First Project in New Garden Space (Mostly) Completed - Seaview, Lower Puna, Big Island, Hawaiʻi - February 18, 2022

Warm greetings all. 🙏 💚

The other day I posted about a new garden space at the Sanctuary of the Blue Dragon(fly), in Seaview (Lower Puna, fat East Hawai'i), over which I've been given creative dominion, and the excitement I feel about the bubbling potential of what this garden could be. If you didn't see it, you can read it here.

The first landscape modification project that I intended to get done in my first week here on the property was completed today. I say completed, however, with gardening nothing is ever truly completed, but rather continues to grow, change, and evolve over time.

Over the course of two non-contiguous days, I turned a pile of dead branches and logs covered in weeds into a planting bed. My darling partner/girlfriend, Hive account@kai-sunrise (she can be seen in two of the photos), helped me on the second day. Once the bed was basically done, we planted a Mamaki plant (Pipturus albidus), an endemic (found only in the Hawaiian Islands), arborescent (growing like a tree), spineless nettle (its in the Nettle family, Urticaceae). I talked about Mamaki in this post in the center of the bed, in hopes that as it matures, it would become one of the centerpieces in this part of the garden. I'll find some useful and beautiful plants to underplant around the Mamaki.

For those that are interested in exactly how the bed was created, here are the stages through which I went. I forgot to take photos of the early part of the process, for which I am sorry. As I mentioned, it stated as a big pile of logs and branches, covered in lots of plants not in the most appropriate location (AKA, weeds), so the first thing I did was clear them off the dead organic debris. Once I had the pile clear, I made the pile more rounded and even. Then I dumped two full wheelbarrow loads of chopped coconuts onto the pile, and evened it out again. Next I dumped many wheelbarrow loads of soil onto the pile of logs, branches, and chopped coconuts, and smoothed it out. The last stage was putting a few wheelbarrow loads of mulch on top of the soil. The logs, branches, and chopped coconuts will turn into great soil when they fully decompose.

When the bed was finished and we had the Mamaki planted, we collected logs and placed them around the bed as a border. In the near future I plan on connecting this bed to others, and to grow it, and of course to populate it with plants!

Thank you all for sharing this first step of my garden creation! 🙏 💚