Food Forest Folks LLC

05/03/2026

Wow we've been busy as bees this spring, thank you to everyone who has supported our nursery! Now is a great time to plant with all the rain we've been getting, good luck to all of you who are also hard at work! Here's a list of plants we currently have at our booth at maku'u market:

Allspice
Assam indigo
Bhodi tree
Black sapote
Black turmeric
Bolivian Mangosteen
Calabash lilikoi
Cat whisker
Cherimoya
Chico sapote
Clove
Cola nut
Cupuacu
Dwarf Malaysian coconut
Dwarf red Malaysian coconut
Eggfruit
Elephant ear philodendron
Fan palm
Fenan jackfruit seedling
Giant jaboticaba
Guadua bamboo
Jaguar cacao
Kuini
Malabar chestnut
Mammee apple
Maprang
Mexican Mangosteen
Pakistan mulberry
Peach palm thornless
Peanut butter fruit
Poshte
Pulasan
Star apple
Variegated sugar cane
White pineapple
Yellow jaboticaba
Yellow mangosteen

04/04/2026

Holy Maoli that's a lot of bananas! These bananas were all grown with stick and log mulch, no chemical fertilizer or manure was used(except composted humanure on the maoli). That's right, you can grow fat racks by using hugelculture and log mulch, especially on the windward sides of the islands where the logs stay wet and break down super fast. With rising food and gas prices, growing your own mulch and fertilizer is going to become more important for food security. More mulch = more food.

Dwarf maoli is an endangered Hawaiian cooking banana. When fully ripe they taste like a red Cuban, but they are most commonly used as a plantain. They have a beautiful rosy color due to their beta carotene content. They can produce massive racks and are an underrated ally in local food security.

Namwah or awak bananas are the most important banana for food security in our opinion, due to their vigor and disease resistance. They are known to be resistant to bunchy top virus and sigatoka, and relatively resistant to weevils. It's less commonly known that they produce about twice as many keikis as an apple banana. This makes it a much more resilient banana than almost any other variety. Oh yeah and they are known for putting out huge racks.

We will be selling these bananas at maku'u market this Sunday, if you've ever been interested in trying these varieties now is your chance. If you'd like to buy banana keikis of either variety send me a DM or comment below. We have limited dwarf maoli but plenty of dwarf namwah.

10/03/2025

Hey everyone! We'll be in Fern Forest with a 9 ton excavator starting next week! If you're in the Mountain View/Volcano area and have a project (big or small) that you'd like to get done, feel free to send me a message or text/call our business number 808-404-8897.

We offer competitive prices and specialize in using machinery to clear lots and use the debris to create food forests- instead of hauling it away or leaving it in a big pile somewhere on the property!

07/24/2025

Mountain View Mangos! 🥭 We got 12 mangos this year and we are so stoked. I'm not sure but we may be the first to have a fruiting mango in rainy Mt.View. What's even more amazing is that this is only a 4 year old seedling!

This is Mangifera rubripetala, a species of mango from Borneo which has a similarly wet climate to Hawaii. Other "jungle" mangos are Kasturi, Kuini, and Lalijiwa. Mango seedlings can take over a decade to fruit if left unmanaged, but if you prune them properly and fertilize with lime and potassium you can have them fruiting almost as fast as a grafted tree!

We currently have Kasturi mango seedlings for sale in the nursery, which is the best variety for high elevations! We will have a select few rubripetala and Lalijiwa seedlings for sale in a few months, and maybe some grafted ones too! And we are always happy to help prune your mango trees 🌿

07/22/2025

Year 4 of our homestead and we are in abundance, check out how much growth has happened on our driveway berm in only 5 months! 🌴 We built this berm out of local soil and rock using an excavator and it's insanely fertile! It's a Syntropic-lite system that relies only on local mulch, we've never fertilized it and it honestly surprised us how fast everything is growing. The berm has bananas planted every 20ft, and alternating every 20ft between them is a fruit tree, including: Kuini mango, kasturi mango, lychee, santol, Mt. Apple, and more. 🥭 There's also tithonia, crotalaria, bele spinach, and some natives like pohinahina and hibiscus. It feels really good to use the excavator as a tool for food foresting after battling the jungle with a chainsaw for 3 years. We also cleared an acre of guava and albezia, dug 2 ponds, built a stick pile barricade/privacy wall/fence, stopped flood runoff, and started a road to the back acre. We also made piles of soil, of which we have the equivalent of multiple dump truck loads. We are eating our first cacao fruits and they are super sweet with almost no bitterness, and the cassava/uhi/air potato garden is going bananas! 🍌 Our property is for sale, if you're interested contact Dayna at DaynaRobertson.com. If you are interested in consultation, design, buying fruit trees, landscaping, or excavation work dm us or email at [email protected] 🌿 more YouTube content is on the way including a before and after tour of our excavation process, stay tuned!

