Chickens at Magoon

The spring semester has arrived and Soft has some new workers at the farm. Soft recently adopted six laying hens to provide eggs for the sales and hunt for insects on the farm. We are hoping to integrate the chickens into the farming system and use them as a learning tool for Soft students.

SOFT honored at first UHM Semester of Sustainability Kick-off

SOFT was recently honored at the first Semester of Sustainability Kick-off event at UH Manoa, a program planned to be held at the beginning of each semester to inform and showcase students and the public about various sustainability related projects which are happening on campus. SOFT was awarded the "Student Movers and Shakers" award for our recent progress in establishing on-campus production and display plots. It's nice to have people excited about what we've done already, because if that made them turn their heads, then what we will do next will blow their minds!

Check out the video below from Oiwi TV about the event, you can see our booth somewhere near the end!


UH Mānoa Semester of Sustainability Kickoff from Oiwi TV on Vimeo.


We also kinda made it into a Ka Leo article, neato!
http://www.kaleo.org/news/sustainable-uh-takes-on-plastic/article_dec0e258-456b-11e1-a98f-0019bb30f31a.html

CTAHR Impact Story

SOFT was recently featured in the CTAHR Impact Stories for this semester. Follow the link below to see the article.


http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/site/StoryDetails.aspx?id=1491

Noelani First Grade Garden Fall 2011 Final Harvest

Early Wednesday morning we had the First graders come out to do their final harvest for 2011. We learned all about food safety from Jim Hollyer and all about nutrition from Maria Stewart, also known as "Professor Peabody". Our harvest included sweet corn, kai choy, edamame, green onion, chives, basil and pole beans, all to be made into a tasty soup!

Jim Hollyer washing hands for food safety

Professor Peabody exclaiming about human nutrition

Check what the Noelani first grade class is up to now at this link:
http://connection.noelani.k12.hi.us/~lmorita/content/Welcome.html

Mid Semester update

The Sustainability Courtyard has gotten a lot of compliments

The new and old plots of Soft are growing well. We are happy to see that our plants are growing up and providing our customers with great produce.

We have just finished installing our new irrigation up at Magoon and everything is running well.

Digging our permanent beds

Two amazing Soft students posing in front of our Hawaiian chili peppers at Magoon

Food Day Event

Soft was a featured guest at this years UHM Food Day event. We enjoyed local food, talking about Soft and learning about improving food quality and education. For more information about Food Day, check out http://foodday.org/

The Kukui Cup

Soft was a special guest in the Kukui Cup! The Kukui cup is a three week energy education and energy saving challenge that is taking place in the freshman towers. Soft held a small workshop where we talked about small scale gardening and the importance of sustainability. For information about the Kukui cup, check out their website at http://kukuicup.manoa.hawaii.edu/about/

Noelani First Grade Garden Fall 2011 Weeding Activity

Today, our very own weed scientist, Dr. Joe DeFrank, came out to talk about weeds and the importance of weeding. We had a great time and cant wait for next month!

Photo credit to Thomas Lim

Kava Festival 2011

Soft had an easy going day at the Kava festival, where kava is drunk, poi is pounded, lomi lomi is practiced and the music is slammin'! The kava festival is a celebration of Hawaii and Pacific Island 'awa where educational booths and vendors from around O'ahu joined forces. This year, Soft sold our own fresh frozen and dry powdered kava, along with our usual produce. We had many visitors, asking questions and talking story. One visitor we were pleased to have our picture taken with was our very own Dean of CTAHR, Silvia Yuen.


Photo credit, Dr. Skip Bittenbender

2011 CTAHR Ice Cream Bash

Soft was invited out to participate in CTAHRs biannual ice cream bash! At this event, we held our weekly sale, talked to a lot of interested students and got to eat a whole lot of ice cream. It was a lot of fun. One of our very own Soft members featured a mango sorbet made out of 5 mango varieties, gown locally.

Soft was more than happy to participate in this tasty event and we are looking forward to many more to come!

Above: Mango sorbet is served to hungry CTAHR members

Middle: Soft-ies enjoying ice cream

Bottom: Customers supporting local agriculture at the Soft booth

Photo Credit: CTAHR, can be found at

http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/site/images/ASAOSlides/slideshow.swf

This Fall semester, the Soft schedule looks like:

Monday:Produce sale at the crosswalk across from Hamilton Library,

in front of St. John 12-2:00

Thursday: Meeting and work day 4-7:30

Saturday: Work day 9-4:00

Also, our Noelani First grade garden will be from 8 am-9:45 am once a month on a Wednesday.

Tentative dates are: September 14, October 12, and November 9

The Rise of Fall

The 2011 Fall semester is here and Soft is full force again. We are kicking off this semester with a long-needed re-calibration of our irrigation system. Thanks to the GSO that Soft was awarded last semester, we can now improve our water use efficiency!

Above: Our banana walk way in progress behind the Art building
Below: The Sustainability Courtyard edible landscape after a summer of growth


Photo credit: Kent Kobayashi

This semester we are planning on installing our bee hives, our chicken coop, out vermicomposting system, a new food processing station, a composting station and expanding a new agroforestry area.

The New Sustainability Courtyard

After much hard work and time, Soft finally has a centrally located, on campus plot! Located in the Sustainability courtyard, we collaborated our efforts with the landscaping department with special thanks to Roxanne Adams. Originally a grass "stage", we shoveled and dug until we had created an edible garden.
Some of the planting material include: sunflowers, cassava, basil, rosemary, sweet potato, taro, coco yam, lemon grass, and much more!
In hopes that this installation will encourage more student involvement, we made the area very accessible with rainbow shaped paths and a nice terrace. We look forward to harvesting and selling these publicly grown veggies and herbs, so come on down to our weekly sales! Also, stay tuned for more news about our new "banana walk way" next to the art building.

