Hakalau Choco-letter March 2022 |
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Aloha Chocolate Fans! We bring you healthy indulgence from the trees and bees. Here is a little update on some of the action on the farm. |
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| | Our new electric mower! Dan has been focused on getting a riding electric mower to maintain the orchard paths (see grasses just starting, in photo of new Upper Orchard to the right) - to move away from the fossil fuel of his skid-steer mower. Now almost all our farm equipment (including smaller mowers, car, weedwhackers, chain saws) is powered by our solar and hydro! Oh and also now Grandpa Dan can entertain grandkids while getting chores done! | | |
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| | The new, aka Upper Orchard, with cover crop growing nicely including daikon radishes, which are planted as a "tilling" crop, since the roots drill down into soil to loosen and aerate it. (We now have an endless supply of pickled daikon, by the way.) The young cacao trees need shade-cloth cages to protect them from Chinese rose beetles, sun, and wind. We have planted a third of the orchard, around 60 trees, so far. | | |
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| | Cacao flowers are quite tiny, but worth a close look - to me they look a bit like a dancing gnat (see the leg warmers?)! Even though the peak of harvest is in winter and spring, new flowers continue to pop out and will produce a smattering of fruit through the summer. | | |
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| | We have a very varied mix of trees, bearing pods of multiple shapes, sizes, and colors. This makes harvesting when ripe an art! Pods that start out green ripen yellow. In picture at the top of this newsletter, you can see pods that start out purplish green ripening to a sunset medley of yellow- orange-red. | | |
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Glints of honey show through when you bite into a Hakalau Chocolate bar. Did you know that honey is anti-inflammatory*, as well as having antioxidant and antibacterial properties, and is healthy for the gut and heart? You can feel good about choosing honey-sweetened foods! *https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7807510/ That's all for now. Aloha, Rachel and Dan https://www.kulikefarm.com/shop |
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