planting seeds.: day twenty two

Ah, the gloves are off, the buzzing noise is finally gone and there is quiet on the farm again. This week has been all about preparation.The trees are starting to burst with lots of bright red cherries which can only mean one thing; time for the 'first pick'. Any day now, a crew of coffee pickers will come in and harvest the ripest cherries for the first pick of the season. Our task for the week was to prepare the fields before the pickers get down to business which roughly translates into, you guessed it, weeding. So far, Eric and I have clocked 42 combined hours of pure weeding. Its kind of been a tough week.

Our days off were well spent. We drove to the Southern end of the Kona Coffee Belt and toured three more (of the 700) Kona coffee farms: Greenwell Farms, Royal Kona, and Kona Blue Sky. We managed to not get a flat tire driving over a couple miles of unpaved lava rock desert and spent a day at Mahaiula Bay. We treated ourselves to lunch at The Coffee Shack- a little cliff side cafe with an amazing view of Kealakekua Bay. We attempted to watch a sunset down at the beach but instead spent an evening wrangling three small cows that escaped through an open gate. We again attempted to watch the sunset at the beach and wow was it beautiful (and much nicer then chasing cows around)!

Although some days are more challenging than others, we help each other get through them. Eric motivates me to go back to work after lunchtime and I save him from falling off a roof (yup, he was tied to one end of the rope and luckily I was tied to the other). Eric weed-whacks for the team while I get the primo job using the industrial size John Deere mower (who thought that was a good idea?). I make Eric grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner and he humanely gets rid of the creepy black pincher bugs from our shack. This must be what marriage is about.

Anyhow, row by row, acre by acre we will continue on for one more day until a much needed, well deserved break.