My Maui Garden part 1

Living in Kahului within the central valley of Maui, I have had to contend with some pretty hot and dry weather. The wind blows pretty hard and carries the sand with it.

I've been struggling to keep a fairly sizable backyard under control from the very aggressive grass and week varieties during the winter rains and then having to worry about the over-growth a the long hot summer's create fire hazards. This year we seemed to have some unusually cool, actually pretty darn cold weather and a fair share of rain to go with it.

So one day I decided I was going to quit struggling with my backyard and put it to work. Armed with some soil and compost from the local hardware store, along with some that I had made in my yard I preceded to take about the only spot in my backyard that had some soil already and wasn't entirely sand and started building a garden.

Between my grandson and me, we managed to dig up the ground and layout two curved rows of composted soil.

With my "Seeds of Change" corn, red and yellow sunflowers and a collection of Marigolds, we managed to get the garden built and planted.

During all the activity, a hen and her sizable brood of chicks kept traveling through my yard on their daily commutes between all the neighbors’ yards. They looked like they could undue all of our hard work in a days time. With a collection of left over wood from rebuilding the fence last summer with my son and a roll of landscape material, I built a fence around the whole garden and strung plastic safety tape over the top to scare off any birds or chickens that might decide to jump the fence.

The next day when my Grandson came down to look over the garden, he exclaimed "Grandpa we need a scarecrow!", to which I agreed and we proceeded to build one using some of my old clothes and even an old Monsanto hat (for the irony of it). We included some left over safety PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), to make sure he was safe and ended up with a mighty fine scarecrow. He was mounted proudly above our new garden.

Over the next few weeks, Maui had some really hard rains and my backyard grass was just barely under control. I managed to hand cut the grass in the garden to being sure not to pull up any of the new sprouting corn, sunflowers and marigolds. I then threw in a couple of giant pumpkin seeds and some string beans for good measure.

The rains continued to come and go and the cool, overcast weather along with it. It was actually great weather for starting up a garden.

By the beginning of March, the corn and marigolds were well on their way. The strange thing about the corn was that all the plants on the east side of the garden were almost twice as tall as their counterparts on the west side.

I'm still not sure if it had to do with the soil, light, positioning, nutrient content or all of the above.

About the first week into March, the corn started to make a noticeable shift from the once darker green color to a yellow. In talking with farmer friends and looking it up on the internet, I realized that corn tends to show it's displeasure with any number of factors by turning yellow.

I decided that even though I had put chicken manure in with the compost, there was a chance that the nitrogen wasn't being released. My Friend Vince Mina with Maui Aloha Aina Association had told me a number of times about getting dolomite and Jersey Green Sand into my soil. I should have gotten it in prior to gardening and worked on "growing the soil." Since I couldn't rework the soil, I choose to put it down on the top and hope the water would take it in.

I couldn't get the Jersey Green Sand and the dolomite was a courser variety than I wanted, but I just spread it around like a parmesan cheese, sprinkling it around the plants. After about a week and no noticeable improvement, I decided to get some liquid fertilizer I found seaweed based highly concentrated fertilizer that was a source of nitrogen and was distributed by Spare Time Supply through Kula Hardware and Nursery. I mixed it up and applied it to the garden, as well as other plants and flowers around the house. Look for my next article to find out how the plants responded.

In the meantime, I was bothered by the amount of watering I was doing with just a sprinkler. I generally watered in the evening due to my work schedule and thought it was a better time to avoid evaporation. I was worried about the possibility of fungus or other moisture related problems and would have preferred to water in the early morning. The other part that bothered me was just the inefficiency of watering with a sprinkler and having the wind blow it away or the plants being constantly drenched.

A few years ago I had put some irrigation and watering systems in place to take care of a variety of plants in the yard. I decided to restore and rework the system. I went to ISI Hawaii Water Solutions in Kahului and browsed their showroom. Being an avid hardware and garden store browser, I learned quite a bit about products I didn't know existed. I collected a number of fittings, hoses and a pressure regulator/sand filter with their help and was ready to set my garden up to conserve all the water I could.

Once at home I jumped into the project and while I didn't have a water pipe run down to my garden area, I managed to utilize the hose to get to the garden and then set-up the garden with the new drip system. By the end of the afternoon and just shy of darkness, I managed to complete the job. I'm now ready to efficiently conserve water and keep my garden happy with plenty of water in the right spots.