HONAUNAU — In 2004, Karen Kriebl and her husband, Tim Bruno, took a vacation to Hawaii.
Within 10 minutes of landing on Hawaii Island, they knew they had found their future home. It took four years to realize their dream of a more sustainable farming lifestyle for their young family, but with no farm experience and only childhood gardening involvement, they bought a 12-acre coffee and avocado farm in Honaunau and were ready for the adventure.
Tim gave up his career in advertising and Karen traded in her doctorate in history and years of teaching to learn some new skills.
“Walking through our newly acquired avocado orchard we realized we had no idea when the fruit was ripe or how to get it out of the trees,” Karen said, summing up just how clueless they were at the time.
But thanks to helpful neighbors and sharing members of the farming community, they learned a lot in their first year.
“Of course, we made many mistakes along the way,” Karen confessed, “but we were determined and just considered our missteps as part of the learning curve.”
They named their farm Luana, a Hawaiian word for contentment, hoping they would find time to relax, enjoy and be content in their new life. Though their farm was mostly coffee and avocados they learned early that diversity is the key to farming success here.
“Hawaii is not like other places,” Karen pointed out. “We had to switch our ideas about what to grow because what we thought would grow, didn’t necessarily work here.”
They also had to find ways to diversify their offerings. Coffee and avocados are major crops in Kona. The market is often flooded. They were challenged to find outlets for their produce while growing new crops and adding value to their coffee and avocado harvest.
With 200 producing avocado trees, they had to find an outlet quickly. A distributor for Costco was willing to buy their grade A avocados. Those that didn’t meet these stringent requirements, Karen packed in baskets and hand delivered to restaurants and any other buyers she could find. In the process, she met a lot of people and finally secured a booth at the Keauhou Farmers Market. Seeing the value of farmers markets for farmers and consumers, she and Tim approached Amy Greenwell Garden in Captain Cook about starting a Sunday market on their grounds. The markets not only provided a dependable outlet for their products but also helped to expand their customer base. Though they have added a website, www.luananaturals.com, to their outreach, they still rely heavily on the farmers markets for making contacts, promoting and selling their products.
Karen was always curious about everything they grew and started researching different ways to use their produce. For many years, she had harbored a passion for lotions and potions and began seeing opportunities to follow her passion using what was growing on her farm. Many of her recipes for skin care products grew directly out of the diversity of plants she was growing or those she knew she could get from local farmers.
Karen’s first venture into skin care products was to make a coffee scrub from finely ground coffee, avocado oil and her ground allspice berries. She later added cinnamon from her neighbor’s farm. With a bountiful avocado crop, she saw lots of avocado seeds go to waste. Her personal experimentation coupled with some research led her to dry and grind the seeds to make a nutrient-rich exfoliant that includes avocado oil and rosebuds.
Today, she also uses her citrus fruit and cacao nibs in her scrubs. Herbs in her garden like lemon balm, tulsi basil and comfrey add their healing properties to a variety of products. Her allspice berries add a spicy fragrance to exfoliants while fresh turmeric lends its color and additional healing benefits to her lip balms and body salves. Though somewhat difficult to grow at their 1,600-foot elevation, calendula, lavender and chamomile are some of the great ingredients she sources locally.
Using a small amount of avocado oil that they were able to extract using a handmade press, Karen started developing a recipe for an oil to nourish skin and hair. By trading for kukui nut oil and adding essential oils from local plants along with some vitamin E, she created her ili oil. Naming it for the Hawaiian word for skin, ili became a best seller in the Luana Naturals line and continues to be a handmade Hawaiian product that provides “good food for your skin.”
While farm work still keeps them busy, Karen and Tim continue to apply their ingenuity and creativity to designing, producing and promoting skin care products using the diverse ingredients that they grow or can access locally.
Though their growing and production practices are sustainable and they use organic and environmentally sensitive methodology on their farm, they have decided against full organic certification until they decide to make the big leap to large-scale production.
At this point Luana Naturals is a cottage industry and they are happy to keep it that way.
“It’s all about connecting,” Karen said about what she has learned in her eight years on Luana Farm, adding that she had to let go of her old ideas and open up to listen and learn from others.
From her own experience as a clueless newbie, she knows that sharing ideas and techniques as well as products with other gardeners and farmers is the way to succeed in Hawaii and the key to the contentment or luana they sought.
Diana Duff is a plant adviser, educator and consultant living on an organic farm in Captain Cook.