We are breathing bamboo these days. Madly propagating plants for the islands. Harvesting poles from our plantation for inventory and small scale projects like our new “bambooth” and beautiful carport. Yay! We are so excited about all the potential building applications on the islands. It is amazing to be intimately involved with the plants and the people that do so much to care for our home here on Maui. Mahalo and let the sun keep shining.
Our first structure with our home grown bamboo.
As the work-day ends, our progress on the treatment center today leaves us with the two storage tanks filled with water, and all the wiring and plumbing set for the first pressure test. All we are waiting for is the power supply to run the equipment and then we can run a test before the borate is loaded for bamboo treatment.
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Aloha. It feels like winter has finally arrived. The length of the days is shrinking and the rains are back for now. The shooting of the bamboo has been slightly postponed from the dry conditions that we had been experiencing. WIth the recent blessings of rain, the shooting process will take off again. In the meantime, we have been working diligently to finish our bamboo treatment/processing shed. We have one more concrete pour to do on Tuesday before we will start construction on the end walls. We have also been working in the nursery propagating bamboo and cleaning plants for off island sales. All plants leaving Maui for the other islands need to be free of scale, mites, ants, and other pests to curtail their spread throughout the islands. Sometimes the plants have all their leaves clipped off prior to shipping. This is no problem as the bamboo leafs out quickly within 10-14 days to its original fullness. We are very pleased to see sales pick up again. Please help me make the your blogging experience better by telling me what you’d like to hear about.
The pressure treatment vessel for our bamboo is here. We have been gearing up for this stage for a long time. Our first harvest will come soon and we will most likely have certified organic and biodynamic bamboo poles for sale in the new year. There is still much to do to get it operational and we are most likely a month out till our first batch goes through the steps of treatment. Here are some great photos of the day it came to the farm.
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I’ve been talking about the propagation for a while now, and I figured that I would tell you how we are doing it.
When propagating bamboo, there are multiple ways to go about it. For different bamboo species, it differs. We have been working with Malay Dwarf for a while and that is the species that I will be explaining for you.
The first step we take is gathering the bamboo for propagation. To propagate for this variety, we need something to take cuttings from. We take the cuttings from shoots that are at least three years old. In order to tell the age, we have to count the branches on the nodes. There must be at least five branches on at least one of the nodes on the shoot to be at least three years old. Here is a diagram of what I’m talking about.
The filled areas are branches, and the numbers represent what year of the plants life that branch grew.
Once we have found a shoot that is old enough, we cut it out of the clump and bring it over to the nursery for step two.
The next step is to trim all the extra branches off leaving only the strongest branch. that branch would then be cut to the second node, and the shoot would be cut on both sides of the node leaving it looking like this.
Finally your ready to plant. Using a 4 inch pot and custom potting soil bury the cutting with soil and pack the soil making sure to leave the bottom of the branch completely covered. Water very well and admire the new plants you have now created.
New leaves will grow within a couple of weeks if you did well. the finished product looks like this.
And here is some great photo’s from around the farm for your enjoyment.
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All photo’s by Nolin Vultrus.
The construction crew working has now finished the footer for the quonset hut. The stem wall pour comes next, and then after that, the concrete floor. All of our achievements always excite us and make us feel grateful for the blessings of this life.
The other workers went back up into our most recent planting and finished weeding the young plants and replacing the ones that the California grass swallowed. We replaced the empty spots with 10 Kokui, 13 Koa, and 5 Sandlewood trees!
P.S. If my posts seem a little boring, please forgive me, I’m still figuring out life (haha Ryan Funny edit) the details of this website. Any comments on my postings would be appreciated.
We have two new workers from Hana on the construction crew: Bryer and Lyman. We are right at this moment pouring the foundation for the quonset hut! Here are some pictures I took about 30 minutes ago. I’ll add the video when I figure out how to upload it from my phone in the right format.
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In the nursery,The Malay Dwarf propagation is going well. We have more than 500 cuttings started so far with a total of 1000 being our goal.
Check in again often to see more on the construction and other farm activities!
Thanks to Obama’s new program for putting youth in full time jobs, the first month’s salary comes courtesy of the federal government. Two new workers are here on the farm to help us build the building for the bamboo treatment center. Uila (We-La) and James have been doing a professional job and both are great workers with experience in construction. The purpose of this program is to put young people in full time jobs hoping that they will end up finding themselves invaluable to the employer and staying on.
In other news, the crew worked in the upper plantation weeding our young plants and doing some guava clearing. In the areas where the trees didn’t survive, the crew planted Koa and Sandalwood trees.
Today, I am showing Nathan how to update and keep the blog going for all you loyal viewers. We have certainly been remiss about adding entries, but are very happy to get it going again. This morning on the farm the crew was in the nursery cleaning malay dwarf bamboo for shipment to Oahu. We are now ready to ship out the 200 2 gallon Malay Dwarf plants.
We do have many new apprentices now, including another cook, whom agrees with our “localvore” diet.
The pictures illustrate the work we have been doing to create a space to build a quonset hut to house the bamboo soaking vessel.
While we spend most of our time out on the farm working with things that grow, there are moments when we have to do some more mundane tasks, like continuing work on our steep driveway. Yesterday afternoon we scraped down the second half of the driveway, using a traditional Hawaiian ‘O’o stick, a pickaxe, shovels, and some heavily gloved hands. We laid out new molds and rebar, and returned this morning to pour the concrete. We managed to get most of it poured, floated, and finished before getting hit with torrential rain. Ten minutes later the sun was out again, and we finished up before heading up to the farm house for some great rice and curry.
Photos 1 and 2 by Andy Moore, all others © 2010 Dan Bloch
