Onward
A Thursday, early October. It’s an odd time, at least in terms of the rhythms and cycles of the life of the farm.
Our summer production is basically over: two of three cucumber greenhouses done and re-prepped (replaced by cauliflower, cabbage, and my new favorite Happy Rich broccolini); two of three tomato greenhouses done and re-prepped (one waiting to be planted, one with even more Happy Rich in the ground); the one pepper greenhouse also done and re-prepped and planted with celery, cabbage, pac choi. Our flowers are way down too. With the onset of shorter days and cooler weather it makes less and less sense to plant flowers ...so we plant less and less flowers. The dahlias have been dug up and their tubers saved for next year—a miraculous thing in itself—but the marigolds are holding it down for us. Tomatoes, cucumbers, cut flowers: the holy trinity of Lapa’au summer work.
Our oyster mushrooms, on the other hand, are getting ready to pop off… but production is nonexistent currently. The mushrooms are a major revenue driver for the bulk of the year, but they do best in the cool damp months. After nearly a year of constant production, the mushroom house (as one might imagine) gets kind of gross. Rafter-spanning cobwebs, sticky traps covered with with gnats and flies like a pointillist nightmare, the occasional viscera from a rat not quick enough to escape the snap… that sort of stuff. Add to that the leakages from the mushroom substrate: imagine a large bag of tightly compressed straw that several months ago was stuffed with a grain/sawdust spawn and taped tightly shut, with the mushroom spawn slowly eating its way through the bag in order to produce those beautiful bouquets. Sometimes the rats get into them and have a party (hence the traps), but mostly the bags just decay over time and begin to melt and ooze. Not pretty, kinda smelly. So once we hit midsummer, it’s clean-out time! The bags aren’t fruiting very much in the heat, they’re old anyway, and we desperately need a deep clean and full reset to start the next growing year strong.
This year me and da boyz took one day a week for four weeks to methodically clear out the entirety of the greenhouse—all eight hundred or so bags of fully spent substrate. Throw some music on (week one was Black Sabbath to honor the death of Ozzy the day before), pull the forty pound bags off their shelves, heave them into the tractor bucket and/or bed of the pickup, haul them over to the compost pile and dump em out, and do it again until a quarter of the house is done. Once the whole greenhouse is emptied, the powerwasher and bleach come into play for the shelves and the floor; Aaron and Tyler should be awarded medals of valor for their hours spent blasting away a year’s worth of grime.
Now we’ve begun inoculating again. This year we’re using only sawdust blocks of spawn, so fingers crossed the lack of grain keeps the rat pressure down. It’ll be a couple weeks until we see the actual fruits of our labor—literally, mind you—and several more weeks until mushroom production is really humming. For now, we are in the little pocket where the downward trending line of summer harvest intersects the upward trending line of oyster harvest, that scary valley where neither is doing much of anything - certainly not making any money! Such is the cyclical nature of agriculture, life preceding death preceding life preceding death (“Now let me feed my song / upon the life that is here / that is the life that is gone”). Even in the tropics where we can and do grow year round, there must inevitably be periods where production lulls.
This is my fourth summer-into-fall transition at Lapa’au. The glory of tomato season comes to a close. My hands are reacquainting themselves with the ache that comes from mushroom inoculation. The barn has gotten its biannual glow-up (glory hallelujah) and the fields are readying themselves for another season. We—the humans of Lapa’au—are readying ourselves too. Onward.
