Monday 30th August

I’ve mentioned Solomon Island politics occasionally, usually to the detriment of it. We’ve just had an election, that went off without any major trouble, no riots in the streets, houses and shops burnt out, so everyone has been thinking “Wow”

We ended up with 50 MPs elected, 24 of them brand new to politics, which is about normal here. They all meet up in Honiara, and the different factions then camp out in various hotels around Honiara, Heritage, Honiara Hotel, Pacific Casino, until enough wheeling and dealing and promises have been made to give one group 26 MPs. This group then goes to the Governor General, informs him they have sufficient MPs to form a government, he then calls for an election to be held by the MPs for the Prime Ministers Position.

Which we had last week, and Danny Phillips won by a couple of votes. Danny then has the job of allocating various Ministerial portfolios to his group, in return for their commitment to his group. Fine so far. Till one MP who has coveted the Finance Ministers position was refused the portfolio, upon which he has switched sides and joined the opposition, another of Danny Phillips group had a heart attack and died at the victory dinner, so he now has only 24 members, and the opposition group are now calling for Parliament to sit so they can push a vote of no confidence through, and have another election.

At the same time, members of the opposition are also talking of leaving the opposition and joining with Danny, as they think they will get a better deal or position with him than with Steve Abana. For those in the USA, sorry but Chicago has nothing on politics here. At least in Chicago, if you bought someone they usually stayed bought, a bit like Charles Haughey in Ireland. Here? If there is a better offer elsewhere, they’re away.

So it looks like another week or so of dealing till Parliament will be called, and all the usual name calling and innuendo in the newspaper. This is when it could get interesting, as the various faction supporters start to get worked up by the propaganda put out by each group.

Other than that, it’s been a quiet weekend, a bit of rain, a lot of sunshine, I’m not going to mention work or compost heaps.

I’ve mentioned the dogs around the neighbourhood, this is what they are like. They have the most amazing collection of skin diseases, from mange, to what appears to be psoriasis (sp?) and measles, chicken pox, scurvy, rheumy eyes, malnourishment, foot rot, tail droop, and congenital idiocy. I must admit that the dog Adrian rescued from the drain as a pup and has looked after is an absolutely gorgeous dog, but he is fed, trained, and looked after. All the rest here are just strays and feed by scavenging.

Thursday 26th August.

Oh Jeez Warren, not another post about compost??????????

Hey, it’s the first bit of success I’ve had in 18 months give me a break here. I promise not another compost post for at least a month, well, couple of weeks, ok?

And I’ll keep it brief as well.

Finally go the last of the first heap turned today, ready for mulching, the guys were painting the truck with rust coat grey, so I wandered down the paddock with a shovel and started playing with the heaps. The blended heap was well on its way to being a small furnace, just a few inches in had steam coming out, so I dug a fair bit out of the centre and turned it over, then started turning the last half of heap one.

Phillip ended up deciding painting the truck wasn’t his idea of a good time, so he grabbed a shovel and came down the field to help, then Kamaki and Ryan arrived to help.

It looked a little like the pits in Mordor for a while, as we broke into the heap the steam would gush out, which sent me back across the paddock for the camera. It looked like a really good pic, and the guys seemed to be enjoying themselves, or at least they stayed until the entire heap was turned.







Tiff figures we’ll easily get $100 a bag for the blended, and $60 a bag for the turned compost, which makes me happy. That will cover the wages and the machine running and replacement costs, so long as we sell 10 bags a week.

I’m finally pleased to see something actually being done though, I’ve been talking about this for 18 months now, and it’s not been the easiest thing to stay positive about the whole plan.




And a couple of pics of the mushrooms, I think they're edible, but they don't last long once they open.Anyone know if they are edible? or hallucogenic? or anything?

Wednesday 25th August

It’s been a quiet day so far, Danny Phillip from Western Province was selected as Prime Minister, around Ba’Hai it has been quiet, I’ve had a couple of text messages mentioning some disquiet on the other side of Honiara and in Central, but nothing like 2006. The police helicopter has been circling around Honiara all day, I’ve been down to the local Barak Shop earlier today, and even the betel stalls were quiet. Good thing? I’m not sure. I’d prefer to see people out talking about it, but then again, that can lead to things getting very volatile extremely quickly.

