One of the real crowd pleasers at the event was the maracuya cheese cake whipped up by Love Family Farms. Ken and Margy Love run this small coffee farm in Kona with a kitschy twist. Visitors can pay to adopt coffee trees and will get bags of beans picked exclusively from them from that tree. Love is also a pioneer in out-there tropical fruit cultivation and has led the charge to turn Kona into a cornucopia of wierd and wonderful fruit farms. Judging by his display at the Taste of the Range Event -- a dizzying show of dozens of types of tropical fruits --his green thumb's been working overtime (as has his son, a former pastry chef at the Hapuna Beach Hotel who is the cheesecake wizzard behind the throne). Even better, you can buy a lot of interesting products from Love Farms online at Local Harvest. Most of these delectibles are pretty much unique and only made by Love Family. Pictured here: grumichama sauce, which has "a unique flavor kind of like black cherry and jaboticaba fruit."

808-323-2417(Map of Love Family Farms)

—Alex, 10/10/06