Just in the nick of time

We were able to procure some of the geotextile (i.e. erosion control blanket) yesterday at Garden Exchange. Thank goodness for people who KNOW what they're talking about and are good about helping (can you tell it took me awhile to find the darned stuff??). We had 2 rolls and more on order and set to work right away.

We asked Buck to come and join us- what a HUmongous help he was. Another focused adult makes the work go so much faster.

When we arrived this late am, the sun was shining and we set to work right away as Buck said a storm was abrewin. He was right.... soon after arriving, I saw a giant 'iwa flying over the coast. They are a portent of a storm.
Sure enough, within an hour of our arrival, it started thundering and the sky got darker and darker.

We first had to even out the terrain. The ground was filled with little rivulets from the big storm and some big scars. So we got out the shovels and rakes to move some earth.

wasn't too long before GB was looking all sweatyHere we are, laying out the first swath of geotextile.

You can see here that it's made up of straw, sort of embedded within a matrix of something plasticy. The thing is supposed to biodegrade in 12 months.

GB and Buck laid it out and then I went and tacked it down any place where it was sitting above the ground, rather than directly on it. It's only functional when it touches the ground.

Soon after taking the above picture, the rain started.

I set out in the truck with the little ones to pick up Silas from school and to get more of the staples that hold down the mat. Since the ground was so uneven, I was using many more than we thought.

While out the rain really picked up. I was secretly hoping to get a call from GB saying that they had abandoned the project for now. No such luck ;)

But amazingly, when I had returned, they had evened out more ground and laid out so much of the mat, that I set right to tacking. We covered a lot more area than we thought we would.

It looks so VAST in these pictures.

Here we are.... 3 very WET and sweaty, but satisfied laborers.....
soon after this it really really dumped.

And more hope. The angel's trumpet tree has sent up another shoot. It's tenacious!

And no blog post would be complete without a picture of our littlest rugrat.... looking very muddy.


Next wednesday we get plants delivered! We'll make teeny holes in the geotextile and stick the plants in there. We're on our way to securing the hill!

Home Design Version 6:

The Flying Donut with the Koi Pond Center

Everyone that knows me thinks I'm either a little bit crazy or...well, off the deep end. As my father says, I do everything the hard way. But this time Karen is just as crazy as I.

Karen told me that she wanted a home with most everything on one floor- her childhood dream home. (That usually means single story on the ground)

All my previous designs were multiple levels. One had a different level for almost every room!

So I came up with the idea of having everything up and parking underneath. I kept the media room down with an outside shower and WC for ease of enjoying the pool.



With my OCD "attentiveness" I did a lot of drawings before coming up with this design. I liked it. You walk in the home on a four foot wide stairway that goes above one end of a large Koi pond. The roof only covers the rooms which encircle the Koi pond about 8-10ft in the air (hence the Flying Donut)



Light reflects off the Koi pond through windows into the living room, kitchen and upstairs lanai areas.



Nice. Except I had my reservations about the walking distances in the home, the long stairs, etc. Karen said "this is it". So, as my father says, in the case of your wife's happiness, whatever it costs, pay it. These designs go to the draftswoman this week. Plus when we told Ra'am about our concerns of the distances from his room to the pool, etc. his reply was "now I feel REALLY spoiled".

Solutions

So we met with the engineer on Friday. He suggested we cover the hillside in geotextile. It comes in many different forms, but is basically a fabric that would cover the hill and keep water from creating more rivulets, while the plants take root.

Soon after talking to him, I ran home to get on the phone and find us some geotextile. I'm still waiting on some info, but so far my estimation for getting some is 4-6 weeks. gulp.
Honestly I don't think we could afford another bad rainstorm. And who knows whether we'll get one or not in the next month.

So.... GB came up with a temporary solution based on some of the stuff the engineer told us. We need to slow down the flow of water. We have this amazing bamboo growing, so his idea was to cut bamboo and then lay it horizontally across the hillside- so that water will divert and flow down the bamboo instead of right through the mud.
Sounds good and simple, right???


