BY PETER VAN DYKE AND DIANA DUFF | SPECIAL TO WEST HAWAII TODAY
Amy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in Captain Cook will hold its eighth annual Grow Hawaiian Festival Saturday. The festival offers an opportunity for weavers, kapa artists, woodworkers, gourd carvers and other practitioners of Hawaiian arts to come together with botanists, entomologists and horticulturists. All will be sharing with festival attendees the passion that inspires their art and dedication to the natural environment of Hawaii. The free event begins at 9 a.m. and continues until 2:30 p.m. on the garden’s grounds.
This year, the festival celebrates Hawaiian kalo (taro). Many of the demonstrations and presentations will focus on growing, cooking and eating taro. As a staple food in ancient Hawaii, taro has deep roots in the culinary, as well as spiritual, traditions of Hawaiian culture.
Daniel Anthony and Jerry Konanui, along with their students and friends, will introduce the taro theme from noon to 4 p.m. Friday. Everyone is invited to this free kui ai public poi pounding session. Cooked taro and more than a dozen boards and pounding stones will be available for participants to practice making poi at the garden.
Anthony is visiting from Honolulu with some of his students, especially for the event. His company, Mana Ai, produces hand-pounded pai ai, which is a dense taro paste. This paste is created as one of the first steps in poi making. Poi is created by slowly adding water to the pai ai. The cultural importance of hand-pounded pai ai and the poi made from it was recently recognized by the state Legislature, allowing special health department protocols to be established for its sale to the public. During the festival on Saturday, Anthony and his students will again be pounding taro and producing pai ai to be sold during the event to benefit the garden.
Hawaii Island taro expert Konanui will also be on hand Saturday to help people identify taro varieties, and discuss taro-growing practices. Konanui will be among several island woodworkers in attendance who will share their secret techniques for making poi boards from native and non-native woods. An explanation of “Saving Seeds: Recovering Hawaiian Kalo (Taro) Biodiversity” will also be led by Konanui. The statewide project was established to protect, recover and multiply the traditional varieties of kalo grown in Hawaii and is funded by CERES. The project will sponsor an expansion of the taro plantings at Greenwell garden over the next two years, including an apprenticeship program and data collection on the varieties growing throughout the state.
Saturday’s event will open with a dedication ceremony for the garden’s new office building from 9 to 10 a.m. The building, which is located about 200 yards south of the previous driveway across from Dr. Margaret Dexter’s naturopathic office and the Manago Hotel, will be at the center of the event and parking will be available around it. The dedication ceremony will be lead by Danny Akaka Jr.
The event is also an opportunity to take a guided tour of the garden with several different guides. Bobby Camara, a naturalist and cultural expert who has worked for the National Park Service and at Kukio for many years, will lead a tour starting at 10:15 a.m. At 11:30, David Orr, a rare plants expert from Waimea Valley on Oahu, will lead a second tour and, at 1 p.m., a tour will be lead by Bill Garnett, who has spent many years on plant restoration projects in remote parts of Oahu and Molokai.
Local gardeners are encouraged to bring samples to the festival for plant, insect and disease identification. Even shell collectors can meet with Ski Kwaitkowski to learn the kinds of shells that can be found here.
This special event celebrating Hawaiian plants and culture is presented by Hawaii Forest and Trail, and sponsored by a grant from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs Ahahui Events Program and Kukio.
Tropical
gardening helpline
Emily asks: Colorado potato beetles seem to be eating the poha berry plants in my garden. What can I do?
Answer: The photos you sent are of the three-lined potato beetle. It is distinguished by its reddish head and two dark spots on the thorax, as well as the black lines on its back. Though similar to the Colorado potato beetle, it has a slightly different appearance and food preferences. It has dark yellow wing covers with three black stripes and like the Colorado potato beetle feeds on plants in the solanaceae family including potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant and other nightshades as well as tomatillo. Your poha plant, Physalis peruviana, or Cape gooseberry, is very closely related to the tomatillo plant, which is the favored food of the three-lined potato beetle.
The insect does indeed look like the Colorado potato beetle, as well as having a similar appearance to the striped cucumber beetle, but it is the host plant that provides the positive identification for this pest.
The three-lined potato beetle overwinters as an adult and as soon as days get warmer and longer, the females begin to lay yellow-orange eggs on the undersides of leaves of their host plants. The eggs hatch in about two weeks to larvae that look a bit like those of the Colorado potato beetle except they all seem to carry a small pile of their own excrement on their back, presumably to discourage predators. In two more weeks, the larvae mature into the adult beetle with the yellow and black stripes. The larvae and adults will consume large quantities of leaves and can defoliate your crop quickly.
Floating row covers are the best prevention, but once the pest is present you will need to seek attacking measures. Hand-picking or vacuuming is pretty immediate and can work on small plantings. Put them in a jar with alcohol in the bottom to kill them. You may get good results killing the larvae with bacillus thuringiensis or other products recommended for beetle larvae. They must eat the product, however, to be killed. Neem oil, Pyganic (a pyrethrin) and Entrust are recommended organic products that will kill the adults on contact. Rotenone is a natural product that also works well, but no current rotenone formulations meet organic standards. In any case, read product labels and follow instructions carefully.
Email plant questions to konamg@ctahr.hawaii.edu for answers by certified master gardeners. Some questions will be chosen for inclusion in this column.
Peter Van Dyke is the manager of Amy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in Captain Cook. Diana Duff is a plant adviser, educator and consultant with an organic farm in Captain Cook.