Angela offered to cook my eggs this morning, which was amazing! I went downstairs a few minutes later and held her finish up breakfast prep. All us wwoofers had breakfast together and chatted.

Once outside, Aizhan and I were tasked with adding chicken manure to the the brussel sprouts. We surrounded each plant with half a cup of bagged, store bought, organic manure. that took us about an hour. We chatted the whole time, getting to know a little more about each other. Apparently, she was charged $700 to work on the farm in Costa Rica, but they didn’t tell her how much it was going to be until she got there. That sounds like a bait-and-switch to me, which is very uncool. I can’t imagine flying internationally to a farm to volunteer there and being charged for it.

Afterward, we weeded the southmost path along Greenhouse 3. It was rocky so it was difficult to penetrate the ground with a hoe. We ended up ripping most of the gigantic weeds and grass out by hand. During this process, I noticed a nick in one of the irrigation hoses and decided to talk to the Head Farmer about it. There was a good chance that I caused it while ripping up weeds. He was very cool about it, which was quite a relief.

After lunch, we were given a very exciting job! We were tasked with putting in brussel sprout beds. Mr. D, a family visitor, had plowed the field on wednesday and had fully prepped it for planting. While A and J were splitting wood, and Ellie and Angela were cleaning up the salad greens, Aizhan and I prepared for this exciting task by collecting 2 chairs, a huge roll of plastic, several hoes, string on a stick, a tape measure, and stakes. We went down to the beds and started laying out the spacing. Each aisle is supposed to be 2 feet wide, and each row is supposed to be 2 1/2 feet wide. We took the tape measure and carefully laid out the stakes based on these measurements. During this process, Ellie and Angela showed up and started to help. Angela and Aizhan worked out the math on the spacing and drove the stakes, and Ellie hit them with a rock to drive them into the ground.

Once the stakes were laid out, we tied string to the stakes on one side of the row and then walked them across the field to the other side of the row and tied them to the corresponding stake on the other side. Once that was complete, we would dig a trench with a hoe to make room to bury the plastic. We then laid out the plastic by placing the plastic on a metal rod, and laying the rod on two heavy chairs. Then we would pull the plastic across the field and quickly lay it on the ground (so as to keep the wind from turning it into a kite.) Once down, the people who pulled it across the field would bury the edges of the plastic a little and hold it down while the people on the other end would pull it tight. Then One of the wwoofers would lead the way with burying the edge, while I followed behind on the other side of the plastic, pulling it tight and burying it.

Once that was done, Mr. D cut slits into the plastic every foot, down either side of center of the plastic. Theses slits were for planting the brussel sprouts into the plastic. The Head Farmer sent me up to the greenhouse to get brussel sprout seedling flats while the other wwoofers continued to set up the plastic. I grabbed some capitola, churchill, and hestia, and the book to write down what we were planting where.

We cut the small soil cubes apart using a knife and then threw the plants on the plastic next to the slits in the plastic. Each row had a signal variety. Then we went down the rows and planted the plants. We needed to make sure that the soil cube was completely covered in the ground so that it wouldn’t suck the water away from the plant like a sponge. We would also check and weeds, or for two plants in one cube and discard the weaker plant from the cube.

As it turns out, I am exceptionally fast at planting. The method I used was to shove my right hand into the hole in the plastic and burrow it deep, displacing the dirt. Then I would shove my left and, holding the plant, into the hole. Then I’d pull both hands out, allowing the dirt to fall around it. I would then push dirt over the cube to make sure it was fully covered and move on to the next plant. We did this process until 4:30pm.

Dinner was a little nuts because there were 18 people there. So many family members are visiting from out of town. The table was arranged in such a way that it was hard to make conversation, but I was in a bit of a quiet mood.

My bee sting got worse, so I took the maximum  of benadryl in the hope that it would relieve some of the swelling in pain. Now I am crashing early.