When Joan Lamont’s grandfather arrived in California’s Santa Clara Valley from Portugal in 1889, all he knew was farming and orchard work. He acquired 20 acres in Los Gatos and began doing what he knew best. Joan’s father eventually took over the orchard, growing apricots and prunes as well as almonds and walnuts. Growing up on the farm, Joan enjoyed working in the orchards alongside the Hispanic “braceros,” or manual laborers, and canning fruit in the kitchen with her mom.
When Joan Lamont’s grandfather arrived in California’s Santa Clara Valley from Portugal in 1889, all he knew was farming and orchard work. He acquired 20 acres in Los Gatos and began doing what he knew best. Joan’s father eventually took over the orchard, growing apricots and prunes as well as almonds and walnuts. Growing up on the farm, Joan enjoyed working in the orchards alongside the Hispanic “braceros,” or manual laborers, and canning fruit in the kitchen with her mom.
She left the farm to go to college but eventually her love of farming drew her back. In 1992, she left her job in the electronics industry in Silicon Valley and returned to her roots in Los Gatos. Since she had left, development had swallowed up most of the farm. Joan was happy, however, to put in a vegetable garden and tend the remaining trees on the three-quarter-ºacre parcel which was surrounded by Lockheed and IBM housing.
Before returning to Los Gatos, she and her husband, Tom, had made frequent trips to Hawaii and decided to buy an acre and a half just above Kailua-Kona. After the purchase in 1988, they began designing and building a house and Joan planted more than 35 citrus trees along with many ornamental plants. They left a huge monkey pod tree in place, which remains a stunning feature as you drive onto their property today.
Within 10 years, the Hawaiian orchard was fully productive and their house was finished. In 2003, they retired from their California life and moved to Hawaii full-time where Joan took up the job of farming and gardening.
From watching the ups and downs of agricultural production as she was growing up, Joan learned the value of growing more than one crop. Her dedication to diversity is apparent on her property today. She has some beautiful ornamental trees and shrubs as well as several well-tended vegetable and herb gardens in addition to her orchard crops and pineapple patches. Her citrus trees number about 40 and include nearly every known variety. She also grows bananas, coconuts, avocados, mangoes and papayas as well as pomegranate, rambutan, nutmeg and several kinds of figs. Add to that poha, lilikoi, and tamarillo and that’s only the fruit. Her vegetable and herb gardens are equally diverse and productive.
Two of Joan’s favorite ornamentals provide light fragrance around her house. Several native white hibiscus, Hibiscus arnottianus, offer attractive shade to the west side of the house and her kula gardenia (Gardenia tubifera “Kula”) is now a large tree graced with lovely golden yellow flowers that fill her kitchen with their heavy scent.
Joan’s initial challenges here were soil improvement and fruit fly control. As an organic farmer, she knows the value of mulching and has also found that composting and worm composting have given her the extra organic matter that Kona soil needs.
“I was amazed when I started worm composting that I could get an excellent soil amendment by leaving the work to the worms,” Joan said.
She has also experimented with intercropping as a way to keep the soil in her orchard covered. Nitrogen fixing ground covers have offered soil support and growing squash has helped protect the soil between trees while providing an additional crop. Joan has been working with several different fruit fly control techniques including pheromone traps and a fruit fly proof tent designed to store rotting fruit and limit insect breeding on her site. Protecting her fruit from fruit fly damage has taken a lot of perseverance and patience, two qualities she recommends that gardeners develop in order to succeed.
As gardening issues arise, Joan has learned to adapt. Insects and diseases come and go.
“Research ways to deal with them and plant something else if you can’t win,” she advised.
She added that failures can be great learning experiences. She recommends that gardeners new to Hawaii understand that gardening in the tropics is different from gardening in temperate climates. Though weeds and insect pests go year-round here and our tropical climate enables lots of unfamiliar diseases and weather extremes, she feels it’s important to keep trying until you get it right. These days the few losses she has are to rats since her aging cat has quit hunting. She experiences rat damage on avocados as well as papayas and several other crops. Traps help but she’s learned to accept some losses as part of farming in Hawaii.
Joan’s enthusiasm for farming is evident in nearly everything she does. She is constantly collecting seeds and propagating new plants. She also loves trying new gardening techniques. Her latest experiment is growing basil in a vertical garden.
“It really is a great way to garden in a small space but it requires a bit of maintenance to work well,” she said. “I don’t mind though since I can maintain it without much bending.”
Joan has diverse outlets for her farm production. She and Tom drink a lot of juice every day. On Saturdays, Joan takes fresh produce as well as products made from her crops to the Kona Farm Bureau’s Keauhou Farmers Market. At her Happy Honu Farm booth she sells fresh produce as well as her delicious baked goods and assorted jams and jellies. What doesn’t sell at the market, she sells to several local outlets and stores and a few private customers.
If farming and distributing isn’t already enough to keep a woman busy, Joan also dedicates time to volunteer in the community. For several years she was the education director for Kona Outdoor Circle. Today, she continues there at the Full Circle Thrift Shop, which supports Sadie Seymour Botanical Garden. She has spent many years on the Kona County Farm Bureau board, and as a Master Gardener emeritus she works the West Hawaii Master Gardener helpline.
Though Joan imagines she’ll be farming for a few more years, she is concerned that there are not enough younger farmers to take the place of people like her with a long family history of farming. After seeing the negative impact of development on farming in California, she hopes Hawaii can maintain its agricultural land and find growers dedicated to continue working toward the goal of growing most of our own food.
Diana Duff is a plant adviser, educator and consultant living on an organic farm in Honaunau.