It may take a day or so for the decision to be accepted, the fact that there hasn’t been an immediate reaction is fairly good.

I intended going to Parliament Grounds this morning and getting some photos of everyone, but as pointed out in a discussion, if the crossword clue is “White man with camera at highly volatile crowd” (6 letters)
The answer would be “Target”

Being a national holiday, and more or less under a curfew, well, not really a curfew, but an advisory then, I’ve spent the day cleaning the house, washing clothes, and baking.

I bought a pumpkin last week at Kukum Market, with the intention of having roasted pumpkin and kumara with onion gravy, as usual, the intention was stronger than the actuality. If it wasn’t 35*C all the time lately, then a roast meal seems like a good possibility, anyway, the pumpkin sat in the cupboard till today, when I finally took it out and wondered what the hell to do with it. Good sized one too.

I took the stem out, removed the seeds, put the stem back in, wrapped it in foil and baked it for a couple of hours.

I let it cool enough to handle, then cut it into slices, removed the skin, roughly chopped the flesh into the wok, and added 4 cups of flour, 2 packets of rapid rise yeast, a tablespoon of salt, about ½ cup of oil, and hand mixed it. Ok, 4 cups of flour was a gross underestimation, I figured there was about 4 cups or so of pumpkin, and was trying for equal amounts. I ended up with 10 cups of flour before I could actually knead the dough, even then it still needed a bit more flour once it had risen.


I figured about 4 cups of pumpkin, so I added 4 cups of flour, the yeast and salt and a 1/2 cup of oil



Ok, 4 cups of flour gave me a very messy sticky almost batter type mix, so...

I added more flour... and more flour...and a bit more flour
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6 extra cups of flour later, yep, 10 cups in all, and I had a dough that was kneadable. It then went back into the wok with the lid on

an hour later, it is 35*C here and about 80% humidity, it was well past time to beat it into submission



3 loaf tins worth, I left these for another 45 min,

before putting them into the oven at about 220C, I'd be more accurate but the dial hasn't got many numbers left on it.

1 1/2 hours later I ended up with these


and this is what it looks like sliced. Despite having had a good pummeling, there are still small pieces of pumpkin that have survived intact.

I’ve had a busy couple of days at the nursery, well, more the compost area. I know it’s only been two weeks since we got the heaps made, but I’m getting tired of trying to explain to a few people that patience is needed, it should be six weeks from start to use, and if they’d been following the schedule we drew up two months ago, then maybe we’d have compost that was ready.

I had Kamaki, Philip and Andrew with me for a couple of days, and we managed to get a new heap completed, till we ran out of sawdust again, then we spent a day mulching one of the first heaps. It isn’t ready, as Kamaki found out when he pulled some of it over onto his bare feet, it was still very hot in the middle.





But we managed to get about 2 cum of blended mulched compost made. It was heating back up again within an hour, but I’m hoping a couple of days sitting will let it decompose and cool down so we can use it. The little Rover Mulcher we have is still working well, but we’d like one about twice the size now, so we can really get the compost going through. I’m going to write to Rover Australia with a few suggestions, mainly a bigger shredding box, and double belts on the drive, and probably a bigger motor, although it has a 5.5 hp motor now. And a different feeder hopper, I know the regulations for arm length etc with rotating blades, I’d like a wider shallower feed hopper, so we can shovel the mix in easier, instead of having to lift each shovel up to shoulder height. Something for the local sheet metal shop to make up for us sometime. Then again we’d have the problem of stuff flying out from the blades as they spun, somedays you just can’t win.

I’ve been trying to describe a bag holder for holding the bags as we fill them with mix, instead of one person holding the bag, another shovelling. Drawings don’t help, I’ll have to make one this week to demonstrate.

I was hoping to have red curried banana and rice tonight, I bought a 10 kilo bag of Solrais on Monday. On opening the bag, the smell was enough to put me off, it was musty, and old, the only time I’ve smelt rice similar is the pig feed in Thailand, as if that wasn’t enough, the weevils running through it were the next thing. I’ll take it to the Solrais office near us at Ranadi tomorrow. Then write to the Solstar if I’m not impressed with what they say.

Hi to Al, after the Milwaukee Irish Fest. Still waiting for the pics of the Orphans Al. And Libby, Zoe, Pete and Katja, John and Sylvia, Stef, Damian Tarsha Jesse Kahu. And the person in Cahirciveen.

