 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Aloha, Glenn Martinez of All Amontic Gardens, and normally I would say Glenn Martinez on this side of the camera and Natalie on the other side of the camera, but today we have Natalie on this side. So up front and personal, this is her, she's doing it, huh? Yeah, so normally Natalie films me on a lot of YouTubes and things like that and a lot of instructional stuff for University of Hawaii. We work with them, Dr. Benny Raun, making films about organic farming and worm composting and all that kind of stuff. And Natalie's always on the camera and so she is, and then she does all the editing and all the other work. So today though she gets to be up front and the other guys get to hide behind the camera. So we're good fun. So what are we announcing today, Natalie? Okay, well today is announcement for our open farm day, which is on October 29th of this month. So this coming Sunday, we'll have open farm day starting at 11 o'clock and we do closing whenever. The last man's spending. Yeah, but our tours for the farm day is 11, 1, and 3. And so we ask people bring a dish, bring your drink, share, comments, beer, wine, soda, whatever you're going to drink, you bring it. That's it. Yeah. So it's good fun. We do it on the months that have a fifth Sunday and my joke is that on the fifth Sunday you bring a fifth and come on out, but mostly people bring a bottle of wine or beer and bring the kids. It's a great family day. It's a day in the country. It's a freebie. All amount of gardens club is a non-profit and we do this is to just show it what permaculture is about, what organic farming is about, and how you can live sustainably and that it is doable on a very low key basis. So we really kind of encourage that. And so what are you going to show them on the tour? Yeah, so we have a video of Glenn doing a tour around the farm and it will consist of seeing the whole farm, you know, permaculture, aquaponics, fishing the pond, fishing the tanks, water recirculating around to the beds, horses, chickens, the whole thing. So we like to play this little video clip of you. It's a little fast tour around the farm. Just give you a hint of what it is, but it's a very relaxing, it's a very picnic kind of mode to it and that. So people come and go throughout the day. So people will start coming at 11 and they'll kind of do a two or three hour rotation so we'll have different people throughout the day and so the flavor changes and so she actually says she'll do the tours at 11, 1 and 3 o'clock and good fun. But anyway, watch this video and they'll give you a hint of what you're going to be able to see at the farm. My name is Glenn Martinez and this is all amount of gardens. We want to give you a tour around here and show you what we're all about. You'll be pulling up worms, a handful of worms like this. They're soft, almost call them cuddly, but they're eating my garbage. This is the nourishing water that make this garden grow. This is fish water, but I smell it, doesn't smell fishy, looks clear, looks drinkable. We all look at the top of the plant and we say, wow, that's good looking. But to a farmer, he likes to dig his hand up and pull up the plant and it's just a piece of foam, an inch and a half to two inches thick and look at those roots go down. This is what we normally use inside of a beehive. We can slip it in and the bees will come up and they'll make their own cone, they'll put their eggs in there, they'll hatch their bees out. We have 17, 18 families eating out of our garden every week and it's very small parts of land and a very small investment. My limbs have become more mature and I'm getting mature fruit on every limb of this tree. So you've got the chickens living in a symbiotic relationship and they're able to go through here and they can eat all these worms. We're only a third people in the United States to be certified organic doing what we do. Well, that give you a little sneak preview of it. A whole amount of gardens. It's a five acre certified organic farm and that, so we do with aquaponics, that's what I love doing. I love doing the airlifts. We do a lot of composting because we have three Arabian horses, we have about 200 chickens and ducks. We've got a couple of goats on there. We have one pig but the pig's in the freezer so we'll just skip that one. But we do one pig a year and that's it. But we're already past the harvest. We have honeybees as you saw in the film there but a lot of it is just to show that you can do, you can pick a part of that. You might not be able to have a horse in your backyard but you can do the aquaponics in that. You can have the rabbits and that sort of thing. And it was really neat that we were able to go out today to the North Shore and visit a farm out there and he's buying his worm compost from a fellow that raises