He had to literally drag me out of the house for this work project. City girl was happily sewing and being domestic at home, and really had no desire to get muddy and sweaty.

But this was a 2 person job, for sure. And.... it was a vastly underestimated 2 hour job.

Here's GB looking at the bamboo. That one on the right?? Anno, the nursery guy cut that a few weeks ago but couldn't get it out.
Here's GB looking up, thinking.... shit. These bamboo are sort of stuck up there. Because if you look at the next picture, you can see that the whole side of this bamboo plant- where the poles are the straightest- grow right up into a giant mango tree.
GB busts out the chansaw. This is the easy part, for sure.
HA HA HA! you think you can actually MOVE an 80-100ft bamboo shoot out of the clutches of a mango tree?? ha ha ha!

After this point I pretty much stopped taking pictures. We decided to go home and get tow straps and use the truck to pull the bamboo. Brilliant idea. We would have gotten nowhere without the truck.

Even so, the bamboo was very very heavy. We dragged each piece down to the site, and cut them up, but it was hard work. Karen was not happy.

We ended up placing a bunch of bamboo like we wanted.... but only about 1/3 of what we really wanted to do. But it was getting late, I had to get Luka, and we had guests coming for dinner.

The ray of hope:
We had noticed that the angel's trumpet tree I bought GB for Valentine's Day had been buried in the landslide.

While placing the bamboo, GB noticed that the tree had sent up a shoot. Yay!



And for the record.... today?? Very sore is Karen.

It doesn't seem to be working YET. But check out the video below of us pulling the bamboo. You can really get a sense of how looooong each shoot is!

Video!

Check out the FUN we had!

Landslide... snafu #2

I am perfectly aware that in this process of creating this wee bit of paradise that there will be a gazillion snafus. So calling this one #2 is just funny. In any case....

After that really successful removal of the umbrella grass, GB and I headed off to the land to do a few things. Mostly I just wanted to pace things out for the house.

Imagine my surprise and shock when I looked at our newly planted hillside and found a $150 bamboo plant on its side- with the roots all exposed:
Of course I ran right down there to save the plant. This is an expensive plant, after all. And lo and behold.... the ground was just SATURATED with water, and my poor leg sunk right down to the knee.
I tried in vain to pull myself out. GB, of course was too far away to holler at.
My phone rang, and it was my dad, who was so upset to hear that his daughter was stuck in a landslide. I'm sure he was picturing Malibu type landslides (ha ha!).

I knew GB would eventually get close enough. So I took a picture of where the mud I was in came from. see the SCAR.
GB eventually did help pull me out. The ground was so soft everywhere it was really hard to get traction.

The upshot is, we had an engineer come out to assess what we could do. Since this hillside edges our already smallish house pad, it's important that we control the erosion. Our rainfall here is so intense, and we can't have more dirt leaving us every time it rains (or before the plants we're planning on planting take root).

Hole in the road... snafu #1

That hole??? In the road- our scenic route driveway, to be exact. The bulldozer guys were working there- scraping and doing whatever they do.... and the culvert collapsed. Hard to tell, but there's water moving down there- about 4-5 ft down.

A concrete guy will fix it by fixing the WHOLE thing- he'd like to excavate out the culvert and then repour some thick concrete over the whole thing. cha ching.

Luckily this is NOT the driveway we use to get to our housesite. But still......

working at home

After a fabulous weekend at the Mauna Lani (thanks Grandma and Grandpa), we came home to a gorgeous day at home (after torrential rains the week before).

GB set right to work in the yard and decided to tackle some umbrella grass that was taking over our koi pond. He started by trimming it, but soon abandoned that project to just take the whole gigantic root ball OUT of the pond.

Here he is.... he's got the ball half way out of the pond. it's big and HEAVY.

We called for reinforcements- and with some serious group effort - all 4 of us pushing and pulling.... we got the thing out of the pond. It's BIG!

This toad skeleton was at the bottom of this root ball. pretty cool!


This is the dense, but very cool and pretty root system.

