continue to take my handprinted cloth and other sundry creations, a little half heartedly, to the local Saturday Farmerʻs Market. I continue to just break even, cover my spending and some treats to eat on the day. Raw vegan sushi with a soursap, coconut milk drink. Yum! A bottle of organic hot spicy kim chee. Yum again! This invigorating relish lasts me almost to the end of the following week and is reason alone to go to the market again.

Because I am a newcomer, I have to wait each week to be allocated a space - usually when one of the regular vendors has indicated that they will not be there. I am also a little constrained as to space which available I can take up, as I cannot set up near active cooking (ready made products are okay). The smells of barbecue and hot fat permeate cloth items.

Most markets separate hot food vendors and crafters, but not this one. Sigh!

This market also does not have regular sized booths - unlike the standard 10x10 ones of my first experiences of markets in the USA 12/13 years back. It is a little challenging not knowing how one is going to set up each day.

Adaptability, however,  is what makes us successful, isnʻt it? Being moved around,  I also get the chance to develop neighbourly intimacy with a different set of vendors each week, building on my sense of community.

At a recent market I noticed a lovely table of orchids. Beautiful! But wait! What is the EBT (electronic bank transfer - in other words the government food stamp program for the needy) notice doing there? I donʻt see a vanilla plant in sight. These blooms are to be purchased for eating?

Hmmmm. Is this or is this not food stamp fraud? A question for responsible market management, perhaps, and not a malahini (newcomer) trader as myself. Orchid salesman didnʻt see it that way.

Pigtailed Boy behaved as though I was trying to put a stake through his heart. Perhaps he doth protest too much?

But then the humanities have not featured highly in education curricula of late. Shakespeare, and literature in general, was where we honed our moral intelligence. Once upon a time. In my day. In another country.