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!