A friend and I were talking last night about feeling settled in Boston. We appreciate the lives and communities we’ve built here but we still feel the pull of distant places. “I didn’t mean to get so comfortable here,” I lamented. We laughed at ourselves for wanting more when we’ve had so much already — she’s lived abroad in Mexico and Mozambique, and I spent more than three months backpacking Europe before moving to Hawai’i to work on a farm. It’s always amusing to tell stories about living on Maui to friends I’ve met since the experience. People are surprised when I tell them I lived in Hawai’i for a…
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The Pros and Cons of WWOOFing on Maui
Do you want to live in Hawai’i for free?! Um… maybe. The answer to this question isn’t as simple as you might think. I lived and worked on Maui for 2 months by WWOOFing. To refresh your memories, WWOOF stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, and provides people with the chance to take part in work-trade programs all around the world. In exchange for room and board, volunteers work part-time as farmers. I’ve written about this program and other alternative ways to travel the world before. This time around, though, I want to talk specifically about my experiences WWOOFing, and share with you the pros and cons of…
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Tea Tuesday: German Chamomile
See this plant? This is German Chamomile growing in the tea garden at Hana Farms, the organic farm I worked at in Hawai’i. This sad scraggly thing is also German Chamomile: This particular specimen is looking pathetic because I transplanted it to the garden bed in front of my cabin, and, at the time this photo was taken, it was still adjusting to its new home. The farm manager told me that when you transplant something, it helps to pick off any flowers so that the plant will focus on growing stronger roots instead of wasting energy on keeping its flowers from wilting. So, when I saw my German Chamomile…
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Tea Tuesday: All the Mint
All mint tea is not created equal. Probably because there are so many different kinds of mint to choose from. For the most part, if you purchase bagged mint tea in the grocery store, it will either be labeled “peppermint” or simply “mint,” in which case it is likely to have more of a spearmint flavor. At Hana Farms, however, we have at least seven different kinds of mint growing, each of which has a unique flavor and could be made into a distinct tea. Almost all of them grow in our official Tea Garden, but some of them also grow as weeds around the entire property. The most prevalent…
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Tea Tuesday: Mamaki Tea
Remember this plant? The one that’s growing in the tea garden, and I took a nice photo of, but didn’t know its name, but I liked the photo, so I still put it on the internet in a previous blog post? It turns out this is Mamaki, a plant that is only native to Hawai’i and is known for its medicinal qualities. Mamaki is commonly made into a cleansing herbal tea, which is good for digestion and general relaxation. (That sounds like code for “a laxative that will get you high,” but it’s not.) I was told by some of the other farmies (folks who work here) that just a…
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Tea Tuesday: Where Your Red Zinger Comes From
If you live in the US, you’ve probably seen Celestial Seasonings’ “Red Zinger” tea in your local grocery store. But what exactly is a “red zinger”? I’d never really thought about it until I was being shown around the vegetable garden at Hana Farms, and someone pointed to a thin bush saying, “that’s hibiscus, you know, red zinger, you can make tea from it.” If you can make tea from it, my interest is peaked, so I decided to try it out. After some internet research, I discovered that this wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d expected. Most recipes for hibiscus or red zinger tea suggest that you…
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I actually just write a gardening blog now
I spent seven hours doing farm work in a white shirt today. There’s dirt under my fingernails and mosquito bites all along my arms, but I feel better than I did after working the same shift last Thursday. Last week, I was too tired to blog, and too grumpy to cook dinner. This week, the hot water in the shower isn’t working, and I’m not even dreading the cold shower that awaits me when I’m done writing this post. We planted sweet potatoes today. A few weeks ago, some of the workers cleared out all the unwanted plants from a papaya grove, and today we went through and started rebuilding…