rabbits up in Manaweli. And… Makaquilo. Makaquilo. Makaquilo. I'm sorry. And what's his name of his farm? Zack. Zack's rabbits. So what's he do? Blue worms. Yeah, blue worms. Blue worms underneath the rabbit cages and his neighbors have no complaints, no odors, no flies, etc. So it really helps out a lot of people who have got problems with odors and flies and they want to have a couple of animals in their backyard in a residential neighborhood. You put the worms underneath, knocks it down, right? That's true. Yeah. That is so true. We had some people at the farm yesterday that came in toward and we took them through and the horses and they couldn't believe, no odors, no flies. But the oddest thing, they say you must clean up constantly, I say once every four months, right? Yeah. That's it. That's about that. Yeah. So can I just mention, the biggest and greatest thing about updating all of them on a garden is Glenn with his airlift pumps. We have a demonstration area where Glenn has aquariums set up. I told him it's a little science fair. Yeah. Yeah. He'll have it operational and he'll talk about all the different things that he does moving that water with using an air pump. Yeah. In fact, it's that area. It's about 20 by 30 feet. He got half of it's under a shade cloth than that. But Murray Hallam, who's a grandpa of Aquaponics in Australia, came to visit a couple of months ago. Yeah. He was only going to be with me for two days. Yeah. So he built this science fair project kind of area, two 55 gallon drums, right? I mean, two 55 gallon aquariums, right? And so I had to rapid fire show him about 14 different inventions that I've done, aeration, how to pump water, how to siphon water. So after he left, we decided, you know what, we'll just keep this little area. So like on Sunday, we'll fill it all full of water, we'll turn it on and show you. And one of the newest things is the circular garden. And this came into being that most Aquaponics guys, like we went out to the North Shore today, they build their grow beds four feet wide, 50 to 100 feet long. They put white or blue foam on it. They drill holes, they put the plant. They cannot have plants underneath, I mean, the fish underneath, because the fish would eat the plant's roots. So that's a no-no, right? So they don't do that. What we came up with, and we have one unit here in Waimanala, we did a nine foot diameter tank. We did it six foot high sides, eight sided coming up, 1200 lettuce plants on it and it revolves in the sun so you get even lighting. And so we have a model of that at the farm. So you'll be able to see that. We did one four foot by four foot. We have it with a 55 gallon drum and it flushes. Every seven minutes it flushes and the garden turns for three and a half minutes so all the plants get even light. But the short thing is why do we do Aquaponics? That's a big question, right? Well for us, we have a mountain stream running through the middle of our property. And the problem is that the rats and the pigs up in the woods contaminate the stream. It's not potable water. You would have to filter it or boil it. So I cannot use that water to grow organic crops and then sell it to the public. So what happened is we went into Aquaponics, we used city water, so it's clean. And then we used the same water. We're what, nine years now? We're into it? Nine years with the same water going in a circle. Now when I say the same water, keep in mind, we add 50 gallons a day because the plants are always drinking. And the best of water. The best of water. Right. And so it's going around constantly. But when I do Aquaponics, before when I irrigated from the stream, I used 20,000 gallons a day to irrigate our crops. Now we use 50 gallons a day. Surprising when you have to pay for it, it changes your whole attitude toward this thing, right? But by doing 50 gallons a day, keep in mind that agricultural water is only $3 for 1,000 gallons. So my water bill is only like $7 a month for the agricultural section, which is kind of amazing. So around the world, Aquaponics people, they can grow two to three times more food in the same space and you only use 5% or 10% of the water because you're recirculating it. So it works out pretty great. So what do you grow in your Aquaponics? Yeah, you know, for the Aquaponics there is more superfoods. What's the superfood thing? The superfood thing is more nutritional value. The Gershin diet? Yeah, Gershin. Kind of thing. Everything except for the apples, pretty much? Yeah. Yeah? We don't do any apple tree. Arrow, ginger, turmeric. Pineapples, chard, chili pepper. Anybody wants chili pepper? Now is the time to come because we have a lot of chili pepper on that tree. Anybody come Sunday? Yes. They can help themselves with the chili pepper. Chaiote squash. We are doing wild on the chili pepper. Yeah, chaiote squash. And