Monday, July 26, 2010

June & July Happenings

It has been a hot and busy couple of months! Here's a sampling of what we've been up to recently.

We did another coop-building demo in June. This time it was a group of Hawaiians who invited us to erect a Hubbell Bubble on one of the Panaewa Farm Lots. Many hands made light work of it and the coop went from a pile of lumber, wire and plastic on our trailer...
... to the finished coop, all ready and waiting for chickens to move in. The whole thing took less than two hours!!


The next big thing was the clearing of our Lot Next Door (as we call it for lack of a better term for our lot next door). The first order of business was to move the rest of our cinder pile to an out-of-the-way location. Here's a before picture with Ashley on his tractor:This one, taken from the same vantage point as above, shows the gray crushed rock in place for the future piggery. Notice also, our most amazing discovery... something more precious than gold in this land of lava rock and cinders: DIRT!! Whoo-hoo! It's the dark brown stuff to the left in this photo. We had Ashley pile it up to create a new garden area:
Two dump truck loads of red cinder to cover the disturbed area:
This created a lovely, smoother driveway that extends beyond the carport canopy and Mike's shop. You can see the piggery rock just peeking out behind the shop, and the slightly elevated new garden area beyond that: So far, we have planted taro, sweet potatoes and yams, 2 starfruit seedlings, 2 longan seedlings, a mamay sapote, pigeon peas, watermelons, and pineapple, as well as a few herbs and flowers. There's still room for papaya and banana, too. We think of it as our semi-permanent garden area for the food-forest type plantings. Meanwhile, Mike is still working on plans for the piggery.

Let me put to rest the rumors that we do nothing but work hard! You should know better than that!
We hosted our International Dinner Group for a Pre-Independence Day party, with the emphasis on 'independence'.
We did tours of our backyard chickens in the original Hubbell Bubble... ... the edible landscaping... ... the future piggery site, solar electric panels and solar water heater. There was a participatory reading of the Declaration of Independence...... horse shoes and darts... ... and of course, loads of good people and good food.
And then there was the wonderful beach bbq day we had just yesterday with some of our closest friends. We just recently discovered this beautiful 'secret' spot on Hilo Bay - well, it was a secret from us since we'd always just driven right past it. Now it's our new favorite beach park!I hope you all are having as much fun this summer as we are!
Aloha,
Liz

3 comments:

Ann Wurden said...

Thanks for posting your busy summer updates... looks awesome! I'm so impressed with the Hubble Bubble... cool!

Martin said...

Hi Liz. I live in Mansfield, Victoria, Australia and I came across the Hubbell Bubble through a search engine. I built one which has a number of modifications to suit our local conditions and the materials I had at hand. I thought Mike might be interested in seeing some pictures. If so, please let me have an email address and I shall send you a link to a Picasa album. Regards, Martin.

Liz said...

Aloha Martin, We've actually done some modifying ourselves since this post was published. Like you, we tend to use whatever resources we have on hand at the time. We would be very interested in seeing what you came up with! Thanks, Liz