Archive for May, 2010

Oh Snooooze

Some might call it the Blaahhhs, but to me its a cozy little cocoon in which to sprout some wings, a break in the pace of things, a time to embrace lazy, go covert. Taking the time to just stare out my office window I see a sight that marks entry into the summer months. The once skeletal looking Inia trees are flowering and pushing out slender shimmering green leaves by the oodles.

The scent is lilackee, the look like that of its Mahogany family brethren and sisteren , tall and spreading, sturdy and climbably inviting. Their presence  is smelt from first light to evening dusk and combined with the fragrance of the Malabar Chestnut blossoms, well, its enough to make a fella feel faint. They are about to provide a stop gap measure to the heat and dry that is the sirens call of summer. Shade, blessed shade.

Often overlooked, rarely understood and commonly mistaken for a shadow, shade provides an altogether indispensable temperature gradient. It is the buffer created between canopy and ground that makes life in the dry tropical midlands livable between June and October.  These days, I'm toast by elevenish and don't want to get out again, unless its cloudy till about four thirty, five. Civilized like.

This tree, Melia azaderach not only provides a high canopy under which all other members of this rag tag eco-moosh can feel comfy and safe, but its massive root systems capture and hold the moisture that does manage to infiltrate the soil in the form of summer storms and evening dews. They drop a litter of leaves, flowers and berry like seeds that break down into fine mulch and humus as well as contributing its numerous pesticidal properties to the soil surface. Properties which work systemically (like its cousin, the Neem tree) to aid other trees nearby in warding off the nasties.

So here they go again, coming on strong just when everything else is beginning to whine about the dry dry dry. To the rescue with that all important component and by product of their existence, Shade.

So lets tip a glass to the Inia, a.k.a. China berry, pride of India, Persian lilac, Melia azaderach and always keep in mind that this little excursion into minutiae has wasted upwards of an hour of time which might well otherwise have been spent pulling weeds, wondering if the oil will stop gushing, scratching my balls, eating organic cheeto's or generally feeling inadequate to pretty much any task. I remember when my dad retired, after the first few days of doing nothing he griningly remarked, " I never knew how easy it was to just piss the day away". Amen.

You're not going to believe this, but it looks like the chickens are acting more chicken like in their laying patterns. Having nearly doubled our production since the days of the great "mystery drop off", we've reached a sort of reasonable production rate, meaning that a little to a lot more would be a lovely bonus and likely make my toes curl, like the sight of Nurse Natty in her patchwork dress or Nurse Caley in her cowboy hat, but as it stands I've nearly achieved happy camper status.

Now it turns out it may just have been a matter of economics combined with my sometimes parsimonious ways. In an attempt to economize the cost of chookerations I began substituting a bit of crack corn for lay pellets, saving me some ka-ching but leading to our version of armachicken. I went into deep study mode, reading article, forum post and suggestions from a broad spectrum of numbskulls on the subject. Came up with two tidbits. One is that the corn and the lay pellets are a no no. Won't go into why. The other is that the ladies need three point five ounces of well balanced lay formula a day, a piece. I also go with a once a week supplement of fish meal, some soy and a bit of grit.

So I set out to do a 'speriment, real scientific like. Got me a pallet of feed, thereby cutting the cost. Did a head count and figured on a few extra servings which meant that each of the three groups of feathered feminists need five and a half pounds twice a day. Could leave the whole amount out for them to free choice throughout the day, but frankly that scares me. Probably wait until production stabilizes and then maybe give it try, feeding them once a day in a makeshift trough to see if they hold off on eating it all or just tear through it.

By my calculations, the forty bags should last us sixty days at a cost of about two dozen eggs a day (ten bucks). Then there's the various meals, grit, electrolyte (that's right, we give our chooks Gatorade during super hot times) and extra calcium in the form of oyster shell which add another half dozen a day to the cost. Utterly fascinating. Is that the sound of snoring I hear? Mission accomplished.

I'll be reporting in from time to time to update the progress of the little darlings. This all to prepare you for the scientific reason as to why we will be raising our prices. I did notice the other day that the Barred Rocks have taken to actually nipping at my heals as I carry the feed bucket around, as though the contents of the bucket and I had turned into one giant lay pellet to be gnawed on till extinct. Cute.

Aside from the escape artists and the few broody hens that have been banished from the flock until they forget they're broody, the fowl life fares well. Collected eighty eggs today. Would love it if all of you out there who feel a kinship with whats going on here vamp on the number ninety six. That's a solid eight dozen and only five more eggs from each group. Thus far, the leghorns are solidly in the lead when it comes to production, our best day being thirty five eggs out of forty five hens. Had enough? Me too.

I used to think it audacious in the extreme when first viewing BP's t.v. ads with their sunshiny logo all green and yellow and depicting themselves as "Beyond Petroleum". What a crock of shit, thinks I. "Bout as far beyond petroleum as a junkie is from his kit. I guess we can chalk this one up to the law of unintended consequences, although in the circles of conspiracy, a tale has been told of an attempt on the part of BP to do the world an enormous service by joining forces with the worlds leading sunblock manufacturer ( masquerading as chemical dispersant) and through the miracle of chemistry combining the two fluids to create the ultimate tanning oil/sunblock.

The plan is to wait until the bruhaha over this little smudge dies down and then announce  that the cleanup is going well and that beach goers on every continent could soon have the expectation that taking a dip in any of the worlds oceans would result in a coating of uv protected tanning goo with the half life of plutonium. Why just the number of skin cancer reductions alone will win the company Nobel peace prize accolades. This act of true benevolence will only require the amount of oil used by America in twenty days, can be paid back with a seven cent per gallon surcharge on gasoline over the next four months and will prove to be an act of marketing genius. Remember, you heard it here first.