every now and then we have somebody from Texas bite one and say, we eat these for breakfast and normally they have to excuse themselves because they're in trouble. Yeah. Our Hawaiian chili peppers are something to be reckoned with, aren't they? Yeah. That's right. Yeah. How about compost tea? Yeah. And that's another thing too is that is helping all the plants that we have everywhere is on the property. Right. Is the compost tea and Glenn has a setup that will get up and running to show you folks what we do with the compost tea, how we brew it, how we release it, aerate it. Do you drink the compost tea? No. No. Your plants drink it. Right. Yeah. So the compost tea is basically you do two handfuls of worm casting or compost. You throw it in this five gallon bucket and we have the devices there. Nice sitting for patents for all of this but it turns out the patents when you get one in America, it's only good in America. It's not good anywhere else. So it turns out Natalie and I were going to the Philippines and we're helping out with Orbitage as a deaf school and we're going to South Korea. We went to China and went to Hong Kong and all these other places went all the way to Jamaica last year and that. We went to San Juan, Puerto Rico last year and you go to these places, our patents are not good basically overseas. So we ended up just giving them away. I gave up my patent rights on about 14 different patents and we just said, you know what? The world's hungry and needs it. We're not going to open a factory and that. So we're going to come up to the break and we're going to talk about the benefits of the worm castings. Okay? We're going to talk about this. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. We're back here at Think Tech Hawaii. We really welcome you aboard. By the way, I want to put in a reminder. This one is live. If you're watching right now, well, that's pretty obvious. But keep in mind that a couple of hours from now, say seven o'clock or so in the evening, we're going to post this up on YouTube so you can tell your friends about it. They can go back and they can take a look at it. In fact, sometimes I suspect that more of my friends in my audience go back and watch this on YouTube or on their website at Think Tech Hawaii and see it, then catch it because sometimes we're on it two o'clock in the afternoon and my friends are working in that. But the compost tea, we went up to the North Shore today, right? Yes, we did. To a medical marijuana grower, right? Yeah. Won't tell you who, won't tell you where. No. Pretty righteous stuff, all legal, all tagged, everything else and that. And so we went out there and we delivered a compost tea maker, which was a 55-gallon drum with a 5-gallon bucket on the top. And what I invented was a way of bubbling the water up. It goes up, it saturates the compost, whatever you put in the sack, saturates it totally and then it back flushes every four minutes. So it goes up and down every four minutes, right? No moving hearts. What's the benefit of it? The benefit for it is nutritional for the plants. Right. What do you get out of it? And I'm buying new chemicals. That's right. That's the biggest benefit. Right, right. No chemicals. And on our farm, I tell people that I had a choice between buying chemicals and buying beer. Yes. Obviously for the beer. But because we have to be so careful when you're an organic farmer, you can't just be throwing anything, plus that you could burn your plant. Can you burn a plant with compost? No. No, you just inoculate it. And then it just goes more wild, more lost in all. And folks, I've got to tell you, when I started shampooing with it, great stuff before I had almost nothing. And now it's just looking better and better. I'm just so proud of it, you know? It's great stuff, you know? You can't go wrong, you know? But the worm castings is so therapeutic for the plants that we do. So we not only use it in our aquaponic system, but we pump it out and play on all the other plants on the farm, right? Yes. Put it in a backpack sprayer, walk around, spray everything. Dog walks by, spray the dog. Grandchildren walk by, spray them. It's good on everything. Yes. And once it gets inoculated, it'll just continue to grow. And so like we went down to Ono Farms down in O'Malley, they're a certified organic farm. They have about 20 acres of orchards in that, you know? Everything from bananas to oranges to mangoes, the whole thing. And they found out very much like we did. We sprayed worm tea every Friday on all of our plants. And on the second Friday, the next Friday, we did EM, effective microorganism. That's a commercial product. You can pick up at any feed store and that. And we would spray kind of one, the left one, don't get them. The right one will, right? We did it for about two years. And then we got caught up in