Happy Halloween

A Happy Halloween to all my friends and family in Canada. I’ve been watching the weather report for across Canada over the past month. Snow has come early to many areas and it looks like there might be snow falling for trick-r-treaters in Whitehorse tonight. I have always enjoyed the fun of Halloween, especially when my children were small, so it was with some surprise that I discovered it is not celebrated here in Fiji. As I was describing the process of children dressing up in costumes and knocking on doors for treats, the looks of confusion and disbelief shared by all reinforced the huge cultural differences between rural Fijian and Canadian life. So many traditions in the Western world have been co-opted by commercialization and consumerism. It’s not until you try to explain the why behind some of our traditions that you realize just how divorced current practices are from their origins. Here in our small corner of Fiji, instead of celebrating Halloween, we celebrated All Souls Day by gathering together as a family, cleaning the family graveyard at Waidranudranu, and praying for departed family.

As per usual life this past month has been very busy. First of all, Arthur and I spent about 10 days over on Viti Levu at the end of September clearing the boxes I sent from Canada. It took a little longer to clear the boxes through Customs this time because in addition to the usual small personal items, I imported a wood chipper for the farm. Thanks to our local Agricultural Officer for providing a support letter, we were able to import the wood chipper duty free.

The wood chipper will help us produce our own mulch for the garden and for the chicken shed. As well we can chip the Juncao grass for processing into silage for chicken feed. Generally we feed our chicken with commercial feed in the morning and then let them out into one of three chicken pens for the rest of the day. They eat a variety of wild food to supplement their feed. During the wetter months the chickens spend less time outside so there is less wild food available. By the end of the last wet season our chickens were not as healthy as I would have liked them to be and their egg production had gone down significantly. This year we’re going to supplement their feed during the wet months with silage and see if that improves their health.

We’ve also had a busy month with our bees. Unfortunately our 20 new bee hives have not been thriving. Several of the new hives needed to be re-queen which we were successfully able to accomplish by providing frames of capped and uncapped brood from our older hives. Arthur’s nephew Simione who provided the new hives, was also able to do a site visit to assess the condition of the hives and the site that we had placed them. He felt that there was not enough feed to support both the old hives and the new hives and recommended that we move them to Arthur’s family property, Waidranudranu Estate. So that’s what we did, first having to build stands for the hives and a fence around the new bee yard to prevent cows and pigs from getting at the hives. We moved the hives at night with help from Simione and his wife Asenaca. Within just days we could see the improvement. The bees were out foraging and all had better nectar storage.

The rest of the farm is growing like crazy. We’ve had lots of rain so the weeds and vines are taking over. Lots of weeding to do! The pineapple and passion fruit are ripening. We’ve taken the first harvest to the Nabouwalu market and expect weekly harvests for the next couple of months. Bananas are also coming into season and it’s going to be a bumper crop.