Warm greetings all. 🙏 💚
Yesterday four of us at The Sanctuary of The Blue Dragon (a new community event and living space in Seaview, Lower Puna, far East Hawai'i, where I live part time) spent a couple hours creating a new planting bed on the forest-reserve border of the property. Before we began the area was basically a weed-covered longitudinal berm (which can be seen in its former state in the last post I made where I mentioned moving a white mulberry, which could barely be seen because of all the weeds behind it). We weeded it, removed a lot of lava rocks (some of which we used to create a small wall in front of the new bed and to improve the fire pit - the rest were put in two piles for use elsewhere, which can be seen in the photos), dug a trench the length of the berm, and then put lots of rotting wood, branches, and coconut husks in the trench to serve as fertilizer and new soil as they break down.
Today I did a lot of work on the property, although I'm only mentioning a small, bit of it here. One of the tasks I completed was putting many wheel-barrows full of soil, lava cinder, and mixed-wood mulch on the new longitudinal bed to cover the trench with wood and coconut waste. The two white mulberries, Morus alba, can be seen a bit more clearly now. The next step is to decide what to plant here.
In this previous post I mentioned also that I had staged some Krishna tulsi, Oncimum tenuiflorum, and comfrey, Symphytum × uplandicum, to acclimate and harden off in sunnier conditions before being planted. Earlier in the week I finally got them planted. I also moved another larger comfrey to this bed, which can be seen looking a little sad at the moment. Thankfully it's recovering quickly. I've been watering them a lot. All of these plants will grow and fill the space quite well soon. I can't wait. I use both of these plants in my medicinal teas frequently.
In that same previous post I also mentioned that I had put a tray of tropical milkweed seedlings, Asclepias curassavica, (that had most of their leaves eaten by monarch butterfly caterpillars) to acclimate and harden off in sunnier conditions as well before planting. These seedlings have started to grow a new flush of leaves, so I decided to plant them among the larger tropical milkweeds and ramgoat dashalong, Ternera ulmifolia, that I described planting in this post. They don't look like much now, but soon they'll all grow and fill out the space very well indeed. They'll also be covered in flowers. Another reason I decided to plant the seedling tropical milkweed among the larger plants of the same species was to give them some cover from being discovered by the monarch butterflies until they grew larger, and it would be easier for them to recover.
Also, today I came back to the 18-acre, off-grid, food-forest, jungle intentional community where I live part of the time, after staying in Seaview for three weeks; the longest stint so far. My next plant and garden posts will likely be from there.
That's all for the moment. Thank you all for sharing another garden update with me! 🙏💚