The Peace Garden retreat property is on the Hamakua Coast, which stretches from Waipio Valley on the north to Hilo, a distance of about fifty miles.
For more than a hundred years until 1993, the primary crop grown along the coast was sugar. With the disappearance of the sugar industry, small farms with diversified agriculture have sprung up to take its place.
The Peace Garden Retreat is a former sugar company managers’ family residence. Sugar was never actually grown on the property, so the soil was never contaminated by the chemicals used to grow cane.
The oldest trees on the property, the macadamias, are among the oldest macadamia nut trees on the Island. We’ve been told by neighbors that the trees in our macadamia orchard were among the first introduced on the island.
Although Kona coffee is famous throughout the world, the Hamakua Coast was the first location where coffee was grown in Hawaii, and if you ask the locals, they’ll tell you that Hamakua Coast coffee is more delicious and less acidic than Kona.
The list of trees growing on the property is impressive: banana, tangerine, grapefruit, orange, mango, avocado, lemon, lychee, mountain apple, star apple, starfruit, edible bamboo shoots, abiu, clove, cinnamon, jaboticaba, lime, jackfruit, ice cream bean, Surinam cherry, Brazilian cherry, peach, loquat, mangosteen, white sapote, mamey sapote, neem, and moringa.
Imagine the possibilities for an endless variety of amazing exotic fruit salads!