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There’s a reason Kauai is known as the Garden Island: Covered in lush rainforests and verdant vegetation, Hawaii’s oldest island is famous for its abundance of plant life. The thriving landscape is a result of Kauai’s subtropical climate, which provides the island with plentiful sunshine, year-round 70-degree days, and a tremendous amount of rainfall. In…

How a Kauai Cacao Farm is Changing the Chocolate Industry One Bar at a Time When it comes to artisan foods and beverages, most people can easily identify a difference in quality and taste between a craft beer made by a neighborhood brewery and one that is mass-produced. The same is true for specialty coffee…

The sweet and sexy history of chocolate, romance, and Valentine’s Day “Did you guys know that chocolate contains a property that triggers the release of endorphins? It gives one the feeling of being in love,” Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005).  While truer words have been spoken, Depp’s wild-eyed portrayal…

In recent years, Hawaiian cacao and the rich, delicious chocolate it produces has been quietly stealing the specialty chocolate spotlight and captivating chocolate lovers worldwide.  As a fairly new player in the commercial chocolate marketplace, Hawaii-grown cacao offers everyone from self-proclaimed foodies to adventurous epicures and the cacao curious new and artisanal chocolate products to…

Today less than 1% of vanilla flavoring sold in stores and used in your favorite foods comes from the vanilla orchid. Hawaiian vanilla farmers like Will Lydgate are trying to change that by adding a little sweetness to the state’s agriculture and tourism industries. Find out how and shop for Lydgate Farms Hawaiian Vanilla here. …

You can never go wrong giving a gift that sweetens every occasion! Hawaiian chocolate, honey, and vanilla from Lydgate Farms make unique, delicious, and sustainable gifts that will please everyone on your list.  We’re on a mission to change the way the world thinks about chocolate. From single-estate, bean to bar chocolate to Hawaiian Palm…

This summer, and into the fall, we have been busy planting new cacao trees. Here at Lydgate Farms the more chocolate we have, the more we can share with you – our growing Chocolate Ohana – so we get excited about planting! It all starts at the nursery. Here we sprout seedling cacao trees that we select from our favorite mother trees, and we also make grafted trees (see our blog post on grafting). We use both the seedlings and our grafts in our new plantings.  Our nursery, where we sprout seedlings and prepared grafted trees When we plant, we take a holistic look at the land we are planting them in and take several steps to ensure a thriving cacao-based ecosystem. First we take a soil sample and send it to our top notch organic nutrition specialist Pete Bunn, with…

In the summer months, especially in July and August, our cacao trees grow prodigiously. Warm nights help to get the sap and vascular fluids of our cacao trees flowing, and the trees reset from the last season and set fruit for a big fall harvest. Since we don’t harvest cacao in the month of August, it’s a good time for farm projects (in hindsight this would also be a good time for a vacation!). We have been happy planting a few new cacao fields, and we are also doing a lot of grafting, because summer is grafting season.  Grafting is a process where you take a small piece from a tree that you like, which is called the budwood or scion, and attach it to another tree. The two pieces fuse together and the budwood grows up, replacing the old…

Many Americans see chocolate as a kind of candy, unlike other specialty foods, like craft beer, fine wine and specialty coffee (agricultural products seen as having fine flavor) But, just as these products have both high and low quality offerings, chocolate too has a wide range of options, which include some that are really exceptional. One…

The chocolate tree has a rich cultural history. As we head into the holiday season we wanted to share with you some of those stories that took chocolate from its humble jungle origins to the center stage of culinary culture. We hope you enjoy! Cacao originated in the Amazon region of South America and we…

n the months of April and May, the nights on Kauai begin to warm (from lower 60’s to lower 70’s) and our Makahiki season (Hawaiian winter) draws to a close. As the days increase in length our vanilla vines begin to show small buds (photo of bud), these buds turn into flower clusters (called racemes), and the elusive vanilla orchid bursts forth from them. Thus begins a period of some of the most focused activity here on the farm: vanilla pollination season. And good thing we grow coffee here on the farm, because vanilla is best pollinated early in the morning. The vanilla orchid has a window of 24-36 hours or fertility. This means that the earlier in the day it is pollinated the more pollen is transferred. And since the vanilla bean is filled with thousands very small seeds…

As many of you who have been on our tour have discovered, there is so much more to chocolate than candy bars. Along with numerous health benefits come a wide diversity of flavors. Fine chocolate can taste fruity or nutty, like flowers, spices, herbs and more. Chocolate tastes like a lot more than chocolate! Discovering what makes the flavor of chocolate is part of your journey as a chocolate connoisseur. All of that flavor originates at the farm — not the factory. It starts with the genetics or varietal. Just as a granny smith apple tastes different than a honeycrisp apple, or one kind of grapes taste different than another, so too strains of cacao have different flavors. These strains are referred to as varietals or under the umbrella term of cacao genetics. Here at Lydgate Farms we have a…