Introducing the Newest Member of Our Family

Acacia Rose arrived home a few days after her birth. I know the kids were so glad to finally be back in their own nest, and to be able to settle down to being a family. Shadow-cat was full of curiosity, but he quickly learned to behave himself around little Acacia.



I think she is totally gorgeous... and I am not one bit prejudiced about that! I couldn't get enough of holding this precious little bundle in my arms.



Gazing at her, I wonder: What do the newly born think of? How does the world look to them? What is really important in this life?



Baby feet amaze me: they have never been walked on and are as soft as the rest of baby's skin. I just love tiny baby toes!



This is the smile that can make all your problems just melt away, and fill your heart with such joy! She was only 4 days old. Admit it - you're smiling now, too. :-)



Three generations... a circle of love.
I am so very blessed to have had this time with my daughter. Thank you, Lori & Dave, for allowing me to share it with you. And to Mike, for arranging for me to be able to go.

Alaska!

Thought I'd share some of the gorgeous scenery up here in the far north country.








And, yes, I am freezing cold most of the time!
Baby pics next time...

Grandbaby #3 is here!

Acacia Rose is utterly sweet & gorgeous, mostly very calm & serene considering what she just went through. I loved watching Lori & Dave together - he was right there with her the whole time. We took turns pushing on her back or coaching her, trading off every so often. Lori was amazing - she did great even with that long hard labor. Everyone's still kinda shaky & overtired, and Lori is completely exhausted. Both Acacia & Lori are getting the hang of nursing.

Born: October 22
8 pounds 9 oz
20-1/2 inches long!
With long dark hair & long slender fingers - she's beautiful!

Now, we're all hoping they can all return home this evening and begin settling in together.

Still Waiting...

I had a lovely, if all too short, time in Seattle with my youngest. Perfect Fall weather and all the beautiful Autumn colors the entire time I was there! We walked & walked, and it felt so good to really stretch out after the long airplane ride (5-1/2 hours from Honolulu). Kerry was in the midst of packing in preparation for her move to a new apartment, which I'll get to see on my return trip, but we didn't spend much time indoors anyway. We had a blast poking into little shops here & there, traipsing through wooded parks, visiting the library and Pike Street Market. Had dinner at The Owl & Thistle Irish pub. And then I was whisked away to the airport the next morning.


Now I'm up in Alaska, with Lori & Dave. We're all still waiting for baby to arrive... she's sure taking her sweet time and so far, that's okay. We've done some sight-seeing, taken lots of walks, found the rest of the needed nursery items, watched movies, laundered & assembled those nursery items... and still no baby.
We've gone on more walks, trimmed Shadow's claws, finished a huge jigsaw puzzle, and toured the land... and still no baby.

Gone shopping, taught Smokey to pull out saplings, eaten lots of wonderful foods, played with the kitty-cat, and done even more walking... and still no baby!

But we have had some wonderful visiting time while we're all waiting patiently for the little one. The days are short but not too bad yet. It's darn cold outside - frost every morning and today it lasted all day in the shady spots. But lovely toasty warm inside at home.
It's fun to see chickadees again, my favorite little bird. And there are huge magpies too. Since the house is surrounded by a birch-spruce forest, these feathered friends come up pretty close and we enjoy bird-watching from the warmth of the indoors.
No one stays pregnant forever. It won't be long now!

Quickie Update Before I Leave...

I'm taking off tomorrow to see our daughters, one in Seattle and one in Alaska, and I'm very excited to meet grandbaby #3 as soon as she's born!

It's been busy, busy around here, though there's been plenty of plain old 'wait & see' as well.


We have 6 new laying hens to replace those who were lost last summer. The new girls are all Auracanas, the ones who lay the blue-green eggs. That brings our flock up to 21. There is now a driveway alarm to alert us of any other activity back there. (The baby monitors we'd tried earlier were less than satisfactory.) A couple days ago, Mike cleared out more of the tall ferns between the back fence and the chicken yard so we now have a clear view of the flock from our house. A perimeter fence around both lots is planned, and clearing has started for that, but got stalled for some reason... not quite sure why.


The piggery is still waiting for the line-up of the planets or whatever it takes to get all the approvals in order. There it sits, all cleared and graveled and waiting... It's utterly ridiculous and would be almost funny except that we could be raising food already. This'll teach us to go by the rules, huh? Frustrating is what it is. The building permit did get approved, finally... now it's the NRCS that's holding us up. They want to do a site survey to check for - get this - burial mounds, petroglyphs, and the like... under our 13x30-foot shed. If they do manage to find something of the sort though, forget pigs, we'll run a tourist attraction! Ha!


On to happier things. The new garden area is growing really well. We have two beds of taro/kalo; lots of sweet potatoes, both white & purple; starfruit, longan, and mamay sapote tree seedlings; a tamarillo, a few papaya, mugwort, purslane, tomatoes, kabocha squashes, basil, & pineapples scattered throughout.

Mike's been producing biochar from dried coconut husks. He has a little firepit in the new garden area and has got the art down pretty well now. He adds this to the IMO mixture along with chicken manure & dolomite. This combo ferments and does its thing for a week, then we use the resultant super fertilizer for top-dressing the plants or dig it into the soil for new plantings. It's fantastic stuff and we're starting to see good results - all this from creating our own fertilizer!


