Protective Custody

  Oh, these mongoose! We’ve had several clutches of ducklings hatch lately, and even our poor matriarch Dee Dee lost a couple of the darling ducklings to the mongoose early yesterday morning. She had five, and then she had three, so we built yet another place to keep the rest of them safe. She wasn’t […]

Banishing Bug Bites!

Purple Bug Band

One of the things about having a farm in the tropics is that we have to deal with all sorts of biting bugs year round, because it never freezes. I’m loathe to use products with Deet in them, so am always on the lookout for products that don’t have Deet in them but that do […]

Shaka Bee

  When I first got to Hawaii this past May, I of course googled shaka because Hawaii. Almost all of the photos I saw were pretty much the same, very simple.   But there’s an important bit that wasn’t obvious to me, and that what those images show is what you are looking at your […]

Deep Roots

In mid-May, I started some okra seeds in our greenhouse, and then when they were large enough to put into the aquaponics system, in they went. I was sort of amazed at how quickly they grew — like weeds! But things got busy, and all during June I totally meant to get them out of […]

Wild Piglets

Feral or wild pigs have a long history in Hawaii, and we’ve written about them here on our farm before (Pigs in Paradise). We have traps set up in the fields where they do the most destruction to our fields, and yesterday caught a bunch of the cutest piglets! It’s hard to remind myself exactly how […]

Wait. A donkey?

We’ve had two horses for almost a decade now, Mocha and Kai. Mocha is a 12 year old registered quarterhorse mare and Kai is a 14 year old gelding. We came out one morning a few weeks ago and had a new member of our equine herd, a donkey! We are pretty sure that he […]

Living Lettuce

We’ve got a delicious variety of Romaine Lettuce just about ready to harvest in our greenhouse this week. It’s part of our aquaponics system here on the farm, where the water circulates from a large artificial pond with fish in it, through to the plants in our greenhouse, and then back to the fish again. […]

Making Honey Butter

Have you made honey  butter before? It’s so easy to do, and such a delight to have available. It keeps well in both the refrigerator and in the freezer, so when I make some, I make quite a bit just to have it handy. Start with your favorite unsalted butter at room temperature, or if […]

Lehua Blossoms, Lava Fields

Yesterday, I took a walk out to the lava field at the back of our property to visit the beehives and to see if I could find the bees working the lehua blossoms. Sure enough, the Ohia trees were covered in lehua blossoms, covered in honey bees. Success! One of our most popular honey products […]

If you like pina coladas …

We recently had a pineapple fall off the plant, and set it aside in the farm stand to see if would ripen off the plant. Google told us no, but surprise, surprise, it ripened just fine. Perhaps it already had all the sugar it needed, because it was delicious, just perfect. I couldn’t let such […]