How her garden grows: Nancy Redfeather reflects on The Kohala Center accomplishments and retirement priorities

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May 16, 2017 (West Hawaii Today)—Nancy Redfeather, whose name is synonymous with school gardens on Hawaii Island, recently retired from a prestigious 10-year career at The Kohala Center in Waimea.

She started working at The Kohala Center in 2006 and accomplished so much that people assumed she’d been working there much longer than 10 years. But for Redfeather, the time flew by and was not so much a job, but a labor of love.

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UC researcher Clare Gupta on re-localizing food on Hawai‘i

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October 4, 2016 (UC Food Observer)—Clare Gupta is a recent addition to the University of California academic ranks. She works as an assistant public policy specialist for the University of California. UC specialists like Clare hold dual appointments with a campus (in her case, UC Davis, where she’s on the faculty in the Department of Human Ecology) and UC’s Agriculture and Natural Resources Division Cooperative Extension Service.
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Food sustainability: It’s what’s for dinner

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September 6, 2016 (West Hawaii Today)—How to increase food security and support local food production in Hawaii is a topic that’s on nearly everyone’s plate these days. In a state that can grow 365 days a year with favorable weather, water and soil, Hawaii grows only about 10 percent of what its residents and visitors eat. And an estimated 85 percent of all the food available in Hawaii’s supermarkets and restaurants at any given time is imported from 2,300 miles away or more.
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Keiki get jump on rat lungworm education

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May 23, 2016 (Hawaii Tribune Herald)—Gardens are a rich resource for classrooms, giving kids hands-on experience with the concepts they learn about in school. But in East Hawaii, school gardens are like any backyard garden: they’re a place where slugs and snails make their homes, and where there are snails and slugs, there’s a potential for rat lungworm disease.
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Isle public schools enticed to “buy fresh, buy local”

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May 2, 2016 (Honolulu Star-Advertiser)—Darren Strand, president of Maui Gold Pineapple Co., sells fresh and frozen pineapple to customers as far away as Japan, but getting Hawaii’s emblematic fruit into local public school cafeterias is a tougher order.

“It’s really frustrating to see how much pineapple they eat in the schools and none of it’s from Hawaii,” said Strand, whose company has 1,000 acres in cultivation. “So we’d like to fix that.”
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Farmers, backyard gardeners share seeds and more

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April 11, 2016 (West Hawaii Today)—Some brought leafy cuttings in gallon buckets, while others laid out baggies of tiny hot peppers and boxes of roots and tubers. Most brought seeds: squash seeds, pepper seeds, carrot seeds, herb seeds, and beans of all sorts, to name a few.
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A farm of gardens

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January 13, 2016 (West Hawaii Today)—The early morning air at Kawanui Farm was filled with the sweet scent of wood smoke. Gerry Herbert emerged from the house to greet me, dressed warmly. “We have a fire in the fireplace almost every morning in winter,” he said, rubbing his hands together to retain their warmth. He and his wife, Nancy Redfeather, are a pair of excellent gardeners who have created a lovely farm with numerous well-tended gardens and fruit orchards on an acre in Honalo.
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Saving seeds is a sustainable practice

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July 13, 2015 (West Hawaii Today)—Saving seeds from this season’s crops for future planting is an age-old practice that is having a revival. Farmers and gardeners once relied on the sustainable practice of saving seeds from their favorite plants, sharing or trading them with other growers and planting the saved seeds later. It meant that you could grow lots of food, flowers and trees from free seeds. No seed companies, nurseries or money were involved.
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Website matches right seeds to right regions

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June 19, 2015 (Hawaii Tribune Herald)—There’s a new online tool to help Hawai‘i gardeners and small-scale farmers pinpoint the crop varieties most likely to succeed in their geographic areas. The Kohala Center’s Hawai‘i Public Seed Initiative has launched the Seed Variety Selection Tool for the Hawaiian Islands at HawaiiSeedInitiative.org/svst.
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Hawai‘i Public Seed Initiative

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June 12, 2015 (Hawai‘i Public Radio)—The Hawaiʻi Public Seed Initiative aims to improve, increase, and promote biodiversity of crops across the state. By working with local communities, farmers, and gardeners, the Initiative aims to grow, harvest, store, and improve the very best seeds that thrive in Hawaiʻi.
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