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| Preparations |
| 11.29.04 (9:57 pm) [edit] |
Recently I bought thousands of half gallon plastic bags for my new coffee plants. I'm clearing an area near the house where I'll lay some weed matting down and erect a fence. Once I get the potting soil, I can fill the bags and plant the seedlings. I'll have to also install some water sprinklers, but that is quite easy since here, I won't have to bury the pipe.I have been creating gift baskets and photographing some of the samples. I'll know how well I did when I see how many sell :D I tested out the clothes drier the other day and it works, but if I keep it I'll only use it for emergency drying. I am happy enough with the clothesline and the solar drier is a lot cheaper. Electrical costs here are quite high, although at least we don't have to have heating and cooling costs if we don't want to. I have been loading an operating system on a server I have. I shipped it here for use with my shopping cart, but set that idea aside when I mispacked the disks and many got destroyed in the move. I was able t orecover some disks and I'll do some testing to see how much the electric costs go up when I run it :D Saturday I received my check from the mac nut processor. It was not as much as I had hoped, but it was well worth the trouble to get it. It pays off my leasehold fees for next year. In the past few weeks I have had more opportunities to browse the property here. So far I have some coffee, lots of mac nut trees, an orange tree, a guava tree, a couple of avacado trees and I think I saw a papaya tree once but have not seen it since. Hmmm... Then the other day I found a couple noni. Noni is a quite interesting plant that appears to have many uses. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say that it appears people think it fixes everything :-) If you want to read more about it, here is an abode document: http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/c... In the next day or so I think I'll post a review of my first full year on the island. So far, not a bit of island fever and I hope I never get it :D |
| Thanksgiving |
| 11.27.04 (1:45 am) [edit] |
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Thanksgiving has come and gone. The food was great, the night was long. After a fantastic dinner with friends up in Waimea, I watched a movie and then, about 11pm, headed down for a long night at Wal-Mart with a couple hundred of my "closest" neighbors The other day, my TV tuner gave up. I noticed a TV sale at WalMart for the "Friday - Day After Thanksgiving Sale". Last year I was many hundreds of people from the door and decided that this year I would get there a bit earlier. As I drove down from the mountain (and within sight of Mauna Kea), the sprinkles I had been in, turned into heavier rain. However, just before COSTCO, the rain stopped. I got to Wal-Mart at about 11:30pm and parked. I would be #16 in line, just 6 and a half hours until the doors opened! I was also the first of the group to have not brought a chair to sit in... I thought about a chair, but you know how it is, I put it off and never followed through. Still, it was not too bad. I sat on the ground some and walked around a bit, my fellow waiters holding my spot. As door opening neared, the line got longer and the chatting became more animated. Finally at about 6am the doors opened and we headed in amidst comments from some of us to not push. I have to admit that the Kona people are very well behaved and except for a few people hoping to sneak into line, I have no qualms hanging out with these neighbors anytime someone comes up with a reason to stand outside all night :-) Besides, with such great weather all night, who can complain? A few hours before opening, the store distributed store maps so that we could plan out attack. Mine turned out to be a simple sweep. I needed a 27" TV, a couple DVD players, a couple of electrical can openers and a flat electrical grill pan. In my case, it was in the door, 1/3 of the way towards the back of the store (grabbing a cart on the way), then a sharp left-hand turn and grab the pickup slip for the TV (which was outside in the container trucks). Then I popped two DVD players into the cart, made a short jog past the photo department and down to small appliances. I had a slight problem finding the griddle, but was soon off to the checkout area. I made one last scan of the flier to ensure I didn't forget something and was 1st through the checkout! As I headed out the door it took a minute or two to get the cart thought he crowd (which was still going into the store). Total time in the store... 6 minutes or less. So by 6:12 I had picked up the TV and was on my way to the Royal Kona Resort, where I dropped off a DVD for someone who could not stand all night outside :-) Now if only Christmas shopping had been as quick and simple as this! I have to admit that based upon the lists people had while we chatted in line, retailers have nothing to worry about this year! In other news, I'll be finishing up figuring out what gift baskets I'll be offering this year. I also have to perform a full court press on advertising the website well before Christmas and I have a few extra domain names to set up. They will all point to the same site in the hopes it will raise me a bit up in the rankings. Recently I purchased containers for growing my new coffee plants and am about ready to start the nursery. I am clearing an area near the house and will soon lay down the weed mat and put up a fence and water lines. The weather has been great and I'm glad to be here :-) |
