As My Adventure Unfolds: And So It Begins...

For those of you who don’t know Zach and I are on this Hawaiian adventure together. It’s been 6 days so far since we landed in beautiful Oahu and started living in a tent. It’s been interesting for sure. For me I feel like this is Peace Corps part 2 and for Zach this is “exciting”. It took us a couple of days to feel comfortable here on the farm but I think we are finally settling in. John, the owner, is very helpful, kind, and full of knowledge, I think we got pretty lucky with the farm. The farm is still a start-up farm so we’ve mostly been working on getting the garden beds ready for planting seeds. Every morning we have chores to complete, mostly watering the WWOOFer garden and other plants and feeding the fish. The workload hasn’t been a lot to be honest; so far we’ve moved wood and pallet piles, Zach dug a small ditch, which he learned he doesn’t want to be a ditch digger, I helped John staple lining to one of the garden beds, John taught us how to feed and clean the tanks for baby catfish, he also taught us about Black Solider Flies and how to grow them to feed the chickens. The main project has been washing cinder (volcanic rock that is rich in nutrients and supposedly very helpful for plant growth). The process is scooping the cinder half way into a 3 gallon bucket with holes drilled out on the bottom then dunking and rinsing it in a large garbage bin full of water. After the cinder has been rinsed a few times then it’s dumped into the garden bed. There are eight 30ft. long garden beds and it takes about 2 hours to fill one garden bed with cinder. John is kind enough having us do one garden bed a day.

We’ve been eating really well, one of the girls is the main cook and she cooks really good, healthy food. It’s nice we all eat together and they are overly generous with food.

Living in a tent has actually been kind of fun. Our tent is located down a ledge from the farm so we are farther away from the main house. We have an air mattress to sleep on, which we are grateful for. However, we are finding out that we want our own place and are actively searching for an apartment. We have been to the beach every day so far and we love that! The beach is about 2 miles away and it’s beautiful and during the week it’s pretty empty.

We traveled into Waikiki on Sunday to explore the city and kind of get a feel for the area. It’s very touristy and we figure we could probably get jobs pretty easily downtown.

All in all we are doing well and are happy to be in Hawaii.

It’s been a fun and educational first week so far.