North Moku Still Mostly Green

[1voyager1]

Got back in to look my place over today.
Pleasantly surprised that it is still looking fairly good.
Some areas of the lawn were showing signs of yellowing,
central areas away from surrounding vegetation.
Orchids were stressed, but in better shape than I had hoped for.
Some may be lost, though.

Fruit trees were surprisingly in quite good shape.
Except that the one avo that had set fruit was quickly dropping them.
Citrus looked much better than I had hoped for, but look to have dropped all their fruit.
The two dwarf papaya seedlings I picked up at last year's orchid show had ripe fruit on them.
They are picked and sitting in the kitchen right now.
They still have more green fruit on them.
Is it possible that the SO2 has adversely affected their taste?

One problem with fruit set may be SO2 kill-off of the neighborhood honey bees.
I had begun to get ready to put in a couple of hives at my place when someone else in the area did so.
I got a fairly good setting of fruit last season from whoever's [whomever's ?] bees they were.
They traveled to and from the NE from our place.

A lot of my bananas have bloomed and set fruit.
They will be ripening in the not too distant future.
The bananas look to be almost as immune to things as the Ohias are.

Our Longan almost set fruit this season, but opted for a weak batch of leaves instead,
quickly followed by a second much healthier batch.
It's losing a lot of leaves but still looks to be surviving.

If and when I get moved back in, I'm again planning to set up an aviary or two.
Lava be damned.

That concludes the North Moku agricultural report.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Pleasantly surprised that it is still looking fairly good.

That's good news 1v1.
Glad to hear your fruit trees, flowers, and other landscape plants are as resilient as you've been throughout the lava flow.

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home — dear and familiar stone hearth and garden — and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word “sojourner”... invokes a nomadic people’s sense of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” - Annie Dillard

[1voyager1]

The papayas I picked from the trees on my visit home:
http://www.mrcorrell.com/index.php?/category/55

I'm dumbfound as to why they didn't have any seeds in them.
I ran across this once before when I planted a couple of strawberry papayas.
Their first fruit had no seeds, and didn't taste very good as these also do not.
I dug the strawberry papayas up and threw them out.
I'll wait a bit longer before digging these up to see if they get better.

[ElysianWort]

I'm very happy for you too 1V1. It's a mini victory for all those who are still struggling to make it work in an area ravaged by natural disaster.

As for your papaya:

The strawberry papaya is a GMO creature made by Monsanto (frankenpapaya) and henceforth does not produce viable seeds to grow.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

The strawberry papaya is a GMO

There is a natural strawberry papaya, as well as the Sun Up GMO strawberry papaya. GMO papaya's were developed by a scientist at Cornell University back in the 1990's. Without the original Rainbow GMO variety, there would not be a commercial papaya industry on the Big Island, as a majority of the fruit was damaged by ringspot virus. Rainbow GMO papaya is resistant to ringspot virus.

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home — dear and familiar stone hearth and garden — and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word “sojourner”... invokes a nomadic people’s sense of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” - Annie Dillard

[ElysianWort]

ah thanks for the 411 HOTPE.

Didn't know there was a non-gmo strawberry papaya.

[SoCal_to_Hawaii]

I have a papaya tree that has produced seedless fruit. I read somewhere that it could be that it was pollinated but fertilization did not occur. I know so little that I have no idea if that sounds like a reasonable explanation.

@1V1 - glad to hear the homestead is still doing well.

[1voyager1]

I went back home on the 2nd and the 3rd, I think.
Mowed the lawn and picked up things needed for my new PC build on the 1st visit, then picked up things from M'Lady's wish list on the 2nd visit.
The area still looks fairly good, but is beginning to show stress from the gasses.
The central areas of the lawn sections away from other vegetation are yellowing and dying.
Our geometry tree has lost many of it's leaves, beginning to look pretty sparse.
Orchids are continuing to decline.
The puakenikeni, longan, lemon, papaya and others look to be from declining to pretty bad.
One good thing, all the albezias, guava and other invasives in the area look to be dead, or at least dying.