Thursday marked one month that E and I have been living and working on Maui. He works at the farm stand selling banana bread that’s baked fresh every morning. I work in the kitchen making candy and hot sauces that we also sell at the stand. We both work in the vegetable garden and around the rest of the property, pulling weeds, clearing space for more beds, spreading mulch. We sleep and store our things in a cabin without electricity. One of the farm cats likes to hang around the cabin, and sneaks in to sleep by our feet at night; her name is Munchkin. I’m not much of 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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Today I’m giving the people what they want…
…photos of Maui’s beautiful beaches. Thus far, most of my posts about Hawai’i have centered on my experiences living and working on an organic farm, but, never fear, I do occasionally stop gardening and go to the beach. There are three well-known beaches near Hana — Waianapanapa State Park, Red Sands, and Hamoa — as well as a smattering of more secret beaches (including one that the people on the farm actually refer to as “Secret Beach”) that I have yet to visit. I should probably let the photos speak for themselves, but I’m terrible at that, so you’re all stuck with my usual witty commentary. Waianapanapa (or Waianaps, as…
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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…
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Tea Tuesday: The Tea Garden
I mentioned in my last Tea Tuesday post that Hana Farms grows many plants that can be made into herbal tea. They’re also working on making a designated tea garden, which is a number of stepped beds located beside the farm’s communal buildings. Apparently, this area was entirely overgrown just a few weeks before I got here, but E’s sister started clearing the land and uncovered some forgotten stepped beds. The tea garden has become her pet project, and she has been rebuilding the rock walls out of the farm’s plentiful lava rocks, turning the soil, and planting. So far, there aren’t a lot of plants growing, although there is…
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Maui: First Impressions
I had trouble deciding what to call this post. These can’t really be my first impressions of Hawaii when I’ve only been to Maui. But I haven’t seen much of Maui either because in my first week at the farm I only left the property once. Hana Farms is technically located in Hana, but, until today (my second trip off the farm) I hadn’t actually seen the town. So, are these my first impressions of Maui, Hana, WWOOFing? It’s unclear. Regardless, here’s how this latest adventure is going so far. When E and I stepped off the plane into the humid Hawaiian air, the first thing I noticed was the…
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Tea Tuesday: It wasn’t meant to be
The farm where I’m working in Hawaii grows many different kinds of fruits and vegetables, including a number of herbs that can be made into tea. The most plentiful and identifiable, at least for me, are definitely the mint plants that grow in and among the beds in the vegetable garden. On this farm, they act as a cover plant, which means they take up space where unwanted weeds might otherwise grow. The mint is not explicitly tended to, in part because this variety of mint grows without much encouragement (it grew beside the driveway of my childhood home), but it’s presence is useful and appreciated. As I was walking…
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Weekly Travel Inspiration: Alternative Travel
Your Weekly Travel Inspiration is a day late because I’m still settling in at Hana Farms — the organic farm in Hawaii where E and I will be living and working for the next month or two. We found this opportunity through E’s older sister, but she, and most of the other people working here, found it through the WWOOF website. That’s why this week, I want to highlight WWOOF, as well as some other websites that offer alternative opportunities for travel and living. WWOOF — World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms WWOOFing is an organization of work-trade opportunities on various organic farms the world over. Farms that are interested…