06/11/2025

Our new video series with Off Grid Neighbors is live! We were shocked and honored at many people saw our Food Forest 101 series, it's been wonderful to share our knowledge with the community and people across the globe! We always have a blast talking about agroforestry with Tony and Rain. This is part 2 of our updated food forest tour, check out part 1 if you want to see how we are building food forests with an excavator. Also our property is for sale, send us a message if you're interested 😃

This land is for sale!https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/16-1588-Io-Kea-Rd-Kurtistown-HI-96760/2052937515_zpid/

05/01/2025

Are you tired of growing mangos that don't produce? Tired of watching your flowers and fruit succumb to the rain? If so you might enjoy growing jungle mangos! We are over 1000ft ft in rainy Puna, and it's a little early to say but it's looking like we will get some fruit this year! And this is only a 4 year old seedling!

Technically some would say these aren't mangos as they are a different species than the common Magnifera indica. Rapoza, Kona King, Keitt, Julie; these are all cultivars of the same species, of which there are hundreds or thousands. But Magnifera indica is native to the Indian subcontinent which features a long yearly dry period that the mango prefers to flower in. That's why they don't do particularly well in rainy places, especially when the rain comes in the winter/spring when they are flowering. But there are many other species of Magnifera that are from rainy, tropical environments that are much more adapted to anthracnose, the dreaded fungus that molds the flowers and fruit. These species such as Kasturi, Kuini, Lalijiwa, and the featured Rubripetala, are much more resistant to anthracnose.

These jungle mangos are often polyembryonic, meaning the seed produces multiple trees. Polyembryonic seeds are really neat because the vigorous sprouts are actually clones of the parent tree, meaning you can grow them without worrying about inferior fruit(and you get 2-4 trees per seed). Mango seedlings can take many years to flower and fruit if left untended, but ours is only 4 years young! The key to inducing flowers is pruning/tipping and giving them lots of Potassium. We tipped this plant a few months ago, piled a bunch of coconut husks around the base, and peed on the husks. This made the coconut husk compost much faster and release the abundant Potassium they hold. If you'd like to buy jungle mangos seedlings from us send us a DM or come see our booth at Maku'u market, we are there every Sunday! We are also for hire to come prune your fruit trees and do consultations as well as excavating your property to build a food forest!

04/23/2025

Happy Earth day! To celebrate we planted a mamey sapote, Jamaican cherry, dwarf wi apple, puakenikeni, Maui purple dragon fruit, lilikoi(purple x Jamaican), and some cherry tomatoes. We've been really busy the last year learning to run an excavator and it's finally paying off. We used the machine to build this 300ft berm of soil and rock and trees, which has kept the pigs out and allows us to plant trees much more easily. Everything planted in the berm really loves the deep soil and the drainage. Our goal is to use the excavator to build food forests for our clients in record time!

03/05/2025

If you want to grow food without a lot of time or inputs, you might want to try growing cassava. Simply stick a cassava cutting in the ground and its stalk will grow to around 7ft while a starchy tuber forms underground. It has quite a few vitamins and minerals, has some protein and not much fat, and is full of resistant starch which is good for blood sugar and gut health. It has twice the calories of a sweet potato and can fare well in poor soil conditions. When given optimal conditions one plant can produce over 50lbs! It's also delicious and makes a great gluten-free flour and wheat replacement.
We like to fry cassava wedges in coconut oil, super delicious and very filling.

When spaced together tightly cassava can outgrow and shade w**ds. Knowing this I planted them very close together, 6 inches x 3ft rows. They successful shaded out any w**d trying to creep into the garden, and we havent pulled any w**ds since we planted them 6 months ago. Now we are thinning them out in phases, allowing the remaining plants to grow bigger. Every time I dig a plant out I fill the hole with rotten wood and coconut husks. This system has produced so many delicious meals with such little effort, we will definitely always be growing this amazing plant.

02/25/2025

Is it Bunchy Top Virus? Though the symptoms appear similar I believe it's a different pest: the banana weevil. The banana weevil burrows through and feeds on living tissue of the corn and stems of a banana plant. When a banana patch has been growing in the same spot for multiple years, there are most likely banana weevils there. Here are a few different helpful methods in management:

When a banana rack is harvested, the culm(stalk) and corm(root) should be cut into small pieces. The goal is for the plant material to dry out and no longer act as food and lodging for the pests. The pieces can also be used to make a weevil trap. I made the mistake of not chopping up the last culm properly and it was absolutely full of weevil burrows.

Move your banana patches to reduce weevil density. Adult weevils are not good fliers and do not travel too far. If you have the space you can place banana bunches strategically around your land while quarantining them from the other bunches. Once a patch has been going for a few years it can be moved and something else can grow there.

To avoid transporting weevils when planting a new banana bunch, it's best practice to carve the roots and corm back until there are no signs of weevil burrows. The corm(roots) can then be additionally soaked in a bleach or hydrogen peroxide solution diluted in water for a few hours. The corm should then be allowed to dry and scab over before planting.

Heavily feeding your bananas will help to compensate for the weevil damage done to the plant. As long as the plant gets large amounts of mulch, compost, or fertilizer it can "outgrow" the destruction of it's tissues. This also reduces the stress chemicals released by the plant that can attract pests. As the saying goes: "a healthy plant is an invisible plant". Mexican sunflower has been shown to have weevil repelling effects, there may be other helpful mulch crops with insecticidal properties as well.