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…
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Blog Updates for 2013 and Where I’m Going Next
I made a few changes to the blog today. The most important is that I decided to buy my URL so, for the rest of the year, I am the proud owner of “anopportunemoment.com.” I also came up with a concrete update schedule. For now, I’m updating four times a week. On Sundays and Thursdays, I’ll be blogging about places I’ve been while on Tuesday and Friday I’ll be continuing my weekly features (Tea Tuesday and Weekly Travel Inspiration). Although I got home from Europe a month ago, I still need to write about the majority of The Great European Adventure. For that reason, my Sunday blog posts will continue…
