Watering the Lāʻī

Dane is off on Fridays & Saturdays. Because he is off, & he just planted the lāʻī (aka ki) on Wednesday, he asked me if I could stop by Lapakahi State Historical Park & water the 3 pots of lāʻī today & tomorrow. He put them in the porta potty so that the wind would not blow them around so much & hasten their transpiration. They looked good, but I did add a little dish washing soap to the water to break the surface tension & get the soil to absorb more water; he was having a little problem with that when he planted them. I think I will get some saucers to hold the water a little more while they get rooted.

Last night I saw Meyer Kitty Lemon come in really late at night to eat on the front porch. None of the other cats was around when he came by. This is only the 2nd time that he has come to eat since I moved back. I usually see him passing through about once a month.

I weighed myself this morning. And found that I had gained a pound over last week. But went from 31.4% fat to 27.7% fat. Which kinda implies that my weight gain was more muscle-oriented. Which I find hard to believe since I have not really done much over the past week to put on more muscle mass. The only thing different is that I went on 2 hikes of the 0.5 mile Lapakahi loop trail this week while assisting Dane with tours for school groups. 

When I went out to pick the ʻohiʻa ʻai this morning, there were 2 young mongooses in the fallen leaves & young ʻohiʻa ʻai sprouts under the tree. And since I had no phone to take photos with, one of them came within 4 feet of me! It was oblivious. The ʻohiʻa ʻai sprouts are about 6 inches high so it had to stand up on its hind legs to see over the top of them. I think I was so close to it that it was only seeing my legs & did not recognize me as a threat. The other one was about 15 feet away so when it stood up it could see all of me & immediately took off & ran in to the  pasture, leaving its buddy behind!

There were only a few ʻohiʻa ʻai on the ground. And signs that the piglets had come in last night. I did find marks along the front of the fence of where they came in. It is pretty apparent that I really need to do the piglet retrofit for the entire fence!

I picked an overfull bucket of ʻohiʻa ʻai this morning; I got 8.6 pounds without moving the ladder. While I am pretty sure the tree will be able to provide 10 pounds for Kohala Grown Market tomorrow, I am going to give a bunch to Masa since he is coming to mow the lawn on Saturday. I hope the thinning that am doing now will produce larger & more uniformly sized ʻohʻa ʻai for them to sell to Kohala Grown.

I spent about 90 minutes washing & chopping the green ʻohiʻa ʻai in to quarters. I am going to make pickles with the ʻohiʻa ʻai that I thinned. I thought I could get away with just splitting the smaller ones in half but ended up quartering even the smallest of the ʻohiʻa ʻai because it is easier to get the immature seed out of it when it is quartered. I'm not sure if the young seeds can be eaten so I decided to play it safe & go through the extra work of removing them.

I gave Jessie half the 'ohi'a 'ai that I picked this morning. I took the other half to Charlene at Minnie's when I went to pick up lunch; she was the only one working today so it was very busy & backed up. I had driven by on another day last week & saw they were closed; today I found out for June she is only open on Monday, Tuesday, & Friday. The parking lot was full, partly because there were so many people there, but mainly because a tourist parked as if it was diagonal parking & took up 2 of the 4 spots! Auē! Then his wife was complaining that next time she wanted to go to Bamboo! I would not be upset if they did, although it would have meant Charlene would have sold 6 less meals today; they had the kids & grandkids with them.

Before I went to Lapakahi this afternoon, I stopped at the post office. The new phone was there! It looks like it would have arrived sooner but they had the wrong address. It's a good thing the FedEx driver recognized that it must be going to the post office since there are no apartment buildings on this road! They had 54-73 Union Mill Road #8; it should have been 54-396. Not sure how they got it so wrong.

Getting the new phone set up & working this evening was a pain in the butt. I still can't use the phone; I got an error message that said, "Sorry, can't activate. Please call Customer Service ... for assistance." With what? Technology! Auē!

It drizzled again this evening. But I really wanted to put up more of the chicken wire to keep the piglets out. I quickly attached the top strand of another 30 feet or so of chicken wire before I got too wet; I still have about 35 more feet to block the front section of fence. Then I will go back & replace the white plastic fence pieces with chicken wire so it doesn't look so tacky. And also go back & really secure all parts of the retrofit.

Too bad I couldn't get the phone to work tonight, could have had some really cute photos of Hahai's kittens. She is apparently using the area under the ramp as her new location to keep the kittens. So when she goes off hunting at night, they play on the porch & ramp. I am glad I got Da Bird cat toy when I was in Kona on Wednesday; I attached it to the railing & they seem to really like attacking it! They have also been using the new cat bed that I got at the same time; I heard them meowing when Hahai came back & it looked like they must have been in the cat bed. They all followed Hahai out of view of the baby monitor, so I checked & the bed was warm! (I will have to move the other baby monitor back to viewing the cat bed.) Will load up some photos once I get the phone working.