| These and Those |
| 11.23.04 (12:07 pm) [edit] |
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So far I have delivered 3000 pounds of mac nuts to the local buyer, but have to wait another week or so for the check. The money from the nuts will pay off my leasehold fee and continue to qualify me as a farm for tax purposes. Of course, selling coffee also qualifies me as a farm, but so far, I made more money off the mac nuts than the coffee. The mac nuts were here on the property and I had no overhead for them, thus almost pure profit. With coffee, I had to get bags, clips, labels and so on. I still appear to have another truckload of mac nuts left to pick, but I am off to other projects that need my time. I am creating gift baskets as I write this. I don't have them priced properly, so I will take them offline until I do. Until I have enough business I will not be able to buy gift item stock at wholesale prices. To keep the baskets reasonably priced, I buy items on sale and keep a low profit. This allows me to still offer bargains and build up the business. When I can buy wholesale, I will increase my profits yet still be able to offer the items at about the same price (or perhaps lower). Still, unless a gift basket fits a need, it will not sell. Thus I will start by offering a number of different baskets with different sizes. Soon I'll be able to determine if some of the products I chose are not "gift basket material" :) For example, gift baskets will include such items as Macadamia Nuts, Calendars, Christmas Ornaments and Figurines, Jams, Coffee Cups and those individual Coffee Filters that I love so much; I wrote my own review for it! I am adding drop-down boxes of choices within the baskets so that some items may be substituted for others. It will be interesting to see what choices people will make if they must choose between 2 different items. If time permits, I may be able to offer a complete choice of any item I have in stock to be put into an assortment where I don't have to be constrained by specific sized baskets. Speaking of baskets, currently I have fancy and plain baskets. Unfortunately, the plain baskets are larger than the fancy ones. So two gift baskets might be the same price but the fancy one would have fewer items, but look nicer. Decisions, decisions :) So whether my gift baskets succeed or fail, this will be a learning experience. Yesterday I spent hours on the ladder fixing some of my gutters. They were broken years before I got here and some of the holes caused the stairs underneath to rot. I wanted to replace the stairs, but decided to replace the gutters first. Just recently I enrolled in a program, which will help cover much of the cost of a water catchment system. That system would gather rainfall to be stored for use on the farm plants. Water is usually collected from a roof... thus the gutters I need to replace. Rather than replace them now, I will wait to see what kinds are recommended for the catchment system. It will be a couple months before I know, but the patches I made will carry me through. Speaking of that grant, it will also cover some of the items I need to perform prior to the new planting of 5 acres. This means that much of the needed farm work will have to wait a few months until I see what conservation recommendations are made. On another front, I have received quite a bit of information lately and will be buying some needed farm supplies in the next week. I will be starting my own coffee plant nursery and need some fencing, PVC, matting, bags, dirt, etc. It will be fun designing the area and setting it up. Yesterday I received my long-awaited Wal-Mart catalog. On the cover is a TV with DVD built in for a really nice price. I was holding this catalog in my hand when I turned on my current TV. The TV's tuner went out and I had to hook up my VCR to the TV so I could see anything. Could this be an omen? In any event, last year I headed to Wal-Mart fort heir Day After Thanksgiving Day Sale and was pleasantly surprised by the crowd. Although it went all the way around the lot and we were standing there for hours, still, it had to be the best-behaved crowd I had ever been associated with. This is in deep contrast to recent reports on TV of sporting events. So, I will be in line early, taking advantage of the bargains. Last year I outfitted my kitchen with lots of appliances for next to nothing in cost. Those in the US should check all of their fliers for sales on Friday. Many tyes of stores will be offering sales. I found another sale I'd like to attend this year (MicroCenter in Marietta, GA), but alas, I'm stuck in Hawaii. Perhaps STUCK is the wrong word, but it will make YOU fell better not being here :) -- An aside: In choosing titles for these Blogs, I try to find a title, which combines the many topics I cover. Sometimes I do better than others. Also, sometimes I spend a lot of time thinking and other times the title just comes to me. In the case of this Blog the first title that came to mind would have been "Soup to Nuts" because I was talking about Mac nuts again, however, I would have had to go back and add something about soup, perhaps add a complete Thanksgiving theme. That was too much work. Then I thought about "This and That" as a way of covering multiple topics, but I already used that title I think. Thus I took that title a step forward and chose "These and Those". |
