The Best Things To Do On Kauai When It Rains
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…
Raising the Bar on Chocolate
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…
From Bitter to Sweet: How Hawaiian Vanilla is Changing the Story
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. …
On The Farm: A Look Inside Our Planting Process
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…
On The Farm: Grafting Season
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…
On The Farm: A Day in the Life of a Vanilla Farmer
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…