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