Snapshots of April

My favorite monkey pod tree near Ho' Okena beach park.

April has been a busy month for us. A lot has happened and there are still 9 days left before May, our last month here. Hard to believe. Anyway, let me see if I can catch you up on what we've been up to out here in hot, hot Hawaii while spring is starting to take over back east. First of all, we booked our flight home, leaving here on Thursday, May 30th and arriving in Boston on Tuesday morning bright and early after a red-eye flight from Seattle. Long lay over, huh? Well we decided that since it was actually cheaper to stop over in Seattle, we'd make a 5 day layover in the city we called home just a few months ago. Be prepared Seattle folks, we are so excited to see everyone again before heading back east for good!

Anyway, our friend Jodi who lives in the pole house is a much better photographer than I am and she captured a few great moments from Dylan's birthday celebration that I'd like to share with you:

Dylan serves a few of our younger guests up at the pole house bar while I help little K take a peek at the French onion soup.

Toasting Dylan's birthday with Brenna, whose living room we occupy for our potluck gatherings, and a few other friends. That's Ali next to her husband Pete and their little one Phoenix who welcomed a new baby boy to the farm family earlier this week. Paul and Heather, our gracious and wonderful hosts are the heads you see in the bottom right corner of the picture.

Dylan and Daniel modeling their new aprons :) Daniel, Brenna's husband, is our resident farm fermenting fanatic and made the most delicious mango wine vinegar recently. He makes awesome kimchi and pro-biotic packed fermented hot sauce.

 In other news, Dylan tried his hand at surfing last week! He loved it but despite the massive amounts of sunscreen and surf shirt, he ended up looking like a lobster again, had sore muscles for days, and scraped the skin off a few of his toes from crashing into the rocks. He learned that surfing is a lot harder than it looks, requires a LOT of arm and core strength just to get out to the waves, let alone hop up and balance on the board. He had a great time though and I had a blast watching from the beach. Luckily I managed to snap a few pictures to share with you:

Dylan gets ready to paddle out with Daniel for his first ever surf lesson!

Riding the wave back to shore, Dylan said he was not at all prepared for how much surfing hurts your ribs. Looks fun to me!

Not a bad spot to set up camp, huh?

Just a week after this group outing to Pine Trees, a poorly named beach since it features exactly zero pine trees, the whole farm crew decided to gather here once again for a weekend of surfing and camping on the beach. This was my kind of camping. Most people backed their trucks up to the sand and slept set up camp in the beds of their vehicles, using big pole tents to shade all the food and beer. The air was warm with a light breeze, there was a gorgeous sunset and the moon lit up the beach beautifully. Dylan and I walked up and down the sand with no flashlight needed, the moon a more than sufficient nightlight. I dipped my toes in the midnight waters of the Pacific Ocean while Dylan watched the red-eye flights take off from Kona International Airport just a few miles up the beach. We fell asleep to the sound of the waves and slept on a soft bed of sand, mattress pads, and 2 fluffy comforters with a single top sheet providing all the warmth we needed. Car camping on the beach is my kind of camping. I could do that every weekend. Oh and did I forget to mention the two whales playing and leaping in the setting sun just off shore? Amazing.

Heather and Paul's VW van transformed into the heart of the whole car camping adventure, that thing has EVERYTHING!

My camera wasn't powerful enough to catch the dark deep pink shade of the sun as it touched the water, but it definitely did justice to the warm yellow sky as it began to drop toward the waves.

Can you see why we were so tempted to stay on for another year? It is going to be mighty difficult to say good-bye to HI.

Just a regular afternoon harvest from the garden

In addition to all the fun and adventures as of late the farm has been keeping us awfully busy, though I can hardly complain because it means we also get to be busy in the kitchen. This week we tasted our ginger-turmeric beer, which was disappointingly unfizzy and the turmeric overpower the ginger a bit too much. All in all, it was a good learning experience and I know we'll get it right with the next batch. In other news, we made another delicious batch of flour wraps and I actually made the dough this time! Dylan told me I earned my "we" in this story and I don't want to brag or anything, but we made a beautiful, soft, and basically perfect batch of 1 dozen wraps. If only I had taken a picture... oh well, I do have pictures of some recent harvests.

Since everyone was at the beach this weekend we came home to a very full garden. This is just what I harvested today, there are still plenty more where these came from. The garden has been booming the past few weeks, there is so much food!

Gecko wants some kimchi!

The beets started popping out of the ground this week, giving us more than enough to make a few bags of baked beet chips (I'll share the recipe when we make them, gotta test it out first). Dylan was busy putting the eggplants to use in another batch of caponata, stewed and canned two big jars of tomatoes, and loaded the Marlin Ceviche for this week's South American themed potluck with these beautiful red chilies. We've been snacking on beautiful watermelon radishes and Baba Ganoush all week and made the most epic and entirely farm-made breakfast wraps. We started another batch of kimchi, which is quickly becoming a beloved staple food in our diet, and I bought Dylan another Kalama's burger since he spent all day yesterday working down at the beach for our friends who own a  surf shop with kayak tours. Naturally he didn't pack himself a lunch so I grabbed burgers (Ahi again for me) and walked down to surprise him with some food and company. Turns out, the walk down to the bay is a lot shorter and a lot less steep than I thought and I'm mad at myself for being scared off my warnings of the heat. At least there are still 5 weeks to take advantage!

Let's hope mama duck Sasha can adequately protect her little duckling!

In other news, our lady duck, Sasha hatched a duckling and it is so cute and fluffy! We are hoping the baby survives the next few days around the male duck, apparently the males eat the ducklings and the mama ducks aren't always very good at preventing it. Talk about harvesting the male duck this week has begun and Dylan has been asked if he's interested in taking part so he can learn how to do it. More updates on that whole ordeal next time. In the mean time, how cute is this little duckling? Here's hoping we get to the big duck before he get's to the baby!