Monday, June 1, 2009

Irrigation

This years weather can be describe as, "we had a wet, dry season and now we are on to the dry, wet season." In Kona the dry season is our beautiful months of fall thru winter. We had ample rains thru this season this year. Now we are into Kona's wetter season, supposedly. This is why Kona coffee has grown so well here for over a hundred years. All the rest of the state and it's islands has wet winters and drier sunny summers. The Kona area has the opposite with beautiful sunny winters and wetter spring and summers to enable the coffee to grow juicy and plump and ripen. So far this spring, no rain. Oh, it sprinkles some now and then but we seem to be nearing drought conditions. A couple times this week and again today Ron ran our irrigation. I'm not sure how many zones we have, it's at least 5, so Ron was on a schedule from one part of the farm to the other, twisting and turning valves and giving those luscious beans their drink of water. The trees and the beans look great and are a bright shiny green now. The rains will come, July and August was very rainy last year, so I'm looking forward to that. But right now we will continue to irrigate as we saw one or two lonely little beans turn red the other day. It won't be long.