Mo’ Manoa
Paralyzed by uncertainty with how to handle the Manoa lettuce in my large Orta Seed Pot, I turned to Anne Fletcher, the person who made them. Over email, the founder of Orta Kitchen Garden advised me to go ahead with a transplant into a raised bed or 4-inch pot. So yesterday that’s what I did. I was a touch daunted when I went to remove them from their increasingly cramped home, as they’d undergirded the dirt with roots and turned it into a solid brick.
The smaller plants grudgingly released from the brick after some gentle tugging, but the biggest two had become too intertwined for that. However, submerging them in a bowl of water coaxed them into easy release, making me wish I’d just dunked the whole brick in the first place.
I spread seven of the plants among four raised beds and stuck the eighth in a pot. Now all I can really do is water, wait, and watch.
I reloaded their old home with fellow travelers from Hawaii, some kai choy I’ve had sitting around for a couple years. A farmer with the last name of Hirayama originally bred it on Molokai, but I bought it from Desmond Ogata at the UH Seed Lab in Manoa Valley.
Quite coincidentally, I was talking with my aunt and my mom later in the day and they shared an anecdote from Great-Grandpa Yoshigoro’s farming years in Manoa Valley. Well, perhaps it would be more fitting to say they shared a wild rumor. But in any case, the story goes that Yoshigoro somehow came into possession of a buggy from Queen Lili‘uokalani, the last sovereign monarch of Hawaii. He allegedly used this buggy to go around to his neighbors in the valley and collect their garbage scraps for slopping his pigs. My great-aunt Takiko claimed to have fallen off this buggy and seriously injured her back when she was four years old. If all this wasn’t highly dubious to begin with, my aunt said there was some far-fetched talk of Yoshigoro having at some point conversed with the queen, which seems just about impossible due to his inability to speak English. But if there is any grain of truth in this unlikely yarn, I’m definitely going to have to track it down.