Hawai'i County Food Self-Sufficiency Baseline 2012 (condo, homes, neighborhood)

[OpenD]

While stumbling around the County website looking for something else, I found this interesting new link.

"This data provides a 2012 snapshot of where, and what kind of, farming is occurring on Hawaiʻi Island and can serve as a baseline to monitor future trends in agriculture landuse."

There a whole bunch of interesting maps and reports, as well as an interactive map shown what's being grown where.

Hawaii Geospatial data Repository

[oregonwoodsmoke]

Thank you. Just the information I was looking for.

[OpenD]

So far the biggest surprise for me is that the largest category of agricultural land use in Lower Puna appears to be Fallow Papaya.

I'm also fascinated to see that they've had the foresight to include Energy Farms as a valid category to track. Yeah, I know they have trouble with the spelling of "energy" but they assure me they'll be fixing that soon.

[hotzcatz]

They aren't tracking home food production, though. I read once somewhere that during WWII, folks produced over 40% of their own vegetables. We could do that here easy enough, one would think.

What did you grow today? Anyone get any produce from their yard today? We can start the sustainable thing ourselves right in our own yards. No need to wait for the government.

[oregonwoodsmoke]

Maybe on The Big Island, folks could produce 40% of their vegetables.

That would be difficult in a lot of places in Hawaii because lots are tiny. It's tricky to grow a bunch of food when the lot is the size of a postage stamp and most of the room is occupied by a house. or for all the folks living in third story of a condo building.

In Puna, it should be possible to produce 100% of the family's fruit and veggies. Although some of those subdivisions have some pretty tiny lots.

I'm guessing that there is a lot of fallow papaya, because Hawaii can't compete on price with Central America. Nobody has bothered to take the trees out but nobody can afford to harvest them and ship them for what they will bring.

[BigIslandBum]

Originally Posted by oregonwoodsmoke

That would be difficult in a lot of places in Hawaii because lots are tiny. It's tricky to grow a bunch of food when the lot is the size of a postage stamp and most of the room is occupied by a house.

The Urban Homestead at a Glance | The Urban Homestead® - A City Farm, Sustainable Living & Resource Center, A Path to Freedom towards Self-Sufficiency

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by oregonwoodsmoke

I'm guessing that there is a lot of fallow papaya, because Hawaii can't compete on price with Central America. Nobody has bothered to take the trees out but nobody can afford to harvest them and ship them for what they will bring.

Maybe. But obviously there's still a lot of papaya production going on, and even new planting happening. Last year thousands of new GMO papaya trees were cut down by vandals, exactly the same as the year before. It was a new variety created to resist the ringspot virus that has become a big problem for growers, but "eco-terrorists" don't want any GMO crops grown, so there's currently a bit of a standoff.

Ever seen the solo size papayas being harvested? I find the process a bit comical, once the trees get tall enough that workers can't reach the fruit. They wander around with a big shoulder bag, and a pole with a plumbers plunger on the end. When the end fruit on a strand starts to show a little color they poke it with the plunger tip, which normally causes the softball sized fruit to fall. They reach out the other hand to catch the falling fruit, and place it into the bag. There's a big papaya orchard across the road from the Hongwanji Temple in Kea'au, and I once got to watching a couple of guys doing that and wondered how long it would be until one of them missed catching a falling papaya. Maybe an hour later I got bored with it, because they still had not dropped one. I guess the old saying is true... practice, practice, practice!

[hotzcatz]

Papayas are stupidly easy to grow, too. Get a papaya, take it out in the back yard (or side yard or front yard for that matter) and toss the seeds out into the area you want it to grow. Try not to mow over it while it's getting big.

Papayas, bananas and coconuts are really easy to grow in the yard and they can be used as a landscape plant, too. The Chinese banana makes a nice short tree. Samoan coconuts are shorter than the others, too. Would a papaya re-sprout and grow shorter branches if you whacked the main stem off? I dunno if it would, though, since those vandals whacked the commercial papaya and nobody mentioned them regrowing.

Scarlet runner beans make pretty red flowers and have tasty beans plus they cover fences nicely and stick around for about a year which is a lot longer than bush beans. Lima beans will cover fences and stay there for years, but then you have lima beans. The scarlet (and white) runner beans can be eaten young as green beans or left to mature into dried beans.

Passionfruit is another good fence covering vine which produces fruit. As long as you have some sort of plants in your landscape, you can probably grow something edible. Citrus makes lovely shade as well as smells wonderful when it is in bloom.

[BigIslandBum]

Originally Posted by hotzcatz

PWould a papaya re-sprout and grow shorter branches if you whacked the main stem off? I dunno if it would, though, since those vandals whacked the commercial papaya and nobody mentioned them regrowing.

Yep, they do. On a Lyman Museum tour, we stopped by a papaya farm that happened to be adjacent to one of the vandalized farms. All the vandalized papaya trees had forked 2 new branches, full of fruit, from the original main stem.

[hotzcatz]

Well, then, that's gonna double their harvest capability on the same amount of trees! Silly vandals. I've got a too tall papaya in the back yard AND I have a machete! Aha! Whappa! And now, easy to pick papaya! Ha!

It seems odd the folks trying to figure out how self-sustaining we are haven't factored in the amount of food which comes from everyone's yard. Who doesn't have a neighborhood avocado tree?