| Another Day |
| 11.13.04 (9:12 am) [edit] |
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Thursday, I had the pickers come back. The the morning, the girls did more playing than picking. The son appeared to be the best worker, picking on his own. When the Father came down to where the girls were, they started picking a lot faster. A few times they sang songs in their own language and were often laughing and carrying on. They picked and I walked the property with the leaf blower, clearing off the old leaves from the fallen nuts. If the orchard had been kept up, the area under the trees would have been leveled and cleared and all grass and weeds removed. However, the renter here before me had no ability to do that and the owner never contracted with anyone. They picked 95 of the 5 gallon buckets of nuts and these look to be better quality that the last batch. When the girls asked to use the downstairs bathroom, they looked all around the storage area. They wanted to see the rooms and so on. I know that they are new to the island and are living in a development here not known for having very expensive housing. Still the houses are not too bad, just far from the lights of the "city". This house may be quite larger than they have. They get a ride in their in-laws van which appears quite nice and new. The Father said they could not pick over the weekend becasue he had to fly to Honolulu. One daughter has heart problems and they will be looking or operating. She is not yet a teenager. Because of the mac nut picking, I did not get to town often for the Coffee Festival. I was hoping to have placed my website or coffee label in the judging contest, but never got to it. Today I am scheduled to go help for a while and I'll go there early and get a haircut first. Gotta look my best :-) Another thing I missed was the seminar on how to roast coffee. Some coffee farmers perform their own roasting but many are like me, we have someone else do it. Still, we want to know how it is done and can sound somewhat knowledgeable when asked about our roasts. The technical side of roasting is interesting. As the green coffee beans begin their roast, they start to expand, the sugars begin to caramalize and there are complex changes in taste and structure of the bean. At two distinct points, the beans pop (almost like popcorn) where you can actually hear the beans fracture and crinkle. The longer the beans roast, the more oils come out and the darker the bean gets. The tatse changes and the caffeine is roasted out! Darker roasts have less caffeine! I found a problem with my website when a customer called me yesterday. He was unable to use a coupon for his purchase. After many hours looking and testing I found that if a procust has "attributes" the coupons stop working. I had just added attributes to the coffee when I came up with the second roast. When I gave customers the option of a medium or full-city roast, I ended up breaking the coupon part. Software coders are investigating. I may be able to patch the code myself in the shopping cart, but for now, I removed the roast option and may just create new products for each roast until the bug is fixed. I have been enjoying the few oranges my tree has produced. Even though they are not fully ripe, they have been sweet enough, and seedless! The other day a friend told me there was an Ebay sale for some server parts I needed. The price was right and so was the shipping! I waited to put in my bid and got involved in the picking. Then it was too late! Oh well :( Well, I have to get ready for my trip to town. ALoha! |
| Exit Stage Left |
| 11.07.04 (10:40 pm) [edit] |
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I keep hearing American Actors and Actresses saying that they are fed up with the country and are threatening to move. Well, I say "BYE"! Some of these people have threatened before and surprise, never left. This is what, Sean Penn's second threat, just because his candidate didn't win. Although most artists seem to be Democrats, I'd say the same thing if they were Republicans or Libertarians or Wonbulgyo (are Wonbulgyons a voting block?). I don't care if the reason they want to leave is political, or they don't like your neighbor, or the tax rates are excessive or whatever. If they feel they must leave the country, I'll hold the door open. Just don't be a famous person trying to make a point. I don't care what they wear (thus I don't subscribe to People), I don't care where they eat nor do I care who they vote for. What makes their ability to become someone else and entertain us, make their political views any more important than the rest of us "unwashed"? I think the reason they want to move is out of embarassment. They got up and rooted for their candidate and the rest of the country felt their political views were NOT a deciding factor. There is nothing worse than telling an actor that he is insignificant :) So I say "Stop threatening us and move already!". |