Photo credit: Miles Hakoda and Kent Kobayashi

Noelani First Grade Garden Spring 2011

Soft has been so happy to help with the collaboration with the Noelani first grade class garden! This semester, we focused on growing herbs that were sold at the end of the semester for the first grade class. The kids grew, harvested and bundled the herbs, both fresh and dried for their families to enjoy. The first graders also made their own cook book using recipes that they brought from home.
The lessons that we focused on this semester were about starting your garden, different types of soil, light, the power of weeds and maintenance, and the harvest.
We had a great time and cant wait to start again in the fall!


Photo Credit: Thomas Lim

Magoon in the Springtime

We have been working very hard this Spring semester to really improve our plot at the Magoon research facility. One dedicated student rallied in the support and built Softs first wood fired oven!
Most of the materials used in building the oven were gathered from the area and all of the labor was done by students. We are excited to host pizza parties and more with our new little oven that could!

We have also expanded our area at Magoon, adopting a couple fruit trees and a handful of land. Our big plans include creating an agroforestry system with bananas, various citrus, starfruit, vines such as passionfruit and black pepper, coconut and an artocarpus such as marang or breadnut!

Our vegetable production has increased, diversifying our sales and our crops. Some of the vegetables that we are growing include: kale, kai choy, green onion, beets, daikon, jaicama, corn, beans, taro, eggplant, cassava, zucchini, sunflowers, and much more!

Kava Harvest

Soft students were invited to harvest and process kava at a local farm. The processed kava was either fresh frozen or powdered for future Soft events and sales. We are looking forward to selling the kava plants that were propagated from the harvested plants at the kava festival later this year. We were lucky enough to work along side Dr. 'Skip' H.C. Bittenbender and Mike , both of whom were very generous with their time and donations.

SOFT featured in Ka Lamakua

SOFT featured in a video interview with Ka Lamakua. For more information about Ka Lamakua, please visit:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=728381667
and http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=371227256115

Summer!

Summer is finally here! This year, we were invited to join in the Aina Ho'ola Hands Turned to the Soil annual youth conference to give a tour and work site for the conference participants.

We had a great work day and got a lot done. Students worked alongside parents to weed the perennial peanut, harvest fruits, mulch, and learn about what it takes to run a farm. Some of the participants had never seen broccoli before and it was exciting to see their reactions when they discovered it.
Josh provided a great tour and provided answers to many great questions about our diverse fruit collection and how we work.

After lunch and a little more work, we sat down and had a talk about what people can do to get involved or how to start a project at their own school. We then dove into an exciting question and answer session about organics and sustainability and where our food really comes from. We had a lot of great questions and almost ran out of time before heading back to the conference.

On the third day of the conference, Soft was invited again, this time to give a talk about farms in schools. There were a lot of eager people excited about starting their own student farms who were really interested in our side of the story. We talked a bit about our trip to the west coast and how that gave us an idea of what we wanted the farm to look like.

After the talk about school farms, we had the opportunity to wind down and just have a little fun demonstrating the techniques in making banana paper. Each student got their own personal frame and a spoonful of pulp. We explained the basic anatomy of the banana plant and the serious amount of waste that results in harvesting a bunch of bananas. This waste, we explained, can be used for making paper, and now students can do it at home too!

Spring Semester in Waimanalo

Now that the spring semester is over, we can start looking forward to the summer! Here is quick recap of SOFT's Spring Semester!

We have been working hard out at Waimanalo and it looks great! New fruit trees, vegetables and herbs have been planted as we continue to fill in the gaps.

The bananas are going bananas! it is finally time for most of them to start fruiting, so we look forward to a bountiful harvest this summer when they are ready.

Thanks to the helpful volunteers that came out on the Spring Workday Event, we were able to plant, mulch and fertilize faster then ever.

As soursops get larger and larger and the guava trees begin to bear more fruit than ever, we just cant wait to share our harvest with our loyal customers that show up to the weekly sales.

We have planted more sweet potato as well as potato potatoes, broccoli, chayote, eggplant, keffir lime, mandarin orange, more coconuts, jaicama, amaranth, basil, surinam cherry and much much more!

The spring semester also allowed us our first time harvest of several different bananas, loquat, pomegranate, cucumber, and all sorts of delicious fruits!

As usual, we encourage everyone to come out this summer and have fun at the farm!

Noelani First Grader Garden

This fall SOFT did something new! We teamed up with the first grade teachers at Noelani to create a wonderful learning garden for their students. Over the last three months the first graders planted seeds, tended to their crops, and harvested the flowers and veggies to bring back and enjoy in their classroom.

This is how it all started. Here we are watering in a basil transplant, but we also sowed seeds for sunflowers, cosmos, daikon, carrots, green beans, mizuna, lettuce, green onion, and planted taro huli!

After several visits where the students tended their garden, it was harvest time. Here they are collecting flowers to make bouquets for their classrooms.

It might be next year's first graders who get to enjoy the taro harvest. But this year everyone is still working hard to keep the taro weeded. The kids have loved to watch these huge leaves grow from the huli we planted just a few short months ago!

Washing the harvest of daikon, carrots, mizuna, green beans and green onions. The first graders brought all the veggies back to school where they prepared and enjoyed a great veggie miso soup!

This is almost everyone! We had a great semester and it looks like the first graders will continue their garden through the spring. This has been a great opportunity for the kids to grow food, get out side and enjoy learning in their garden. Thank you to all of the wonderful UH student volunteers, faculty, and Noelani first grade teachers who made this possible.