Building Infrastructure

My Hawaiian name is Puilani which means “water from heaven.”  I am Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese and German and while I was born and raised on the US mainland (my mother was born in Hawaii and raised in Hawaii and Okinawa, Japan), I identify most with my ancestral homelands.  Most of my adult life I lived in big cities but now I am most comfortable in nature.

In 2016, my husband and I were blessed to buy an affordable 29-acre farm in Oregon’s beautiful Willamette Valley.  I happened to take a yearlong organic farming class in northern California in the fall of 2014 - 2015.  The house we were renting at the time had a quarter acre plot with some fruit trees and a few raised beds which I nurtured using each step I learned in my classes.  In my final project, we were asked to write what our future goals were, and I wrote that I wanted to buy a farm to homestead within the next two years.  I forgot I had written that until we moved onto our farm (2 moves later), and I came across my final project in 2017 as we began unpacking, only to realize I had indeed manifested my dream!

The prior owner of the farm lived here for 50 years but did not build it out (she leased out the land for hay) so it’s a blank canvas waiting for a vision. The infrastructure and buildings had not been maintained (the reason the farm was affordable) so the first order of business was to remodel so we could live in and use them comfortably! We rolled up our sleeves and have since remodeled the house and bungalow to make them livable, revived outdoor sheds, warehouse shop and the wood shed for storage and tools, installed a new well and built a 30’ x 40’ greenhouse with a USDA grant.

We have 16 outdoor raised beds, some fruit trees, chickens and bees too. We built a 16’ x 16’ corrugated panel greenhouse off the back of our small farmhouse for starting seeds.