| From nuts to beans |
| 11.07.04 (12:21 pm) [edit] |
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My neighbor talked me into it. That is, having my macadamia nuts picked and sold. Although I kinda knew what was involved, it was something I was resigned not to do. She convinced me that there was money in the nuts and it was a waste to let them go to waste. The fact that she was kinda doing the same thing with her coffee did not escape me :) She contacted some pickers and they came by to look at the trees and farm condition. You can pay pickers less if the nuts are easy to pick, or they are desparate for work (and money). In my case, the mac nut orchard had not been picked in quite some time, and there were leaves all over the place. Still, I agreed to pay them a pretty good picking fee and they agreed to come on Friday and Saturday. There was and still is a possibility they will continue working next week, but I think they really only want to work on Saturday. The reason will soon become obvious. On Thursday evening I went into town and bought a leaf blower which I would use to blow the leaves off of the mac nuts. Mac nuts fall to the grougn and are then picked up, evaluated by the picker and dropped in a bucket. The buckets are consolidated into special white woven plastic bags which are very strong. So, on Friday the Mother, Father and a child were there. The family were from Micronesia. They picked a number of bags, mostly in the first acre of land. I had blown a lot of leave away and I could see that this would be slow going. The mother sat on the ground and picked nuts and put them in her apron. Then she would get up and dump it into a bucket. There was a small playpen for the child and it was under close supervision. We ended the day with a few bags filled. I went town afterwards because I needed to try to find a concentrator for the backpack blower which would hopefully allow me to blow more leaves yet not blow the nuts away with the leaves. The next morning the pickers said they would be there about 10am so I decided to sleep in a bit. Imagine my surprise when they showed up at about 8am... A younger girl and her sisters was at my door asking for "Manager Mark". Well, that MUST be me :) They had walked down the long driveway to get me and I offered to drive them up. I pulled the truck around, dropped the tailgate and the girls piled on. Many people here have no qualms jumping on the back of a truck for a ride. Back on the mainland my Mother would have been worried that they would fall off. I think their feeling here is, just DON'T! All together I think I had 10 or 12 people picking Saturday and we only had a few problems. There were a few younger kids there and they seem to pick any nut off the ground, while the older people are more selective. It also turns out that I am paying on the high side for the work. In reality, I don't mind that. In this case I didn't have to water or fertilize these trees since I was here and they did fine; so any money I got from them was free. Without these pickers I would have had no money from them. It would be impossible for one person to pick nuts on 9 acres by hand! Worldwide children are asked to help on farms and here seems to be no exception. Until somewhat recently, Hawaiian schools woul;d close during coffee picking season so they could halp with the harvest. In watching the pickers here it was obvious that the children wanted to work and often played games to see who was picking the most, etc. Never once did I see a parent or older child scold a younger one for not working. All family members seemed to take breaks whenever and for how long they wanted. Over the two days I chatted with most of the family, although many of them spoke broken English, they seemed quite nice. Their reason for moving from Marshall Islands was so that they children could have a nicer school and perhaps a better education. They like Hawaii County and have not ben to the other neighbor islands. It sounded as though this place was nicer than where they were from, but I'm sure they still miss their old home. I kept going through the "jungle" to each of the trees which were easy to get to. I would blow some leaves and see what quality and quantity of nuts were there. If it looked like a good spot, I would sweep as much of the area as I could. Blowing leaves the wrong way or too hard just moves them under the next tree. It was an odd feeling while I cleared around the trees. It was somewhat like an Easter Egg Hunt but more like a Gold Prospecting Expedition. In prospecting for gold you have to pick a location that looks promising, then clear off the dirt and hope that you find a nugget. Even if you don't find a nugget, the spots of gold all add up and the more you pick up, the more money you get. Here every mac nut helps fill the 