Taro & Ti Home

It’s been a couple of months since I last posted about my little bucket-lo’i project. I have several 25 gallon molasses tubs re-purposed to be used as pots to grow my taro in. Since these particular taro plants prefer semi-aquatic conditions, I opted to not drill a drain hole in these tubs and to flood [...]

It seems that every week popular opinion vacillates between coffee being healthy ambrosia and coffee being toxic waste. This week, it seems, coffee has been given a nod for it’s health benefits so we all can drink our cuppa with assurance of good health. Until next week, of course, when we will be required to [...]

For the last couple of years I’ve kept taro in the greenhouse in large molasses tubs filled with water. The taro themselves grew in smaller buckets of topsoil submerged in these tubs, which I have dubbed bucket-lo’i. Of all my taro, these taro grew the best and produced the largest corms and healthiest leaves. The [...]

A poi pounder is a stone shaped somewhat like a half an hour-glass with a rounded bottom. It’s usually carved out of a gray lava with tight pores. In those days, these stones were pecked at with a hammer stone to shape it – a process that took many many patient hours. Once the shape [...]

The hardest part of planting boo is thinking years ahead. After all, bamboo is a long term commitment. Once planted and established, it’ll take a bulldozer to get rid of it, so one has to be absolutely certain that it’s planted exactly where one wants it to be planted, and planted in an area where [...]

Not long ago I was presented with an opportunity to gather some bees. As usual, until you go look at it, you have to form a picture in your head with the questions you ask and the answers you get. My wife’s friends mother called about bees in her roof – way up at the [...]

Up until I got bees, flowers were just pretty colorful things growing on the weeds in my back yard. And until I got bees, I had no idea just how many flowers I had growing back there – and how many there are. There are just a ton of them back there. Always could be [...]

I had a bee cutout this Saturday to do. Last week I built a bee vacuum, sure it was going to cut my cutouts from four hours to two hours. Yep. Just suck all them bees up then cut and mount the comb at my leisure then pour the bees in when done. That was [...]

My first swarm of the year hasn’t done a whole lot just yet. But then, the nectar hasn’t really kicked in yet. My other hives are also pretty dry too – they’re certainly ready for the flowers to kick in. Currently we have bluebonnets in bloom and have had a few trees in bloom this [...]

I have always pictured a swarm as a bunch of bees and the old queen leaving the old hive, hanging out on a tree and then deciding on a new home – in just a few hours, if that. I’ve never heard of a swarm that would hang out overnight. But today’s swarm changed all [...]

I got a call this weekend, earlier than expected. A friend had a yard full of flying bees and there was a mass of bees landing on one of his little Crepe Myrtle trees. My first swarm this year. I admit – I was a bit unprepared. But it didn’t take long to fix that [...]

Saturday began like any other day – getting up and realizing that I’m running late.  I rushed to my job to set up some equipment at a convention and while there conducting the work I was to do, I bumped into a fellow beekeeper. In these parts that’s a pretty good thing – there are [...]

As with any plan, things change. This season I was distracted by bee opportunities and had to shuffle my deck to do a couple of emergency (as in they would be exterminated otherwise) cutouts, which meant building hives and planning my apiary. I have 6 hives being assembled to expand that little apiary and the [...]