The experimental corn patch behind Mike's workshop has been producing lovely sweet corn for a week now. So fun to have a familiar crop, and it tastes wonderful. But the most amazing thing is that it's growing on 2-3" of soil atop a slab of solid pahoehoe lava!! Now you understand a little better why we're so excited about all this IMO stuff. ;-)


I absolutely love my new workroom! We spent a few days during a lull between guests to reconfigure the hale and increase the living space on our side by adding a door between the Sunrise Room and our bedroom. Then we put up a wall to divide the hallway, thus creating a linen closet on our side and a beautiful map wall on the hale side. As a bonus, we also gained a second bathroom. It all went so smoothly and makes me feel like I can really settle in at last, now that I can have indoor projects going, space for my sewing & craft stuff, and room to pack my suitcase in preparation for my trip!(This baby quilt was the first project in my new workroom ~ for Lori & Dave's little bambina, arriving very soon!)

How I Spent My Saturday

We took off early Saturday morning to deliver 2 dozen eggs to a friend's office right in Pahoa. Of course, one doesn't just drop off eggs, collect the money, and leave. No, no... you visit a bit, talk story and exchange each other's latest news. It was like that back in Bonners Ferry, too - just a small town, rural way of life. I love it!

Then we drove up the hill as far as Mountain View to go to the Hilo Coffee Mill farmer's market... what fun! I've been hearing good things about it, and although it's quite small, the vendors are all so friendly! Lots of free samples & tastes of goodies. We sat and talked with a furniture maker guy for about 1/2 hour, bought some candied ginger and Japanese pickled vegies from another booth, and walked around the beautiful grounds a bit before getting back in the car.

Next stop was at friend Carey's house, right in Kea'au, to drop off the box of picnic stuff left after Scuba Sunday last weekend. We also wanted to see all the progress on their place... She's done some stunning tilework: dolphins on the guest room floor, humpback whales in the shower... beautiful! Played with the rescue dog, Kiko, a bit and then away we went for lunch at the Kea'au Marketplace. There are many tiny lunch shops there and we thought we'd try something different. Ended up at Ma's Place - very friendly ladies running the place, and really fresh and tasty food: Mike had shrimp & chips and a small salad; I had Oriental Chicken salad with half chicken & half fish. Both were ono grinds!

Onwards to Hilo! If you have a museum membership you can get in free to other museums this month only. We have membership at the Lyman and had been wanting to take advantage of this wonderful offer, so today we went to the Tsunami Museum. We'd never been there before... it was awesome! Well organized, amazing exhibits, lots of information. The building used to be a bank; built very solid and sturdy. You watch a touching video inside the vault. I 'saved' Hawaii from a 'tsunami' generated in Alaska on their tsunami warning system simulator... made the right call and set off the sirens... how cool is that?! We spent a couple hours in there, then as we were walking back to our car, we ran into Leslie (for whom we had recently built a Hubbell Bubble chicken coop) so stopped to chat with her a bit.

About 5 minutes after we returned home, our very good friend Royall pulled up! He'd been doing something nearby and thought he'd just drop by... I love it! More "sit, talk story." We'll be going over to his place for dice & ice cream later this evening.

Whew!! Never a dull moment on the weekends, eh? And that's just Saturday!

Forward Ho!

Okay, here's the plan:

Mike has reinforced the chicken yard with welded wire field fencing and repaired the damaged side with roofing tin. He moved the nest box away from the fence - we now have to go inside the yard to collect the eggs, which is kind of a drag but oh well. We are using a baby monitor to listen in on the chickens. I doubt any dogs could get in there now, but if they try, we'll hear 'em right away. It's very reassuring when we awaken during the night, to only hear coquis, rain, and soft little chicken sounds (and we have been waking a lot these past nights, believe me.)

We're going to put up fencing around the back half of both lots, one big fence to encircle and protect the backyard farm. This will also serve to keep out the wild pigs that will no doubt be attracted to our sweet potato beds and fruit trees just before harvest time.

The piggery is still a go. Right now we're waiting on the architect to stamp the plans, then the County gets to have another go at them. Once the permit is finally issued, it should only take a couple days to build. Of course, it will have to be inspected before we can really use it.

Though we're still reeling from the loss to our flock, life goes on and so do we. The injured birds seem to have recovered, and the chickies are pretty much settled down. Egg production, however, has dropped considerably with the loss of three of our best layers, and the shock to them all.

You knew we couldn't really be stopped by mere dogs, didn't you? We just have to adapt to the current circumstances and move forward. Onwards!

DISASTER!!!

Our chickens were attacked by dogs in the wee hours this morning.

What a horrible sound to wake up to. Chickens squawking & screaming all around, feathers everywhere, and 2 young pitbulls tearing into them. Three hens were killed - well, two were and one was so badly injured that Mike had to put it out of its misery. Several others were so traumatized that we thought they were dead at first. Several are missing feathers and one other is limping. The poor birds didn't know what hit them since it was pitch dark and they were still roosting.

We didn't recognize the two dogs but we sure will if we see them again - which is quite likely since if they kill once, they'll be back. They both had tags (I could hear them jangling as they ran past me). Thank goodness they didn't attack us! We had run out in our jammies, yelling at them to get out of there. Thank goodness Mike was sleeping lightly at the time... we think it was the first excited yips of the dogs that woke him and he heard the first squawks of the hens.

All plans for the day have been canceled, but we're most worried about tonight... I think those dogs will come back for more. They had torn through the chicken wire underneath where the nest box butts up to the fence. There's a piece of tin there now. But chicken wire is really no match for a determined dog; we may have to add something stronger around the lower part of the chicken yard, like field fencing, hogwire, or chainlink.

We decided that we'll bury the victims of the massacre in the back of our new garden area. That's the most soil we have, but it will still be a shallow grave, so we will have to cover it with rocks. At least this way it's not a total waste... they will fertilize our crops. Circle of life.

I'm still shaking. And Mike's looking up traps & alarms & fencing & so on. And we're wondering about our ideas & plans of backyard farming here...

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