Meanwhile, news out of the gulf has it that a plume of oil some six miles wide and twenty six miles long has been discovered at a depth of thirty three hundred feet. It is headed for the harbor at Mobile Alabama. The stuff that 'pockyclypses are made of.  As of this post, the live feed on BP's website still shows a gusher of fluids escaping the pressure of that depth like it was grabbing its nuts and saying, "preshah 'dis".

What else? Oh yeah, my old computer finally crapped out completely, taking with it my "farm stuff" email list. I'm slowly recovering and posting to as many of you as I can. There may have been one or two posts prior to this mail going out.

Finally, I'll be turning the corner on forty years on Maui and figure to have a bit of a bash in honor of how weird that actually feels. Will post the date when its a sure thing. Until then, sleep tight, no fright, all night.

The more you show, the more we'll grow.  Dream on, Jp

Motherfucking, cute as the dickens, four legged, fluffy tailed pieces of shit, lacking  sensitivity to anything but their appetite for succulant young tree branches and older trees that they can ring bark with their antlers, cause it feels soooooo goood to scrape the fuzz off. I know that's true for me on full moon nights but I only have one antler and would rather soak it in some warm viscous fluid than rub it against a tree.

So I'm making the rounds the other day after having spent a couple of work days with the amazing wwoofettes, re-securing the deer fencing on the southern border of the property. This is the direction from which the deer approach the property.

Now that the weather has turned to drought, the myriads of trails leading to the property are like some terrestrial g.p.s.,tracking all roads leading to unky jp's plant smorgyborg and fermented water emporium. Yummy.

All the areas for growing veggies, or doing banana/papaya/perennial veggie polycultures are within fenced orchard areas to keep the darling (I want you dead now) deer from doing what they did to the one orchard area that lacks a fence on the North side of the property line.

Why, you might ask would I not fence this stretch of border? The standard answer of I'm a knucklehead comes to mind, but also because that portion of the property is bordered by Kealakapu road and not an area where one normally see's anything but cars, trucks, horseback riders and those out for a stroll.

The beautiful (I want you cut up and in my freezer) deer would have to do some loopdeloops to get over there. Well they did, and in so doing found a patch of glycine growing by the roadside as a result of the irrigation system used to keep the the orchard thriving.

Now this orchard and home to the rhode island reds, which we refer to as" Oscar Peterson" is fenced in on the South, East and West sides and has never been hit since that fence was in place.

But in a meeting, held in secret in a barranca just to the south the of the property, the alpha male, a nine point buck named Rory Spotted Balls and the notorious Mergatroid Chizzletooth of the Kamaole mongoose clan sat over a bowl of fermented egg yolks and talked business.

Chizzletooth, surrounded by his elite henchgeese, teeth laser sharpened and bared ever so slightly in a snarl, confided that his clan had been raiding the Americauna enclosure from the North for several years now and that with the exception of  a certain acceptable percentage of war casualties found it to be a foolproof approach yielding a steady supply of eggs, some good sport freaking the cookies out of the chooks and leading to discoveries of ever more clever ways to beat the traps.

He told of vast mountains of greenery running up the roadside, smelling of terpenes, crawling things and bird doo. Rory sat patiently on his hind quarters, surrounded by his stable of rutting beeotches taking in this info and realizing that even though the hard black stuff on the road hurt his feet, it might just be worth it to chance-um'.

Little did he know at the time that his risk would lead to a night of ravaging Oscar Peterson.

Rory handed a faded leather satchel over to Chizzletooth who examined the contents with an ever widening and sickly sinister approximation of a grin. He pulled a  piece of jerky out of the satchel, bit off a tweensy bit and chewed it with such zealous frenzy as to turn it to liquid within seconds.

He then swished the slurry around in his mouth and spit the remains to ground. After rolling his eyes back in a swoon and breathing very deeply, Chizzletooth declared fair deal, zipped up the satchel, waggled his eyebrows at the beeotches and disappeared into the underbrush.

Rory then barked out orders for the evenings forage and the dye was caste.

The result of a few of these delightful ( the only good is a dead) deer finding ingress to Oscar Peterson resulted in the ring barking of the largest Inga Edulis and the newly transplanted white indonesian guava, the total destruction of a two and a half year old mango, the shredding of four banana keiki's, a two year old lychee tree rendered unrecognizable as anything but a small stump to trip over, a denuded cashew and mulberry and the nibbling of numerous mango leaves and small branches.

All in all not at all what I had expected to find in a routine days rounds. While I know that a lot of what farming is about is rolling with the punches, I found myself rolling into "whats the use" mode and then allowed myself some pissed off time to begin the energetic transmutation from  anger to order where the world is good again and life is simple and solution orientation points the way to overcoming even the vision of years of work laid to waste and of unheard plant screams put to rest.

I knew from past patterns that it would be imperative to get that northern border fenced the next day or risk the total destruction of this young orchard. So I camped out with a pitcher of pina coladas and my rifle and passed the night in an uncomfortable sort of peace. Early the next day I headed for town to pick up the fencing materials. A few hours later and with the help of superior human women, access to the property from Kealakapu road was denied.

Not having the dough to fence the entire property kinda sucks, but moments of intensity which yield affirmative action geared toward renewing the strength and vitality of the Rancho, rock out. Its about getting sweaty and bloody and teaming up to solve a problem. Its about the learning and the laughing and the longing. Its about knowing that the challenges never cease and that one of the most important crops we can grow is Perseverance.

"Thats deep unky jp."

"Not really, little fella, just the voice of Nature."

"The who of what?"

"That's right little fella, the who of what."

The more you show, the more we'll grow. Peace, Jp