Drains and stuff

ugh! I uploaded sideways pictures and now blogger won't let me delete them. argh.....

so turn your head to the left and "enjoy". (this is NOT working for my sense of esthetics!)


GB and I went out to the land sans children (courtesy of wonderful big brothers Ra'am and Noam). I was gonna do some more planting , while GB worked on a drainage pipe for behind the rock wall.

Here's GB looking at the project, thinking he messed up. He had put down some plastic and then a big pipe with holes in it. Here he's using rocks to cover the pipe and hold the plastic away from the holes in the pipe.This is me using the o'o bar to make some holes for more ti plants. I got some fabulous RED ones from Tom and Eve. Soooo pretty.
The picture is dorky (made moreso by the sidewaysness of it), but since I'm always the one taking the pics, you might get the impression I never do any of the work. Well I do *maybe* 10% of what GB does. but it's something, right??

Here are some of the bamboos we planted. This is pre-landslide (next post).
The row of ti and croton. looks lame now. Give it some time. Will be beautiful.
Artsy shot of the drain area.
Another shot of the house pad.
And another, with the light lower.
GB.... looking so handsome and proud with the rock wall

View from "Above"

Much behind on posts, am I!

We had the fortune of getting to meet some nearby neighbors, Rob and Mike. Their house is to the Hamakua side of us, on the other side of the stream. We feel lucky to have met such nice neighbors. Their house is beautiful and was truly inspirational to see!

From their yard I took some pictures of our land. The sort of bald patch in the middle of this picture is the road that connects the upper and lower parts of the property.
We are on draft #4 or 5 of the house plans. We think that we're on the best and final one! I'll have to get GB to put it in a postable fashion so we can share it with whoever is reading this (who ARE you by the way?) We're finishing up some details and will hopefully get it to Val this week.

More Valentine's Day pics!

More Pictures!

Here's Noam carrying some of the crotons we planted. I love their red color. We have so much GREEN here, that it's nice to break up the landscape with some other colors.Here's our favorite mango tree with the rock wall that will hopefully keep water away from our house. It's really important for us to have many pictures of the landscape as it is now because in a few years from now it will look SOOOO different, and it will be really hard to remember what it was like.
Here's Noam standing on the top of the ridge. I'm down where I was planting bamboo. The sky looks so BIG!

There's our truck parked where the house will be.
Noam and Luka working. They were really both helpful.
Another shot of the chainsaw hunk ;)
Luka's crocs in the sawdust.
Last.... but not least. The POOL!!!! It's all dug out and filled with gravel- just waiting to be formed and sprayed!

Valentine's Day PLANTING!

With all of the bulldozing going on (and completed!!!). We found ourselves with a rubbly and erosion prone hillside right at the side of where our bedrooms will be.

GB, Noam, Luka and I set out on Valentine's Day 2007 to spend some time together and do a little planting. (or a lot of planting).

We did a little research and found some bamboo to plant there- very attractive and will also hold back the dirt. GB found a source here Gaia Yoga Nursery. We ordered the bamboo and for a small fee, they delivered the plants.

Before we could get those, though, GB had one last BIG tree to fell. It had a big branch hanging down over the railroad part of our driveway. He wanted me to video the fall- but I was too busy getting out of the way. Oh well.

Here he is cutting away..... see that sawdust FLY!

Tree is already down and he's cutting it up so we can move it off of the road. He was psyched because it fell exactly where he wanted it to.


After that exciting adventure, we drove down to start our planting. Well.... I should say LUKA drove.
When you're cute and little, you get all of the free rides : )

We planted:
B. glaucophylla (Malay Dwarf)
S. brachycladum (Sacred Golden bamboo of Bali)
and a bunch of Ti and crotons

We also came up with a plan to get some Okinawan spinach to finish off that hillside with a groundcover. We should get that from the same nursery some time in the next month or so.


It was a looong day. After lunch, Luka pooped out.

But he was raring to go after a short nap. This is at the end of the day. Content and DIRTY!

More Pics to come. Blogger can't handle too many at once, it seems