The Last Time It Rained This Much, Noah built himself a boat! (paraphrasing Wilfred Brimley‘s line from Absence of Malice — if you haven’t seen that movie, you really should. But we digress…)

This year, February came in like a lamb, and is going out like a very ornery (that is, a very windy, rainy) lion. Mid-month, Hawaii was hit with what we call very strong “Kona winds” (and what the weather service sometimes calls the “Pineapple Express” when the winds carry storms from Hawaii to the west coast on the mainland). This year, the winds did a good job of tearing up our banana patches. This seems to happen every few years — in 2015 we had a similar “banana-pocalypse” — and the bananas recover in a surprisingly short amount of time. At least this time around nothing hit the greenhouse!

The rains turned much of the farm into a seriously muddy mess. Thankfully, even deluges like that drain faster through lava rock than they would on the mainland, but this year the rain is just not letting up! In the past couple of weeks we’ve gotten about 18″ of rain on the farm, and it’s still raining!

Ordinarily we’re thrilled to have a lot of rain at this time of year, because it encourages our coffee trees to break out in blossoms which, with a little luck and the help of our bees, should transform into gorgeous red coffee cherries. Constant rain, though, can actually discourage insect pollination, so hopefully we’ve had enough dry spells during the daytime hours for the bees to do their job.