Breadfruit Festival Goes Bananas 2012 slideshow

 

Hawai‘i Homegrown Food Network,the Breadfruit Institute of the National Tropical Botanical Garden and Amy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden presented Breadfruit Festival goes bananas at the Amy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in South Kona on Saturday, September 29, 2012 from 9:00 am – 3:00 pm. This festival had all the breadfruit-related activities of the previous two festivals, including cultural and horticultural presenters and practitioners, story telling, cooking contest and demonstrations, youth crafts, 'ulu buffet and snacks, tree sales, fine art contest, and music. Recognizing 'ulu's traditional role in mixed agroforestry, the festival also highlighted 'ulu's Pacific-wide companion, mai'a (banana), with presentations by Angela Kay Kepler and others, as well as banana plants for sale. The Festival was free and open to the public—an estimated 1,900 people attended.

Sheet mulch being placed over kikuyu grass to expand a vegetable garden.Mulch is a layer of decaying organic matter on the ground. Mulch occurs naturally in forests; it is a nutrient rich, moisture absorbent bed of decaying forest leaves, twigs and branches, teeming with fungal, microbial and insect life. Natural mulch stores the nutrients contained in organic matter and slowly makes these nutrients available to plants. Mulch also protects soil from desiccation by the sun and wind, as well as from the erosive effects of rain and run-off.

Mulch forms a necessary link in nutrient cycling vital for our soils. When mulch is absent for whatever reason, the living soil is robbed of its natural nutrient stores, becomes leached and often desiccates. Natural terrestrial environments without a litter layer are usually deserts. Non-desert plants grown in bare soil require constant fertilization, nutrient additions, and water, not to mention the work required to keep the soil bare.

It is encouraging to see the different ways individuals are taking on the challenge to make locally grown and produced food available in their own districts of the island.

About six or seven months ago, Michael Scott of Ocean View, a member of the e-mail Yahoo group Big Island Self Sufficiency (BISS), in which I am also quite involved, mentioned that he and his wife, Melanie Baca, were working on plans to open a location next to their own Aloha Dreams computer business to sell produce and other fresh goods in Ocean View.

After doing research, obtaining permits and procuring the use of a commercial kitchen, Home Grown Hawai’i opened its doors on Saturday, September 1^st with a Grand Gala featuring music, an owner hosted barbecue and displaying produce and product from 12 different sources. Local vegetables, greens, herbs, fruit, coffee, eggs, homemade breads and other baked goods, jellies, jams, preserves, raw local honey, butter and feta cheese are just some of the items that can be found in the store.

Emmerich Grosch
Food engineer, Hawai‘i Product Resources, Kealakekua, South Kona

Emmerich Grosch of Hawai'i Product Resources.The soft-spoken Emmerich Grosch has nearly five decades under his belt as chef, entrepreneur, hotel food operations manager, and processor. He brings this wealth of experience to his current manufacturing/wholesale business processing macadamia nuts, coffee, and cacao from farm to market. His company produces a wide range of artisan products including flavored macnuts (honey roasted, wasabi, etc.), roasted coffees, and raw chocolate. The emphasis is on quality products, and all sales come with a 100% no-questions-asked quality guarantee.

In our modern era of endless conveniences and luxuries, we take bananas for granted, but until about 1900, few Westerners knew of their existence and even fewer had eaten them. In fact, bananas were the first tropical fruit to be mass produced for North American and European markets. Imagine those first bananas exhibited at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, wrapped in foil and offered for ten cents apiece! On the opposite side of the world though, in Southeast Asia and New Guinea, villagers had been improving local banana landraces for millennia! Indeed, the seedless banana was one of the world’s first domesticated food plants, at least seven thousand years ago, in the New Guinea highlands.