In Our Fields

Bees

Paradise Meadows is home to 80 or so bee hives. In Hawaii, we have flowers blooming year round, and our bees produce honey in every season. Bees are opportunity feeders, which means they will range up to 1.5 miles from their hive, when necessary, to find a food source. When food (that is, nectar and pollen) is abundant, bees will tend to stay closer to the hive, selecting from among the array of flowers blooming. To learn more about bees in general, and specifically about the challenges of keeping bees (aka apiculture) in Hawaii, click here.

The flavor of honey will reflect the flowers the bees have chosen to feed on, which is why our honey will vary in flavor from season to season, and why we sell four different seasonal varieties of honey.Although Hawaii is paradise all year round, we still experience changes of season as different plants flower at different times of the year. When the bees collect nectar from the avocado, macadamia nut, coffee and eucalyptus trees, we get honey that has distinct, rich caramel flavor notes, which we call our Winter Mauka Blend Hawaiian Honey. In the springtime our citrus orchards are blooming, and magenta-colored Lehua blossoms break out on the native Hawaiian Ohia trees. That sweet, citrus-flavored and often creamy honey is our Spring Mauka Blend. And in the summertime, you can see a riot of color as a wide range of flowering plants begin to bloom. When the bees blend the nectars of all of those flowers we get our Summer Mauka Blend honey. Our Summer honey has a unique "finish" or aftertaste that comes from the Wilelaiki (or Christmas Berry) tree, and we think it is our most distinctive tasting honey.

Coffee

The folks at Paradise Meadows are all coffee lovers, and that love shows in the quality of the award-winning coffee we call The Local Buzz. Our coffee is the result of taking 3 types of 100% Hawaiian Ka'u beans (Arabica Typica, Red Caturra and Yellow Caturra) and blending them to produce an extraordinarily smooth yet complex coffee. 100% of our trees (and, therefore, 100% of our beans) are grown in the Ka'u district of the Big Island of Hawaii at elevations ranging from 1800' - 2000' above sea level, and our soil is unusually deep and rich relative to other parts of the island (including Kona).

We hand-pick and hand-process all of our coffee from cherry to roasted beans. The beans, once liberated from the surrounding cherry, dry in the warm Hawaiian sun before heading to the milling, grading and roasting process, which is done in a state-of-the-art facility. Our coffee is always small-batch roasted so that we can be certain that we're bringing you the very freshest coffee possible.

Citrus

Paradise Meadows is also home to the largest lime orchard in the state (that we know of). Over 1,400 trees produce delicious mostly Tahitian limes that we sell to local grocery stores, restaurants and other vendors.

In Our Greenhouse

Aquaponics

Aquaponics is the fusion of two methods of farming, aquaculture, or fish farming, and hydroponics, growing in water instead of soil. In hydroponics you typically fertilize your plants with man-made chemicals and must maintain a constant and careful balance at all times. In aquaponics the plants are fertilized naturally by the waste of the fish, which breaks down into a form of Nitrogen called Nitrates that the plants can use. This system becomes a closed pond system and balances itself naturally without the need for chemicals. The only thing we add to the system is fish food.