Category: Plant Profiles

This one goes all the way back to day two of the whole planting streak, so it’s basically a founding member of this food forest. The Basics Eggfruit, also called canistel, Pouteria campechiana, is native to Mexico and Central America, in the same family as abiu and sapodilla. Origin and Habitat It likes warm, humid…

Regular mango does grow on our wet side of the island, but it fights an uphill battle against anthracnose, a fungal disease that rots the flowers practically the moment it rains on them. Which, on the Hamakua Coast, is often. The Basics Mango, Mangifera indica, is native to South Asia, somewhere around the border of…

We’ve now got three wiliwili trees scattered through the food forest, most recently one planted right below a pheasantwood I’m slowly phasing out anyway. The Basics Wiliwili, Erythrina sandwicensis, is one of the true native Hawaiian trees, endemic to this island chain and found nowhere else on earth. Origin and Habitat It grows in dry,…

I’ll be upfront, I don’t have a big personal story attached to kukui yet, the way I do for a lot of these other trees. No friend handed me a seed with a story behind it, no wild backstory. Just a good, useful tree that belongs here. The Basics Kukui, Aleurites moluccanus, also called candlenut,…

We have a small collection of dwarf coconuts by now, and I’ve learned the hard way that the word dwarf can’t always be trusted. The Basics Coconut, Cocos nucifera, is probably the most recognizable palm on the planet, and its exact native origin is still debated between island Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. Either…

ʻUlu was one of the very first trees Julia and I ever planted here, back in 2014, long before I started counting days or trees. That original one is a Maʻafala, which makes smaller fruit and has been quietly feeding us with carbs ever since. The Basics Breadfruit, Artocarpus altilis, is a big, fast growing…

People ask me all the time how we landed on chocolate as the thing to grow here. Honest answer, it was kind of a joke at first. About six years ago Julia and I were trying to figure out what our main crop should be, and she said it, half joking, that we should just…