No phone. No DSL

Life is never boring.

Saturday morning. GB leaves for work at 9am. I am on the phone with my mom. At 9:30 I check email. All good.

9:40 I leave the house, and lo and behold, a tree has fallen. On the rock wall. Parts of it are blocking the gate. And worst of all.... it fell right on the phone line. No phone. No DSL.

After Ra'am took the SAT, he and I set out to clean up the mess. The phone company said they'd be out by the end of Monday.

Ra'am looked psyched to go at the tree with the axe. Neither he nor I know how to use the chainsaw, and I was hoping not to have to call GB, who is very very busy getting ready to go back to LA for more voice recording.

We climbed up the hill and saw how large the tree really was! It's a junk tree (gunpowder)-- and not well rooted, obviously.
Inside the trunk was some hollow areas and an abandoned bee hive

The sad phone/ DSL line

Ra'am and I worked and worked. The amount of work was overwhelming, and I knew that GB could finish it off quickly with the proper tools

Luka hung out with us

GB drove home from work and quickly grabbed his chansaw and the tractor

20 seconds of chainsaw = 5 minute of axe

GB also used the tractor to push all of the rubbish into the bushes. It would have easily taken us another hour to clean up the mess w/o the tractor

Done!

Unfortunately this was NOT the only issue/ tragedy that week. Our oven flipped out again (thank goodness for extended warranties!).

The worst was that a neighborhood dog got into one of the goat pastures and killed Tamarind :( We are incredibly upset about it and have no idea who the dog belongs to :(

New Kid on the Block

Meet Loki

He's a young (not sure his exact age) Nigerian Dwarf goat who looks like he fits right in with the rest of the gang. He's got horns and a sweet high pitched baa.

We got him 3 days ago and so far he's at the low end of the totem pole of goats here. But I suspect that the horns will give him an advantage in the future. in fact, Noam told me he saw Loki butt back one of the other goats yesterday.

Here's Gandhi, Neo and Floyd checking out the new guy

This maneuver was happening over and over from all goats. Maybe it means "hi, howzit?"

He fits right in with the gang

Cutie

And for my own record keeping.... started some seeds (straight in ground). Salad mix (in pots). Kales (in with chard), tomatoes, peppers, corn (why not?), sunflowers, and some papayas

Got Grass?

Continuing with our grass grabbing that we started at the Biermans, we decided to work on the same project today. We headed over to their house in the am (sans Ra'am), and were delighted to discover that Carly wanted to help!

It was hard work, for sure.

We stayed there for awhile, gathering grass, then headed back home, Carly in tow.

We set Ra'am to work on weed wacking the area to prep it.

Hokulani watched

Luka watched too

All 3 kids (Ra'am, Noam and Carly) moved a bunch of concrete hollow tile

Ra'am and Noam brought the heavy heavy grass from the truck

"small" sod= still very heavy

GB prepped the areas-- but here he's moving a big hairy clump of a different kind of grass that's softer-- to edge the Bierman grass

Finished area behind the concrete containers

Grass around the lime tree

Our lemon tree in the chicken run is LADEN with flowers. They smell sooooo good-- and this is just a small portion of them!
Ra'am has been working on giving these Malay Dwarf bamboo a big and much needed haircut. Looks great!
And those bad chickens!!! They've been giving very few eggs recently.... found out why. Down in their run, where I can't see, I found this large clutch of 14 eggs!!! I need to see if they're fresh. but 14?!?

all in all, a great family work day!

planting again!

Banana Delivery. I was in the house feeling sick and GB drove down in the tractor with 2 large bunches in the bucket. Yumm

Bromeliad flower

GB started working on planting the new bamboo we bought, guadua angustifolia

This is the bamboo we're planting between us and evil neighbor. I wasn't feeling well, so GB was on his own-- he went out there with the tractor and cleared some area/ knocked down a bunch of junk trees and then yesterday planted 3 of the 7 we bought!

Here's some of the cleared area (hard to tell!)

GB working hard!

Transforming the jungle (and for the record, there is not one native species in this photo- lest someone think we're doing the land a disservice)

cleared pathway to new planting area

Today, Sunday, he and Ra'am will finish the job! Go bamboo!

Around the farm

Updates seem to be few and far between here on our blog.

There's not been a lot of new planting this summer on the property. We've had an extremely dry summer. Living on catchment has been very interesting with the nearly arid conditions we've had. Up until the last couple of weeks, a HUGE percentage of our water was going into filling the pool-- which can lose sometimes a whole inch of surface water to evaporation on a bright and sunny day. I've rigged up an ugly, but effective solution, in the form of some thick, black, bendy, inexpensive corrugated pipe that goes from one of the downspouts on the house, right into the pool. So far it's making a huge difference in filling up the pool, and I think that we can mostly stop using the tank water on the pool.

So we haven't wanted to really plant a lot of new stuff, since that would require lots of watering. But like all summers, there's a lot of maintenance in the form of mowing, weedwacking and pulling weeds.

The rains (or at least a little bit of rain) seem to have started, so we're going today to a bamboo festival to look for some large and spiky bamboo.

We did manage to get the property line surveyed between us and the mean neighbor. GB and I went out yesterday and put T-posts into the ground to mark the points on line that the surveyors marked with little wooden sticks. Now we'll see about plants for there (see above reference to spiky bamboo).

Some photos from yesterday afternoon:

GB has been working hard on fixing up this formerly very very messy with lame grass area. That's a lime tree in the center.

The Biermans gave us some clumps of their good grass when they planted some trees last week. GB and Ra'am went over there yesterday and dug out a portion of their front lawn and brought it over to cover more area around the lime tree. Apparently it was hard work and the grass was heavy. I wouldn't know... I was sewing.

GB and I walked around and checked on a few bamboos he's planted. Here's a hirose on the upper property, near the highway.

Monet-like fields of while owrchids

Here's a malay dwarf bamboo on the upper property at the bottom end of the fenced in area

last breaths of one of Luka's prized zinnias

A Luka Adventure!

I asked Luka what he'd like to do on Saturday and for him to give me three options, "I want to play in the pool, make chocolate cookies, and go on a Big Adventure!", he replied. I'm trying to keep my roundness from going global so I said, "How's about we go on and adventure and play in the pool!" He was confused by my willingness to two of his choices and said, "No, I want..." His voice trailed off when he realized I had completely capitulated, "YES, YES, YES!" he jumped up and down. We got ready and headed to a part of our property we rarely go to.....

This part is very, very steep.

Here Luka is learning to slide on the super steep parts and grab trees to slow himself down.

Milo, our youngest cat thinks he's a dog and trails along for the hike.

Half way down!

At the edge of a 60 foot cliff that over looks our stream stands one of the largest mango trees on our property. After a quick look over the edge of the cliff we headed through ferns that were over his head. He told me that everything glowed green in there.

We then headed to the goats who are now in the lower pasture and then to the pool!

Beauty and the Beast

LeAna and I did a flower theme week for our 365 photo projects.

Same flower as above- just opened.

In other news, despite living on almost 15 acres, we've got major neighbor problems. An older man who lives behind us (thankfully well away from our home) is angry and icky. He's destroyed 2 of Barry's pig snares. One of them he cut up while we were on the mainland and then waited on the road every day for Barry to return so he could yell at him.
Old man neighbor yelled at me on father's day... and then I saw him again on July 6, with the 2nd cut snare in his hand. He refused to give it back to me, and I was so angry (for other reasons) that I called him an evil old man. Barry ended up calling the police on him. The DRAMA!
Now we're in the process of getting the line between our 2 properties surveyed. We're going to plant something large and thorny there.