Easter is a religious celebration for many Christians, but it is also a universal celebration honoring the arrival of spring. In addition to the ecclesiastical symbols of the holiday, chicks, colored eggs, live and chocolate bunnies as well as jelly beans, lamb and ham are also associated with the season. All signify birth and new life and represent spring’s arrival.
Easter is a religious celebration for many Christians, but it is also a universal celebration honoring the arrival of spring. In addition to the ecclesiastical symbols of the holiday, chicks, colored eggs, live and chocolate bunnies as well as jelly beans, lamb and ham are also associated with the season. All signify birth and new life and represent spring’s arrival.
Assembling all these can mean lots of running around. Why not consider a homegrown version of the holiday for next year? Growing or creating your own celebratory items at home can have benefits way beyond your spring celebration. When you find ways to use naturally occurring or local products for your needs, you are taking a step toward sustainability for your family and our community.
If your neighborhood allows chickens, you can start there. Several organizations, including the West Hawaii branch of our community college offer classes in backyard chicken raising. Chicks are often available this time of year or you can order them online. Coops and other supplies can be found at various sources online. Learn which chickens are best for your location and get started.
Keeping your chicks healthy, protecting them from predators and providing good food for them is necessary if you want eggs, pets and more chicks. “Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens” by Gail Damerow can help you with these issues and more.
Though you can get organic chicken feed on the island, it’s far cheaper and more sustainable to feed a small flock of chickens from your own or a nearby farm or garden. Chickens love papayas, coconuts and avocados. If you want to avoid buying grain from somewhere in the Midwest, try growing sorghum. It’s easy to grow and chickens will eat it without husking. Kiawe is another local plant that offers nutrition to chicken’s food. Dry pods can be ground and added to their feed. Table scraps from your home, your neighbor’s or a nearby restaurant, as well as locally grown starches like breadfruit, taro and sweet potatoes all make good chicken food.
Raising chickens has benefits beyond eggs. They’ll eat your kitchen scraps, eat bugs and slugs from your property and generate high-quality manure for your garden. Docile breeds can also make entertaining and affectionate pets and provide lots of entertainment.
Bunnies make good pets, too. They also offer high-quality manure for your garden. Care to keep them contained is important for their protection and to keep the population under control. You can get bunnies often if you have male and female rabbits. Raising them beyond the bunny stage can provide an experience and lesson in growing your own meat for food.
If you’d rather eat bunnies made of chocolate, plant cacao trees. Information and classes on growing cacao and processing it locally into healthy and tasty chocolate abound. Want to make your own bunny molds? Check online. Lots of recipes for making rabbit molds from chocolate, as well as making jelly beans at home are available on the Internet. Consider flavoring your homemade jelly beans with fruit juices from your garden or other local sources.
Raising lambs and pigs for food may be beyond your capability or interest, but you can start by researching local sources of these animals for next year’s holiday table.
Courses and sources of natural dyes for eggs appear locally in the spring and are online year-round. You can delight your family by gathering plant material and creating dyes for Easter eggs at home. Get creative and make patterns and colors you will never find in a store dye set; find egg-dyeing ideas at vegetablegardener.com.
However you choose to celebrate Easter or springtime, you might want to think of ways to make it more homegrown and sustainable next year.
Tropical
gardening helpline
Amy asks: I just moved here from the mainland and want to grow some of my favorite fruit including apples, pears and stone fruit like peaches and cherries. I have heard that some of these can be grown in the tropics. Is this true?
Answer: Tropical varieties of apples, pears, peaches and nectarines exist and are available locally. We can also grow tropical fruits including apricots that closely resemble mainland favorites.
Research at the University of Florida, University of California and in Hawaii has produced some varieties of fruit trees that require much less than the usual 300-plus chill hours for apples and stone fruit. By crossing, recrossing, double-crossing and grafting onto nematode resistant rootstock, researchers have produced trees that are better suited to tropical climates. The results are some dependable apple varieties that need little or no chill and some pear, peach and nectarine varieties that require very few hours of cold. A chill hour is measured as one hour below 45 degrees and above 32. At many locations in Hawaii, even one chill hour is not possible, but some upper elevation locations offer some chill most years.
Anna, Ein Shemer and Dorsett Golden apples will grow well in areas that experience very little or zero sustained winter chill. Dorsett golden apples are from the Bahamas where occasional chills help them flower and fruit. Both Anna and Ein Shemer dependably produce here with no chill hours at all.
A tropical pear is also available locally. The Hood pear is a product of research and breeding at the University of Florida. It requires minimal chill hours but will do best at elevations above 1,000 feet that get some cold winter nights.
Several tropical nectarine and peach varieties are also locally available. Desert Delight nectarine needs 100 to 200 chill hours for best results and the Florida Prince peach needs 150 hours below 45 degrees.
Several other tropical peach varieties grow well here but their fruit is often bitter and better suited for pickling than eating out of hand.
One tip that can make these trees fruit at lower elevations is to water them during winter evenings for a week or so with ice water or simply place ice cubes in the root zone to melt.
Many other tropical fruit trees thrive here and produce delicious fruit. You may want to consider mountain apple, Natal plum, tropical apricot and Surinam cherry. Though they sound like relatives of mainland apples, plums and cherries, they are not. They have quite different tastes, textures and growth habits but are worth getting to know and love if you are planning to grow fruit here.
The mountain apple, Syzygium malaccense, produces a bright red fruit about the size and shape of a pear. It is not quite as juicy and sweet as a true apple, but it is a cool and tasty treat on a hot tropical day.
A star apple is another sound-alike fruit that actually has little taste or textual similarity to mainland apples. It is a small round fruit with a star-shaped seed arrangement in the center. It has a sweet flavor, soft flesh and with a custardy texture and taste.
Natal plums grow on a shrub with thorns. The shrub produces white fragrant flowers followed by the plums. Though small and egg shaped, a fully ripe Natal plum is bright red and tasty. Growers make a jam from this tropical fruit that hails from Natal province in South Africa.
Surinam cherry is a tropical cherry with stony seeds and a sweet and sour flavor. The tropical apricot has firmer flesh, is more berry-like in flavor and usually produces somewhat larger fruit than temperate varieties.
Email questions to konamg@ctahr.hawaii.edu for answers by certified master gardeners. Some questions will be chosen for inclusion in this column.
Diana Duff is an organic farmer, plant adviser and consultant.