Anyone in Porirua reading this, vote for my son Hayden on Oct 9th for City Council. He’s got some good ideas for Porirua.

Sunday 22nd August

It must be my week for having a bitch session.

The new truck which has been going really well, while I had control of where and who drove it, came back Thursday afternoon with the passenger window loose in the door frame. Electric window. It didn’t work, so someone helped it down by pushing the window down, which bent the lift bracket and dropped the window glass off the holder.

There is a button on the drivers door frame which locks the windows, it had probably been pushed to see what happens, then as there is no obvious effect, it has been left locked. Which stops the window buttons from working. So the window got forced open.

I’ve just spent the afternoon in the rain getting it apart, it looks like I’ll have to take the guides out as well from the top of the frame to install it properly, trying to get the window lift grip on inside the door frame is next to impossible. The guide grips the window with 2 rubber strips, that are impossible to get on inside the frame.

Other than that, it’s been a quiet weekend. We are down to two main contenders for the Prime Ministers position now, Derek Sikua and Synder Rini are out of contention, which hopefully means it may be a smooth and quiet announcement on Wednesday.

The Police Commander declared a public holiday for Wednesday, hoping to keep on top of any trouble. It is a funny place. There was a person arrested Thursday night plastering posters around Honiara calling for a revolution, if their candidate wasn’t selected. There were a few other things on the posters as well apparently, which would have caused a disturbance easily.
It must be one of the few places I know where a riot can be caused by someone writing graffiti calling for one group to be excluded, or making a slur against one of the other provinces. The last local one was caused by someone writing “Malaitans go Home” on a building wall. That caused close to 400 people to rampage through Honiara breaking shop windows and beating people up.

Everything we need to complete the Nursery is now sitting in Brisbane waiting for a container to come up here. It’s going to be a hectic couple of weeks once it all gets here. The shade cloth should be fairly easy, we’ll have the posts and wires in place and ready, so just roll out and clip in place.

The irrigation is going to be the part that needs a bit of time to install. We’ve got permission to tap into the SIWA line finally, so that goes ahead this week. I’m getting four 2,500 gallon water tanks, initially connected to the mains, but eventually when we get the building up, I’ll use the mains as a back up to the rain.

We’re having an official opening for the Nursery side in mid October, the German Ambassador etc coming out to see where their money has gone. And the EU Director as well to see their truck with the logos I designed. I made up a design for us as well, to go on the front of the trucks, Solomon Island flag colours and stars, with SEB inset.

We still have the gateway and the fence across the paddock to install, but with only 11 crew left things aren’t getting done as fast as they should be. Young David who has been doing a terrific job in Commonwealth Ave cleaning, decided he needed a holiday and walked off, so we have been juggling people for the past 2 weeks to keep Commonwealth Ave cleaned until we can find someone else to take care of it permanently.

Wednesday 18th August

We spent the day at GPOL, Guadacanal Province Oil Palm factory collecting the deseeded clumps to use for mulch and ground cover. Big factory, for here. I would have liked to go through it and have a look, but that isn’t on the agenda unfortunately. I got a few pics of the loading and first stage processing from where we were waiting for the truck to fill though.





All the workers live in the village built for them next to the factory, and the nursery and field workers live further out. I knew we had palm oil plantations on the plains, but until you drive through you don’t realise how large an area they cover.




It was once all productive food crops, till a few years back, and the 1998 civil war didn’t help. The cattle farms that were there had all the cattle eaten during the crisis, and never replaced, and the oil palm companies moved in.

I got caught finally today, and one of the crew stole my wallet, with all my cards, drivers licence etc, and about $56 in cash. I didn’t realise till I stopped at the shop on my way home and couldn’t find my wallet, went back to work thinking , well, hoping, I’d left it in the office, but nope. It would have been taken while we were waiting at GPOL or the Memorial gardens, I know who we had with us today, not that I’m going to get my wallet back, or anything, but it really pissed me off.

Edit to add. Wallet turned up, minus the money, but all the cards and ID stuff still there.

