Going into April, 2008

Tomorrow is April Fool's Day. I'm not really much of a joker, sorry.

I'm down to four chickens, but all four are laying eggs pretty regularly. So now I've got a lot of eggs. That worked out well for Easter, but day-to-day, we don't need that many eggs for regular consumption. I've been trying to be creative though. I pickled some eggs last week, I think they came out pretty well. For, you know, pickled eggs...

If you follow the blog (I'll assume you don't... (who would ;o)), you'll notice that four chickens is one less than last time I posted. Yeah, the mean hens killed one of their own. I came home from work one day, and one of the hens was just barely alive. Looked like they'd pretty much torn her apart. I don't know why, maybe just frustration of not being allowed out of the coop (typically I let them out to range whenever I'm home, but they get really uptight when they're stuck in the coop while I'm at work).

I have managed to adopt a rooster. We have a lot of feral chickens around, and one particular rooster lives in my neighbor's avocado tree. Now that I let the hens out during the day, and throw some scratch down, he's over every day, all day. Crowing outside my window at 6:10AM every morning. EVERY MORNING. AT 6:10AM. How nice for me.



I built a trellised bin, after being inspired by my friend Darryl's bin. Basically I copied his design pretty much completely. I call it the "Watanabe Device." Anyway, I figure it's good for growing anything that vines. Of course then I went and planted it half full of a non-vining type of squash, go figure.

I also finally dug out, assembled, and filled my fish pond. That was a lot of work. I now have a 4ft by 8ft by 24 inch deep pond, in which I plan to raise tilapia. Hopefully this will be a big step forward in getting my feet wet with aquaponics. I'm getting some tilapia from Darryl hopefully sometime in the next week or so.

Since I don't fill the pond to the top, it ends up being about 20 inches deep, and should be a little over 400 gallons. If I understand the barrelponics guys, particularly Paul Range, I should be able to get a pretty sustainable output of fish from that, maybe 3 to 4 pounds a week, plus a considerable amount of food from the whatever plants I grow from the effluent. I just cross my fingers. Darryl has had a lot of ups and downs with his system.

I put together a little triangular raised bed for some Thai okra and some hyacinth bean (dolichos lablab). I used some bamboo I harvested with Darryl and his family at a friend of Darryl's house. I think bamboo is an awesome resource for gardening here in Hawai'i. It seems to stand up to the weather really well, grows like crazy, and is fairly easy to work with.

You can see the hyacinth bean (moonshadow hyacinth bean, seeds from Baker Creek, www.rareseeds.com) grows pretty well. Also on the right you can see some "wild tomato" I'm trying to grow, aka litchi tomato (also from Baker Creek).

I picked the hyacinth bean, aka dolichos lablab, partly because they were attractive, but largely because they were on a list of tropical subsistence crops I found on ECHO's website (http://www.echotech.org, the list is here).

I've also planted two bins recently, and installed anti-cat devices. In the left one I planted popcorn. Maybe not the greatest subsistence crop, but I just figured it would be fun to try. Plus it stores well.

The back half of the bin pictured to the right is planted with jicama, the seeds I got from Darryl. The front half I split up into 12 squares, trying to emulate the Bartholomew's square foot gardening. I planted a square of yardlong beans, a square of Thai basil, and a square of cowpeas. Then the three adjacent squares next to that I planted with broccoli rabe. The three adjacent squares next to that I planted with gobo (burdock root, Takinogawa type) using three different planting densities, just to see what works best. In the last three squares, at the end, I planted fennel (Florence), daikon, and parsnips. Here's a pic: