Rarotonga is just now beginning to export to New Zealand again. Taro root and leaves are among the main staples of traditional Polynesian diet. The root is served much as potatoes are, and the leaves are boiled like spinach, often with meat or fish mixed in. Taro is nutritious, with a taste somewhere between potatoes and nuts. In this photograph, you see a young taro crop just sending out leaves.
Farmers use coconut palm fronds as a way to keep the moisture in the ground around the taro plants.
Taro can be grown all year round, and is found in profusion all over the Polynesian islands. C off ee Coffee plants are not grown as a cash-crop in Rarotonga as they are in many other places, but the bushes appear on various family plots as well as in the wild, along roadsides, for anyone to use. Ken likes to collect coffee beans from the bushes lining his road. You are left with a white bean, which must be dried in the sun and then roasted before being ground up into coffee suitable for brewing. This is the tree from whose shoots hula skirts are made.