Tuesday 17th August

SolBrew finally delivered a load of spent mash yesterday, which we started incorporating into a new heap today. I’m sure the guys at work consider me as just another crazy palangi, I was digging into the first heap, pulling out handfuls of the mix near the centre and smelling it, squeezing it. It smells good, no ammonia smell left, and believe me, the heap is HOT.
We built a heap using part of the existing big heap, split the first heap into a smaller width, moved the sawdust around to start another one with the brewery waste, got rained on, very heavily for a bit, and finished the day with 3 heaps all tidy and quietly doing whatever compost heaps do after hours.

The Brewery waste is really wet, which is good. Hopefully it will saturate the sawdust and keep the bacteria active until they have broken down the lignin in the dust. The smell from it reminded me of going to Otara Intermediate, which must be the only school I know that was placed behind a major brewery. The waste from DB Breweries was heaped up on the school boundary, which was great over winter, you could get through the fence and stand with bare feet into the heaps and stay warm when there was frost all over the ground. Then get your hands warmed with the strap when you got caught, but that’s a different story.

We’ve got 3 heaps now, one with mainly chicken manure and sawdust, one with chicken manure, sawdust, brewery waste and shredded branches and leaves, and one with only brewery waste and sawdust. I’ll keep watch and work out which will be the best for us to continue using. I think we’ll need chicken manure for all the heaps though, it supplies the most nitrogen to boost the decomposition to start, and has sufficient other nutrients to help.

Still, even if we use the brewery waste as an initial starter heap to get the sawdust breaking down, it becomes such a fine light material to shift, adding manure to it later on when we get enough isn’t that much of a hardship. And as I found out today, the SolBrew driver has just been dumping the waste at the tip if no one has ordered it, so from now on it looks like we’ll have a steady supply. About 6 truckloads a week, added to the 2 truckloads a week of sawdust, whatever wood chip we can get from pruning, and our usual supply of manure. Finally getting a system going at last.

I see NIWA in New Zealand are finally being taken to Court for fiddling the climate data records. And about bloody time. The whole ETS scheme was based on their shonky adjusted figures, which if you take the adjustments out and just use the plain as written records, show negligible warming for the past 100 years. As if 0.5*C is going to do a lot of damage over a 100 years. The temperature changes more than that between sunrise and sunset every day, well maybe not at the moment with the weather there now.

And their justification for adjustments is based on a 30 year old thesis lodged in Victoria University by J Salinger, who went on to coach Phil Jones in adjustments at EAU CRU, then returned to run NIWA. And which no one at NIWA knows how it came to be used. Hello? Salinger wrote it as a student, he’s now in charge, (or was till he finally tried doing a Jim Hansen and got fired). As if that isn’t enough to start ringing alarm bells somewhere.

And the glaciers (Franz Josef, Fox) are growing again, which means it must have been cold enough the last few years to increase the snowfall at the head of the glaciers.

Only one word for the whole sorry deluded bloody Malthusian left wing Marxist inspired lentil munching control freaks. IDIOTS.

Ok, another word, LUDDITES! Although that fails to capture the true depth of ignorance and idiocy being displayed. And the Luddites were actually concerned about their jobs, and livelihoods, not some ephemeral feel good fuzzy conception of Mother Gaia needing saving from the nasty anthropoids that have ruined Eden, where all the little birds went chirp chirp, and baby seals weren’t eaten by big white polar bears who had run out of ice.

Follow the cycles you idiots, the weather repeats every 60 years, cold 30, hot 30, cold 30 etc.

If anyone has shares in some of the more southern vineyards or dairy farms in the South Island, I’d be selling them real soon, and swapping to shares in coal mines. A couple of good winters with no power and blackouts like Britain is about to have will stop all the stupidity with wind farms and get another couple of coal fired stations up and running.

And John Key deletes any references to ETS on his facebook page as well. Considering he argued against Kyoto and all the rest since while he was in opposition, now he’s all for it? More like all for the extra tax grab is more like it.

And trying to say we had to do it or other countries won’t buy our produce? Like which countries? The USA? Almost bankrupt. Britain? Bankrupt. Australia? Considering the drumming Rudd got over his version of an ETS, I’d say Australia would welcome food from anywhere. Which still leaves Russia, China, India, Asia, all of which have decided they want no part of the western suicidal rush to oblivion over a trace gas. And strangely enough, have got money coming out the ears and just dying to spend it.

