At our leased 400 acres across the Wailua River, a tractor is used frequently to mow grass between the rows of noni fruit trees and hardwood trees. Our Branson-brand tractor was starting to break down too frequently, so we found a John Deere tractor in the midwest of mainland US, waited for temperatures to warm so it could be moved onto on a hauling truck to be moved to California, and now it's finally here getting blessed.

The blessing took place at the new home of the Ganesha murti that used to be on San Marga path. Arati was shown, a coconut broken, and limes crushed under the wheels to ward off any asuric forces. The tractor is now hard at work across the river.

We took taskforcer Tarun Nathoo (in green) over to Himalayan Acres for the first time, to join us in picking hundreds of pounds of noni fruit. Suresh and Rajkumar also joined us. They got to briefly experience the picking platform to reach the higher fruits, while spending most of the time picking the younger trees from the ground.

The second group of photos shows the Ganapati Kulam updating our Guru Puja pilgrims on some of its media activities, including new artwork commissions, videos to show US sixth graders about students visiting the eastern dharmic religions' places of worship, and the Sanskrit pronunciation website we recently created.

Vishvanathaswami and taskforcer Tarun Nathoo planted a special variety of banana by the new Siddhidata Kulam shop. This will provide food, and privacy for the building. Not to mention it will look very beautiful. Thank you Tarun for your hard work!

Some 70 years ago Uncle Manuel, who used to be the caretaker of the Aadheenam lands back in the 40s and 50s, brought a special orange tree he was give by the native islanders on the West Side of our island. He planted it on the land, not far from the current Rudraksha Forest, in a pasture.

The tree was famed both for its sweet taste and the fact it gives oranges all year long. It spent its years happily in the sun, munched on occasionally by our cows. But it is getting old, covered with lichen, and suffering from cow abuse. So we set out to graft it and save the genetics.

Yesterday Sean Kelly and Eilene came to help, both experts in grafting. They brought a robust root stock well established in pots, and they cut from the famed tree and grafter three copies.

Hopefully one or more will make it and we will start fresh with a new long life of oranges.

Today we wanted to show our cyber cadets some of the wonderful vegetables growing in our greenhouse. We started green snap peas a few months ago, most of the plants are flowering and some are even starting to fruit. Hopefully they can be harvested soon so the monks can enjoy them on their banana leaves! We also wanted to showcase our tomato plants, particularly the rare, yellow beefsteak variety that we are growing for the first time. All of our tomato vines (that were planted a few months ago) are fruiting and the first harvest will happen within the next month or so.
Aum Namah Sivaya!

The Siddhidata Kulam reports that on June 9th we planted two Atlantic Pumpkin vines and 2 local pumpkin vines ( Japanese Variety). They were harvested a few days ago. The single Atlantic pumpkin on the cart transport is 120 lbs. This variety is usually grown for size competition in state fairs. The local pumpkin produced 211 lbs from about 33 pumpkins.

Beautiful flowers!

Aloha all! Never look a gift horse in the mouth. What is a gift horse you might ask? Perhaps it's a magical horse that gives you whatever you ask for. We don't know what happens if you look into its mouth but we are too scared to find out. The gift horse of today's story is an energy company on Kauai who graciously gifted us a ripper-fertilizer they were no longer using. What the machine lacks for in grace it makes up for with the ability to cut deep into the ground while dropping fertilizer to ensure nutrients reach the roots of newly planted trees. This machine was picked up by two monks from the north island and will be used to plant new noni trees across Himalayan Acres. Aum!!!

A couple of our monks visited this 500+ acre plantation recently to walk beautiful public trails through its 82,000-tree mahogany hardwood farm, the largest of its kind in the USA. The Wai Koa Plantation was founded in 2006 by Bill Porter, founder of ETrade, and his wife Joan. The plantation also includes multiple food produce farms.

After walking through the mahogany trees, the trail leads to the beautiful Stone Dam and swimmable area above it. The property used to be a sugar plantation and the dam was created to provide irrigation at the time.

Here are some beautiful malas recently strung by local sishyas for selling in the Minimela giftshop. The malas move like hotcakes and we can barely keep up.