Malay Dwarf Propagation

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.

Mahalo Nui

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.

Atter Cleaning

Today we cleaned the Atter bamboo. The team used sawzall’s to cut shoots that were too small or to crowded. This afternoon’s work is going to be propagating Malay Dwarf keikis. We have been making these starts for a while now, and are about halfway to our (don’t quote me on this. I’m probably wrong) 1,000 keiki goal.  For more information on bamboo propagation, I found this website. Bamboo Propagation

Quote of the week:

When I was walking down the hill, I felt like Godzilla. Walking all slow going “rawr rawr rawr”

Kapok

More clearing today on the upper reaches of the project. We had the extra help of a new guy as well, which allowed Allison to work on planting more peach palms. Yay! Two of our Kapok trees made seed pods which I have been harvesting. I’ve got six so far, and they made about a gallon of material. They are used for their cotton-like substance that surrounds the seeds in the pod. This is what Wikipedia says about it. And here is an image of it opened up still on the tree. It is really soft and has been fun to play with.

Photos by Ryan Zucco

18th Annual Taro Festival

Once again, the East Maui Taro Festival was a great success in Hana. We had excellent weather and lots of Hula and music. Whispering Winds Bamboo had a booth at the fair where we sold some bamboo and talked to a lot of people about what we do. It’s a great event for us because it is so close and creates a presence for us. Some of the more popular things to do there is eat poi and buy taro to plant or eat. The Taro Festival is really a venue for promoting Taro and its cultural practices.

Photos by Ryan Zucco

compost tea

This afternoon we had a demonstration on how to make compost tea from our neighbor Brian. He used a mixture of more than 70 different herbs, natural compost collected from local riverbeds, and other goodies. After boiling some of the herbs twice and adding others fresh, along with some minerals and guano, Brian put everything into an aerator for around 6 hours to expedite the composting process. The goal is to recreate the natural aerobic composting and prevent any anaerobic fermentation. Once the process was complete, we filtered the tea through a double strainer and then loaded it up on the tractor for spraying this evening with the dew. Compost tea can be applied to the land up to 6 times a year. With some luck it will also help bring us some rain.

All photos © 2010 Dan Bloch

Permaculture Tour

This morning was a bit shorter than usual, since we started out with a clearing, where we shared any thoughts on things that are getting in the way of our full enjoyment of and participation in our work and community. It was both a rewarding and comforting experience, and added to our communal karma. We followed up our talk with some more Guadua trimming, again doing our best to avoid the thorns.
This afternoon friends of ours from Hale Akua farm on a permaculture course came by for a tour of our farm. We took them all over our facilities, explaining the basics of bamboo farming and sharing our nursery, fruit orchards, hardwoods, and bamboo groves. We also were happy to share how we use permaculture techniques are a large scale, recycling organic material throughout the different parts of our farm.

All photos © 2010 Dan Bloch

Biodynamic Agriculture

Last night we shared dinner with Jason Harris, also known as Buffaloboy, of the Josephine Porter Institute. Biodynamics is a philosophy introduced by Rudolf Steiner in 1924, before organic was a word associated with food or farming. You can read more about the philosophy and techinques here and here. Since we’re a biodynamic farm (the only biodynamic bamboo farm we know of), Jason wanted to come see how we incorporate biodynamic techniques into our work.

He also graciosuly told us his own story of how he became involved in biodynamics, starting with his own Cree upbringing, learning traditional healing with his grandfather, and moving on to studying with Hugh Courtney at JPI. Jason explained that he’d like to turn all of Maui into a biodynamic ecosystem within a year – a lofty goal, but one that we think he could accomplish.

Chipping

Some readers have asked why we chip rather than harvest the cut culms for other uses. Right now we’re working to grow clumps of bamboo for future harvesting, and many of the clumping bamboos can get crowded in their first few years of growth. We remove culms from the inner sections of the clumps to promote straighter growth of the next generation of bamboo. Straighter bamboo culms are much easier to use for construction, and nearly all of our tropical clumping bamboos are grown for building materials.

The culms that we remove aren’t mature enough for construction use, as the ideal age for building bamboo is around five years. We chip the young culms and add them back into the bamboo groves, since they make perfect compost for the culms that we’re growing for  harvest.

Propagating Bamboo

Today the interns learned bamboo propagation techniques in the nursery. After digging up some hardy Bambusa textilis gracili (a variant of the bamboo favored by weavers) we split up the roots, trimmed the tops, and placed them in a coco peat mix to help sprout new root growth.

All photos © 2010 Dan Bloch