By day, Bernard Matatumua-Vermeulen is a Soil Conservationist with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA NRCS) in Kealakekua—and in his spare time he is one of the green thumbs behind a food forest project at the Kona Seventh Day Adventist Church.

The church is adjacent to the Amy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in Captain Cook and is located in the kaluulu—a 18 mile-long breadfruit grove that was for centuries an abundant food producing region in Kona.

With our mild tropical climate in Hawai‘i, we are very fortunate to be able to grow most food plants from both temperate and tropical climates. Temperate food plants include many table vegetables such as lettuce, cabbage, tomato, cucumber, corn, squash, spinach, sunflower, radish, peas, and beans. These plants have relatively short life cycles, usually 2–9 months. These short-lived plants are adapted to completing their life cycle during the few months of spring, summer, and fall.

Part 1 of a 2-part series

Introduction

The forest-gardening approach to fertility emphasizes strategies employed in the design phase that should reduce the need for work and expensive inputs later on down the line. Many basic characteristics of forest gardens support self-renewing fertility by their very nature: perennial plant roots provide consistent root-zone resources to the soil food web; lack of tilling allows undisturbed development of the soil organism community; consistent mulch provides stable food resources for the decomposers and a stable soil environment for everyone who lives down there; and so on.

Among the winners of the different categories in the recently held 1^st Annual Sam Choy Keauhou Poke Contest held Sunday, March 18^th at the Sheraton Keauhou Bay Resort was the entry by the ’Aina Life Culinary Arts Class of the Kua O Ka Lā Public Charter School at Pū'āla'a in Lower Puna. Mariposa Blanco, the school’s Culinary Teacher, and Susie Osborne, School Principal and Administrator, entered the class’s ‘Ulu–‘Ahi Spicy Poke, and won First Place in the Non-Professional Spicy Category.