Backyard Permaculture on Hawaii Big Island?

Greetings!

We are evaluating a move to the big island and are looking for the right neighborhood. We’ve practiced permaculture for 15 years in a variety of climates and are wanting to get back to the tropics. We taught permaculture in China for several years and now design & build sustainable homes in Central WA.

We’ll be on the big island later this month and would love to meet some folks and see examples of backyard permaculture around the island. Our interests are family-scale backyard permaculture, neighborhood scale social networks, and sustainable architecture.

We’ll expect to pay or trade for people’s time showing us around but aren’t interested in the professional ‘permaculture project’ or working farms this visit. We’d like to get a realistic idea of what systems people are managing with 10-30 minutes per day and to talk to people on the ground about the day to day of growing and living in their community.

Below is where we’re staying. We have a 4x4 and will be willing to travel an hour or so for meet-ups!
Jan 16-18 Mountain View
Jan 18-20 Captain Cook
Jan 20-22 Honokaa
Jan 22-23 Papaaloa

Please reply below, private message me, or find me on Facebook:
Facebook.com/PermacultureTom

I think Su Ba is on Big Island. You can check out her homestead thread here, though recently I think she's putting more energy into a community farm.

Hey, I lived on the big island for a few years and was involved with several of these types of backyard systems. We lived on the wet side of Waimea which might be one of the best climates in the world for this. In about 2 years we developed a really great backyard system full of native plants, canoe crops (Polynesian introduced food/medicinal crops), and animals (ducks, chickens, pigs). This was on a 1 acre rental property (shared with owners), and they were happy to allow us to experiment and stuff. Here’s a video:  https://youtu.be/4ABRbDkvRzI

I was just there visiting them and the system is running great with minimal maintenance. You might be able to visit it but if not I’ve documented it pretty well on my Instagram (@geoscience_ecology_hawaii) and am working on uploading some videos of that system in the next week or two to my YouTube channel ( https://youtube.com/@AgroecologicalSystems)  Hopefully that content is enough to give you a sense of what it’s like.

Another great location is Honoka’a / the Hamakua coast. I have a friend who bought a 6 acre property there and is in the process of turning former pasture into a food forest. He has plenty videos on his YouTube channel ( [youtube]https://youtube.com/@ainabearfarm8075),[/youtube]  and might be willing to give you a quick tour. Definitely a good climate for this type of work, plenty of soil, etc. He’s specializing in rare fruit trees.

Big Island has an insane variety of climates and different soil conditions. A lot of off-grid folks live on the hilo / Pāhoa side, cheap land but very thin soils on porous lava rock make it a challenge to work with. I have a friend there who is trying to develop soils in raised beds and he is able to make it work pretty well, but if you’re really in to growing things it might not be the best site.