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.

Hey, where did fall go?

Well it's been a long dry spell with no blogging, but there's certainly been a lot of activity around the farm. Here are just a few of our accomplishments:

We've managed to grow enough vegetables to sell nearly every week this semester.

We've expanded our Mauka garden to make room for even more tomatoes and greens. If all goes well, we expect to have tomatoes available most of the spring semester, along with loads of arugula (it's been a favorite these past few weeks) as well as lettuce, sweet basil, and carrots.

On the Waimanalo farm, our bananas have gone bananas! Every Saturday when we show up we're shocked at how much more they've grown. With over 20 different varieties there's always something amazing to look forward to, as we await new fruit stalks and tasty yellow fruits. In between the bananas, we've been growing three different kinds of sweet potatoes since the spring. We harvested and sold a bunch of the earlier maturing kinds (like Molokai Red), and also made good use of the tender greens in stir-fries and curries. In the places where we harvested potatoes, we're trying out a few different things, including daikon, birdhouse gourds, and kabocha.

Of course, all of this takes work, and there's been no shortage of that. We're happy to see new faces nearly every week, and it's amazing to see people willing to muscle up and get dirty. We've spread literally tons of compost and mulch, and hand-pulled countless thousands of weeds. We make time for fun stuff, too, like relaxing at Waimanalo Beach Park.

First Workday of Semester

Today we had the first workday up at the Mauka plots, and the turn out was excellent!

Above:Watering our newly planted seeds.
Below: Josh hooking up some irrigation.


We did the usual weeding and cleaning up but we also planted some beans.
After we were done we snacked on some awesome 'uala (sweet potato) bread [thanks to Brooke!], bananas and some roasted 'ulu [compliments of Gabe and Duke].


Just us cruising after working on the garden.



Group pictures are always good!

Don't forget we are at the Mauka plot on Wednesdays from 4-6PM. Come out and join us! For more info visit our website or email us: soft@hawaii.edu

UC Davis student organic farm: Davis, CA

Our last stop was the student organic farm at the University of California Davis. This is the largest farm we visited with many different programs, though we only saw the 5 acre Market Garden and the Children's Educational Garden. We met up with Raul Adamchak (coauthor of the book Tomorrow's Table) and Damian Parr (a UC Davis PhD candidate who's dissertation is about student farms). We got a chance to talk to students and harvest produce for the CSA the farm runs. The overall system of the UC Davis farm is based on paid faculty who act as project managers while students are guided in practical hands-on skills.


Jeana and Brooke helping to prepare produce baskets for the CSA members.





















Jeana picking cherries in the Children's garden.


Raul speaking to Gabe and student members of the farm about why the corn is so small.

A group photo with Damian.


Damian has spent a lot of time looking at the organization of many different student farms all over the country. His dissertation has to do with the rise of student farms and what they can do for the students involved in them. We had a nice talk with him about our farm and other farms on the same path. Since we are rather new and not sure exactly how we want to run our farm, or even what organizational options are available, his knowledge was very helpful and greatly appreciated. One of the main points we focused on was that it is important for the students themselves to be the ones to make big decisions regarding the farm, and if faculty are present (paid or otherwise), to not let too much power be given to them. The farms that follow this type model have achieved great things and the students involved felt they had a very worthwhile experience being part of the farm.

Lane Community College: Eugene, OR

While visiting Horton Road Organics and Food for Lane County, we were strongly urged to stop by the Lane Community College Student Farm. On our way out of town, we decided to follow their advice after encountering a bout of afternoon traffic. We were rewarded with an unexpected presence of friendly students as well as a fresh bounty of veggies. We were quick to observe the close-knit community that surrounded the garden and how the support of the students and staff made a world of difference. One of the most impressive features of the Lane Community College Student Garden is that they are a major provider of ingredients used by the on campus student restaurant even though they are currently cultivating on a small plot of land. Even more impressively, although the farm is fairly new they were still able to set up a federal work-study program, work out an extra credit connection with other classes, hire an Americorps employee to work for the farm, collect the Bill Clinton Initiative Call to Action grant, as well as enact an extra dollar a semester student activity fee for farm project funding.

Most of the funding for the farm was dispersed through small mini-projects such as building fences or a foyer, expanding their agroforrestry system, or just purchasing new soil. Through the strong support of the groundskeeping crew as well as the faculty, this student run farm was able to convince the school to allow them more growing space as well as hopes for a new green house.

Similar to the OSU campus, LCC Farm hosts weekly work parties, sharing food and knowledge. Strong faculty support played an important factor in the quick growth, maintenance, and overall success of the garden.

We were so happy to meet with Toby Kubler, an active student member.  He shared much of his wisdom with us and left us with much to think about.  

• Apply for grants that pay for specific projects but do not cover the whole cost of the farm project
• Central on campus location creates the most sense of community and availability for student and faculty participation
• Utilize work-study and Americorps opportunities to bring in a manager and other workers.  Also find teachers who are willing to give students extra credit for participating in the garden.  Many of these students will then become active members.
• Staying small at the beginning brings success!  
• Use the materials that are available to you on campus or for free and use those as much as you can. 
• Network - get everyone at the university on board with what you are doing.