something and somehow we missed our little routine and it didn't face it. Now maybe every six months, I'll go out and hit it with it. If I ever have any odors in the horse pen area or around the animal, we simply go over it. We spray the pile of horse manure and people are amazed. My pile of horse manure is maybe 20 feet deep and 60 feet long. There's no flies and no odor. You can go over, dig your hand, pick it up and smell it as sweet as can be. So it's good stuff. Yes, it is. Yes. So what do you think for the kids to do there on Farm Day? Yeah. I think what happens is we'll take everybody on a tour and the kids especially and we have them help us feed the animals. So they'll just walk around and we'll have like sprouts or, and that's another thing too is all the animals get special sprouts to eat for their meals. So when you go, when we go to a Waimanawa feed store and we buy grain, right? We could go home and just scoop it up and feed the grain, right? But that would be dead food. What we do, you'll see on Sunday, we put it in air-conditioned boxes that are four-foot wide, 12-foot long. The smallest air conditioner are made at Home Depot up on top and then in between they have layers and we put the seed in there. It's green, but it's actually a seed, right? And we sprout it and in six days it's this tall, green and luscious can be. And better for them. That's what we feed our horses. So the result is how do the horses look? Oh, they look fabulous. Their skin color, I mean the color, the coating good. How about their feet? Oh, barefoot. They're all of our horses are barefoot, folks. And there's two reasons for that. One, it's good for the horse. Number two, it's good for my pocketbook. The horse sure was getting $80 to $100 per horse. I had four horses, okay? I'm down to three right now, but I had four at $180 to $120 each horse every six weeks. So when we improve the diet of the horses by giving them the live food, their hooves, which are basically like your fingernails, in that they got so hard and so strong, all my horses run around barefoot. You remember when you're a kid, when you ran around barefoot, by the end of summer you could walk on anything, right? In fact, you didn't even want to put shoes on. Well, that's the way our horses are. And that is growing around Hawaii as barefoot horses and that. So it's a growing trend. How about baby animals? Do you have any baby chickens? Chickens, ducks. Ducks, yeah. We do have chickens and ducks, not a baby fish, and a pond, and we have geese out there. Right. And then if you're a plant lover, let's say you're not a real animal person, you're a vegetarian, so you're not really into the animal so much. How are we doing on plants? The botanical garden, right? Yes. Yeah. So you have trails all around. Yeah, like 18 kinds of bamboo, 87 different kinds of tea plants. And the gingers, the white gingers, and the yellow gingers are in full bloom. In full bloom. And some of them are growing out over the pass and I cannot bring myself to cut them off. I mean, I know I should open up the path. Yeah, I just brush by and my side gets wet because when you brush by them the smell is so great. And you smell so good. And everything else. Somebody says, should we trim them down? We've got people coming Sunday. And I forget it. You know, it's just, there's something about being over the top is really nice. Yeah. So we look forward to y'all coming out, coming go as you want to, it's a nice day. We make new friends every time, don't we? We sure do. And the people that come, they really enjoy it. And then eventually, because it's a sustainability farm, they'll start doing it too. They'll start off with the worms. They'll sell the worms. They want to buy worms and they take the worms home and make them a worm bin and start recycling their food waste. And all amount of cardens is the largest worm farm in Hawaii. We have been for about eight years now. And we've started other people out. We started Laie, the Mormon College, BYU. They have, we license them to do the worms and that. Zach, the rabbit man got him going. So we've started a lot of other people in business in that because there's something wrong about somebody driving all the way from the North Shore back to the Windward side to buy worm tea or to buy worm casting. Everybody should be doing their own. That's what we did at the farm today. They have enough land. They can start getting restaurant waste. They can start doing their own composting. So we lose another customer. Yeah, but we're sorry. That's why we're non-profit, huh? Yeah. That's how that works out. But we're having a good time with it. But it's a relaxed day. And the other thing is, remember, before I wore this hat, last week I wore the ham radio hat. Yes, you did. So we're not only growing carrots and tomatoes and lettuce, we're growing ham radio