May 24 2006, The farm house is getting an interior refresh at our sustainable kona farm

052406, In the meantime, the painters start work and COLOR comes to the upstairs of the house!

All the windows are out so the glass can be cleaned.
We used to bring the dogs sometimes (you can see Alex trotting about below) and we would come late and clean up after the painters and try to work ahead of them doing things like taking all the glass out and cleaning the wood frames before they would need to touch with a brush. We learned that it gets COLD up on the mountain late at night and that windows are very important to have so you can CLOSE them to keep the cold air out (shiver)...

May 18, 2006, The Truck Blows Up that had come with our organic coffee farm

051806, We don’t even get to really use the truck one time until it throws a bunch of oil -- just what we need, it is late in the day and it has already been a long day we did not need this. What can you do? We take the load from the pickup truck and move it again by putting that load into the Honda Element and a Honda CRV.

We try to put more oil in but it just gushes out. So we have to call a tow truck rather than leave the pickup sitting -- it sure won’t budge on its own.

May 11, 2006, Time to Work on the farm truck that came with the organic farm in Hawaii

051106_We take the farm truck from the farm to the other house. It takes a couple of days to clean it up, replace turn signals, make some rail holders for the back end, change the spark plugs and wires. We really liked the idea of a small pickup that we thought would come in handy for hauling coffee bags and stuff like fertilizer -- and it could help us with the move of course.


The oil came out like sludge..

May 9, 2006, Work is in progress at the coffee farm house where we will live in South Kona

050906, The farm house interior before was all one color of -- well, white!

May 4, 2006, We are still working in between old and new places, Lucky gets lots of attention

May 2006_We are boxing up and packing up at the old home to move to the farm...The farm “came with” an existing dog called “Lucky”. The story is that he was “Lucky he did not get shot” when he wandered onto the property. He was in his twilight time but still had some spunk. He liked to stay in the garage or in the flower beds and all the people coming into and out of the house doing their work became friends with him.


Lucky sometimes gets in the car whether you want him to or not...

May 1st 2006, A new fence is installed at the sustainable farm.

050106, The house has a nice big back yard, but it needed a barrier fence to keep our dogs contained and safe...
One thing about being “in the country” is that there are many dogs (big ones) that tend to run and roam.
Our dogs are small and probably would be attacked if they are not kept within the boundary of the back yard. Thank goodness the back yard was already well located to the back of the house, well suited for the dogs, and not impossible to retrofit!

April 23 2006, Some unexpected junk needs to be picked up and moved off our South Kona Farm

042306, Unfortunately we discovered loads and loads of trash we needed to haul away...

April 2006, Friends Help Us With Our Work

Lawrence and Ikaka visit and get “Tom Sawyered” into helping. Besides coffee we have some wonderful citrus that we pick and enjoy during its season..

Here we see "Uncle Lawrence" who has a fruit picker that comes in very handy to reach up into the trees.




Ikaka (below) helped us many many days try to weed eat with the residential style whackers...

With those "hardware store" things you seemed to move just 40 or 50 feet after working all morning!

April 2006, We Get Possession of our Hawaiian Farm in Honaunau Hawaii

April 2006_We get possession of the farm

Yes, finally we get possession and it is a long period during which we move from one place to the other and at the same time attempt to get started with clearing out some junk left by the previous owner.
While getting things to the final packing stages at the previous house, we get this house painted on the inside.
We also start getting a new solar water heater system put in.
We continue to try to control weeds all during this time.


We quickly found out the weeds are a BIG chore -- with everything else we can’t seem to keep up.

We look at a SKAG mower that is supposed to make short work of this problem. I wonder???

March 2006, "We Are Trying!" to get some weed and overgrowth control at the organic coffee farm

March 2006_We work on the back fields even before we get possession of the farm

This seemed never ending. Of course we were using weed whackers from Home Depot and Lowes (big mistake)...
This picture is from March 19, 2006 -- everywhere overgrown coffee trees!



We eventually learned the hard way that when it rains it can rain a lot. We kept getting our cars stuck because by the time we would get our gear together and get to the car to leave, the soil would be saturated. Now we rarely take a car into the fields but the ATV is a different matter -- it is light enough to pick it up and get it “unstuck”!
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