Sustainable yarden

KILAUEA — As County Councilmember Felicia Alongi Cowden walks through her yard, she spots a ripened fruit. She pulls down a tree branch, picking off a fresh breadfruit.

“Most everything you’re looking at is edible in some way,” she said, surrounded by varieties of spinach, sweet potatoes, avocados and sweet-smelling basil.

Cowden has more than just a typical garden, housing about 150 different types of food products in the “yardren,” she said, most of which are native to Hawai‘i and Polynisaian islands.

“In Polynesia, you’re meant to eat in your community because there’s so much abundance that you need to feed a lot of people, not just one or two people,” she said.

But the property wasn’t always this way.

“I didn’t think of myself as much of a plant person” at first, Cowden said. “What I learned is if you mimic nature in your yard, it just grows on its own.”

Cowden bought her Kilauea property in 2001, at the end of its days in the hands of a mechanic. She, with the help of a home-schooled class she taught, friends, a permaculture class and encouragement, created a sustainable food source, and transformed the space into a lush garden that encapsulates her property.

“What I learned in that process is how easy it is to be resilient on Kaua‘i,” she said.

Harvesting a garden of this magnitude comes with its own challenges, and sometimes an overabundance of food which she shares with friends and her community.

“The biggest piece of the work is harvesting and cutting the plants back,” she explained. “It’s different than if people plant a little row crop garden like what you would be buying in the produce section in Foodland that comes from the continental United States.”

Cowden’s akamai backyard is pesticide-free. The design is built around diverse “plant guilds.” Each plant in the guild has a job invoking a tiny ecosystem where the plants feed off each other in a way. She points at nitrogen-fixing trees that help the soil, and coleus plants which keep back the weeds.

“They’re nourishing each other,” she said. “That’s how nature works.”

The efforts at her home are a smaller scale version of the Kaua‘i Food Forest in Kalihiwai. A short drive from her house, the food forest is celebrating its seventh year.

The expansive “edible landscape,” as she called it, includes fruit, vegetables and medicinal plants from around the world.

“My yarden is a mosaic of my friends,” Cowden said, including plant populations and seeds that wouldn’t have been possible without others.

The establishment of her yarden preceded the food forest, with some life having a past on her property. Now, the food orest acts as a community seed and plant exchange.

“It’s like currency,” said Paul Massey, who works at the food forest. “You never know when these seeds will be needed.”

During a time when people are spending more time than ever at home, Cowden encourages people to learn with nature. It took years to grow her yarden, and years to grow the food forest into what it is today, but the benefits were there in a short amount of time.

Cowden encourages local food production. “Neighborhood agriculture and neighborhood food production is central to what was the character of Hawai‘i,” she said.

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Sabrina Bodon, public safety and government reporter, can be reached at 245-0441 or sbodon@thegardenisland.com.