antennas. So if you're into ham radios, I'll have the ham radio shack open. We have everything from Coast Guard radios to VHF radios, UHF radios, and of course I went to my high school reunion last week, my fiftieth, and I went to a ham fest down in Elverin, Florida. And they insisted that I couldn't go home without a new radio. So I have a new Yesu 857D all-in-one, if you only owned one radio, this would be it. But we have them all hooked up. We have them all running. And we did the Boy Scouts yesterday, right? On Sunday. On Sunday. On Sunday. We did Jota, which is the Boy Scouts jamboree on the air. Across the whole nation, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts get a married badge by going to a ham radio outfit and talking on the radio. And so Natalie and I hosted about 30 people out of the farm, again, all for free, and that this is just a public thing that we do. But the young boys got to come in and they got to talk on the radio. So we had people coming in saying, my daddy lives in Japan, can we talk to him? My brother lives in Italy, can we talk to him? And it was just the thrill of getting on a shortwave radio and being able to talk to people. And the boys really lit up on that. They only gave them a courtesy tour of the farm just to round it up. I think they liked the animals best. You think? Until they got to the ham shack. It's hard to compete with baby ducks, isn't it? Yeah, it is good fun. But so it's a little bit of everything for everybody. And then while you're there, for any of the guys that are galloping into machine shops, we have a little machine shop, welding, carpentry shop there. A bakery, if you will. Everybody's been to a bakery. Well, we have a bakery. A bakery. We make things. And we've had two marines come out this year and make AR-15 rifles legally. They buy a kit and you make your own gun and you go down and register it and everything else. So they learn machine shop skills, but we have a full welding outfit and that. You sure got all the tools there. We got all the tools. Any excuse to buy another tool, that's my theory. That's a good program to be on. But how do they find us? Where can they get more information? Yeah. So Olamana Gardens, www.olamanagardens.com and also www.olamanagardensacoponics.com. We'll show you a lot of videos about what we are about. Right. And what we do. Like that little shirt video we showed, she's got about 20 or 30 of them on the Olamana Gardens, aquaponics.com. Yeah. But anyway, just go up on Google, write Olamana Gardens, hit it, give you a simple map. Very easy to find in Waimanalo. It's good. Parking is out on the street, just walk in and that if you're bringing down food, come down to the bottom, unload and drop it off and then park on the outside. We're good fun. We'll lock up the horses so the kids can walk anywhere without being stepped on. So that'll be pretty good. But you get to feed horses, feed ducks, feed chickens, feed fish, feed yourself. There you go. There you go. Pretty much the food's out from one o'clock on. We start eating and it's a food fest. And we'll really look forward to y'all coming. I wanted to give you a follow up. Two shows ago we did the Farmers Union Convention and it was anticipated that they would get chartered for their national status and we did it. That was two Sundays ago, three Sundays ago. So we did our charter, the big national guys flew out, we did that. And then the next show we did was on the ham radio because we had this set, which was the test, that was a statewide test, that was last Saturday, it went from eight in the morning to noon time and every emergency outfit, hospital, state, civil defense, every island did it all the way through. It was so successful, well that was what Klim might guess last week talked about. It was so successful they had a big pow wow Monday and the order came down from the governor's office so the power's on high, they're going to do another state one and every single government agency must have ham radio and BHF in it. And this is a wake up call because of San Juan, Puerto Rico. And we have friends there, 95% of the island still has nothing. We sent about 50 ham operators over there to help out with getting messages out, mostly who's okay, what's needed, that kind of stuff. When Natalie and I were in Florida, every day on the news, it was people flying out in small airplanes down to San Juan, Puerto Rico, they were not allowed to come into San Juan, Puerto Rico, unless they brought supplies. So they did it. So anyway, great roundup, so we had a good fund. So every weekend's been good fund and we're looking for another one this weekend. So anyway, thanks for Natalie for being in front of the camera, good fund, huh? It wasn't so bad was it? And remember, Think Tank, Think Tech Hawaii, and we look forward to seeing more from you guys. Thank you.