Community Gardening in Hawaii
adam August 13th, 2009
In the city of Honolulu, in Hawaii, there’s a community garden that grows some of the same plants as Lawrenceville’s community garden. There are tomatoes, basil and kale. Then, also, there are bananas and papayas and taro, which we could never grow.
The Diamond Head Community Garden is named after a nearby volcanic cone that looms on the horizon. The ridge is visible from nearby Waikiki, where the Royal Hawaiian Hotel serves their famous mai tais, including one named after Ellen Degeneres.
My friend Billy lives on the island and waited six months to get a plot. He planted peas, red Russian kale, bok choy, Italian eggplant, tomatoes, basil, oregano and mint. One stalk of corn sprouted in his garden, though he didn’t plant it.
Billy’s bok choy is doing very well, as is his basil. His peas, not so much. The temperature is pretty hot for peas.
The temperature is also pretty hot for arugula. Billy made a tent to shade the greens.
Geckos spend a lot of time at the Diamond Head Community Garden. If you watch one long enough, you might see the lizard blow these kind of bubbles out of their neck. I don’t know what it is, but doesn’t it look like a tropical fruit?
Geckos have special footpads that allow them to climb things other animals can’t.
Billy told me the way a gecko would pounce on a beetle or other insect is very impressive. Geckos remind me of tiny alligators.
The Diamond Head Community Garden is run by a committee that meets every month. They offer gardeners a tool shed and greenhouse to start their plants.
Because of the year round growing season, gardeners can grow plants with longevity in mind. We don’t have that luxury in New Jersey. Imagine growing a banana tree in your garden!
Diamond Head’s gardeners grow mostly fruits and vegetables, but some people have ornamental gardens, like this cactus garden.
And I can’t even identify some of their plants, like this strange fruit.
To a visitor from New Jersey, the Diamond Head Community Garden is foreign yet familiar. I’d love a garden where I could pluck a papaya from my tree and eat it in the mid-afternoon sun.
I loved this blog - it is so very different to any garden in the UK and especially so from my plot in the North West of England. I am surprised at the lack of flowers though?
I am trying to mix veggies and flowers throughout my garden this year - not too many veggies to show for it yet but an interesting experiment in growing green.
Adam: You’re right; I didn’t see many flowers in Hawaii. As my garden expands (here in New Jersey), I’m slowly warming to the idea of planting flowers. When I had a smaller space, planting flowers instead of food made no sense to me. But next year I’m going to plant more and use them on my garden’s border.
Lovely post. I’ve been to Diamond Head - at the top was a radar station for WWII, yeah the one that they ignored
Here in Newtown PA, we’ve escaped the blight too. I have a dozen plants sparsely producing (like yours) and the CSA we belong to has hundreds of plants bountifully producing though the determinants are running out of gas. I think the difference is the amount of fertilizer (you can smell the organic fertilizer in the soil at the CSA - whereas I only put a layer of 1 inch of rotted manure and tilled it into the soil in the spring).
Hi…
I sprayed neem but that didn’t seem to help much (more droppings, chewed up foliage, and gecko sitings anyway??). If I don’t do something soon I will loose my sweet basil. Thinking of adding some ck. wire. Just hope they don’t start munching on my other herbs then? Any tips or insight would be greatly appreciated!
Enjoyed your blog! Was wondering if you grow any sweet basil? I have a container garden where I grow all of my own herbs and I have some geckos that are demolishing my sweet basil. They leave all of my other herbs alone (even my other Thai basils). Just wondering if you encountered the same problem b/c your garden is so close to mine. I’ve had plots at UH and over in Pacific Heights and have never had this problem… totally perplexed by it. I thought geckos were our friends!
Happy Gardening.
Aloha,
Christina
Oh… P.S.
Strange fruit = Japanese bitter melon