5 gallon bucket, which then fulls the white bags. When we were done I did my first count. The total was about 96 buckets of nuts (each about 23 pounds each) so this group picked a respectable 2200 pounds or so! Unfortunately, some of the nuts are not good and will be rejected and some will be bad and the pickers could not have known. Still, on Monday I'll drive the two truckloads of bags down and drop them off. It will be interesting to see just how good they are and what I will be paid. With the pickers I had to be a foreman, making sure there were enough buckets and bags and places to store them. I ferried some of the family around and did my share of work too. This was a great dry run for what it will be ike when the coffee comes in. Then I will have lots more workers and will probably have to have a foreman to control things. With macadamia nuts they can sit for a while and not go bad. Coffee cherry must be picked when it ripens (and there are many pickings throughout the season). The cherry must be processed almost immediately as it will begin to go bad soon thereafter. It will be a more immediate problem then if there are insufficient bags or facilities, etc. I'll be ready for that! Also, on Friday evening I was able to stop by the Kona Coffee Festival in town. I was hoping to be there every day, but will have to limit my trips because of this truckload full of nuts I have right now... I cannot imagine how much more gas a 1/2 ton of extra weight would cost me! When I stopped by the Kona Coffee Council booth, I saw that the coffee I had donated was up for sale. I stood back and watched as people picked up different farms coffee and made their buying decision. I watched as one lady picked up a bag of my Pele's Passion Coffee in her left hand, looked at the fron and read the back. Then she held that bag as she picked up and put down other coffees until she fould another competing coffee to buy. I now know what an artist feels like at a gallery. He stands back and watches people enjoy his work and possibly buy it. It is quite satisfying. I also took a few pictures of people while they had my caffee bag held up :) Although the majority of my mac nuts will be sold, there are still plenty that I can open and enjoy, free of charge! By the way, should you wonder why the cost of mac nuts is so high? Well, for one reason, they are picked by hand. Then the company who buys them must inspect all the nuts to weed out the bad ones. They check moisture content and so on. Opening the nuts takes considerable work as these things do NOT want to open easily. You can drive over them and they still won't open easily :-) I won't be selling mac nuts on my http://itskona.com webpage, but will be including mac nuts from various suppliers in the gift baskets I'm creating. However you get them you will soon realize why people pay as much as they do for them. They are FANTASTIC! |
| Ramping up |
| 11.03.04 (6:05 pm) [edit] |
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As a new month starts, I begin to ramp up on projects. I just paid my first mortgage payment and now must look towards making some money to pay the bills. Today I printed some labels for 2 oz coffee bags. Some of them will be offered for sale at the Kona Coffee Festival this week. The receipts will help fund Council projects to inform and educate the public about 100% Kona Coffee. Tomorrow is the Council meeting. Friday is a full day. In the morning the County Agriculture Department is sending someone to help me decide how to set up the farm. At about the same time, I have some macadamia nut pickers coming by to pick and bag as much as they can. Then I'll take them down to the local mac nut company to sell them. So besides growing coffee, looks like I'm a Mac Nut Farmer too (at least until I plow many of the trees down for coffee). Although I don't really have an "Upper 40", I have named parts of the farm. Upper 40 refers to the "north 40" or the upper 40 acres of a property. In order to remember where things are on the land, certain parts of the property lend their attributes to names. For example: "Car Park". When I found this property, there was a junked and abandoned truck on the land. The truck is gone now, but it is clear where it was as that area has a nice open spot where it was. "The Garage" While not really a garage, there is an old metal storage shed there and I added a new shed next to it. There are some PVC pipes stored there and I just thought the Garage sounded appropriate. "McDonalds" is about 1/2 up the property (the dividing line between the upper and lower 40? :) McDonalds is known for its "golden arches" and at this spot on the property; you drive under some tree limbs, which form an arch over the road. The “arches” is a very busy area too with lots happening in close proximity. Within a close area are the arches, a mango tree, a Pumpkin Cherry tree (the cherries are shaped like a pumpkin) and now just today I found an orange tree! J Here I have been living here a year and had no idea I was growing oranges. I am also working on the new newsletter, which will contain information about Christmas baskets and so on. So there you go, projects and names and things to do. |