I blame that Nanny control freak Helen Clark, for all of it, after she got into bed with the Greens just to stay in power. I can’t understand why John Key is too gutless to tell the 5% party, (Greens) to just put up or shut up. Another politician who just wants to stay in power, forget the principles he was elected under. And considering the greens are only in Parliament because of MMP voting, they never got a electorate member voted in, which shows they can’t even convince enough people in one area to vote for them. 5% of the voting population gets them in, I’m almost in favour of going back to FFP voting just to get rid of them. Well, until they recover their senses and start pushing ecology based policies again, not CAGW rubbish.

Ok, that’s my rant for the night. If I don’t stop now I’ll still be going in the morning.

Wattsupwiththat has a good few articles about NIWA, and a whole range of other CAGW stuff. http://www.wattsupwiththat.com/ well worth reading, if you’re a lentil munching Malthusian Marxist control freak that wears socks and sandals and wants to return everyone to the dark ages, maybe not a good read, but you can’t please everyone.

Sunday 15th August

It appears from the Sunday Isles newspaper today that enough MPs have come together to have sufficient numbers to form a Government. 3 different groups, plus some independents, 32 in all. 7 different parties, the Our Party, Independent Democratic Party (IDP), Solomon Islands Party for Rural Advancement (SIPRA), Direct Development Party (DDP), Reform Democratic Party (RDP), Peoples Alliance Party (PAP), and the Independent Members of Parliament (IMP).

At the moment it is all jockeying for position, the Governor General has to be informed that there is a group that has sufficient majority to govern, he then gives 4 days notice of a meeting to decide the Prime Minister, after which, if everything goes well, Parliament can then be called to open.

By the list if MPs so far, it could be interesting when the PM is announced again. The 2006 riots occurred because of an unpopular decision, it took 4 days to call another vote for PM and most of Chinatown, and a few hotels and Central Honiara shops were burnt out before it was resolved.

It’s been 35*C for the past week, and only a couple of nights with rain, the air is thick and damp, everything is limp with the humidity, I’ve been trying futilely to get my washing dry, the best it does is feel not damp, but not dry either.

I bought a couple of coconuts this morning at Kukum Market, $1 each, fairly good sized ones, full of liquid as well. So, for those asking, here is the simple method of opening a coconut.



One coconut, end up, with the three eyes.




I use a cork screw, you can use a small sharp knife, but after stitching my thumb together last year, I use a cork screw. Pierce the largest eye, not that it matters, it is just the easiest to pop out.




Ten seconds and done, you can get an idea of how much meat is in the coconut by the thickness of the plug that comes out. This looks about 10mm.



Drain the juice out, this is NOT coconut milk or cream, it is nice to drink cold, I use it to cook rice with. I got 400 ml from this coconut.




Now for the fun part. For purposes of the photo, I had it sitting on the bench, trying to hold the camera, a cleaver and a coconut only works if you have 3 arms, and I took my camera tripod back to New Zealand. Normally I hold the coconut in one hand, and rap the husk sharply with the back of the cleaver. You don’t need to hit very hard, I’ve seen the girls at work use a butter knife to tap all the way around, and it just falls open.




One sharp tap, and it is split open, well, ok split mostly open, I had to turn it around a bit and give it one more tap.



There you have 2 halves of coconut, with a large amount of meat in each. The locals pop it out with a bushknife, I’ve tried and tried, but I guess you have to start young to get the right technique. My method is to crack each half again a few times to break it into smaller pieces, the prise the meat off with a BLUNT round bladed knife, as in the picture.




Broken pieces, and one half to go.



Wedge the tip of the blade into an edge between the meat and shell, wiggle a few times and the meat pops off.

To grate it, I don’t have a coconut scraper, so I peel the brown skin off with a vegetable peeler, then use a kitchen grater to grate it into threads. From there, you can either, dry the threads, and keep in an airtight jar, or use fresh on a banana and chilli sambal, or with curry etc, or make coconut cream.

I ended up with a one litre jar of dried coconut from the one in the pictures, I still have another one to prepare tomorrow.

Things to watch for, always shake the coconut before buying, you should be able to hear the liquid inside. If not, and the eyes have not started sprouting, try another one. If the eyes have sprouted, to a large double leaf size, inside you will find a spongy endosperm, which is really excellent eating, crunchy and sweet with a huge amount of juice.

The husk can go into the compost heap, it will take a while to rot down, the hair will rot quickly, the actual shell could take a year or more though.