Goodbye Earth Rose?

It has been a while since I last wrote in here. A lot has happened since then. SOl and Ella have kind of taken over here and things are actually moving along. Adirian and I have been working hard on compost central which looks like it will be really sweet once finished. It consists of either 9 or 5 manure piles sothat each week or every other week there will be nice soil for the gardens (it takes around 9 weeks for animal shit to become useable). There is also a separate area for kitchen scraps and for a mixture of green and brown matter. Finally there is a spot to mix it all together to get some really nice compost.

In other news this may be my last day at Earth Rose Farm. Tomorrow I head out to the ultimate frisbee tournament and it has yet to be seen wheter or not I will be at Derek's farm when I return or whether I will be back at Earth Rose. So I guess it is time to look back and see what are the major things that I have learned here.

• Spiders and snakes are really more scared of you. Stay out of their way and stop being so frightened of them and they generally leave you alone. Don't bother leaving your bedroom to try and sleep on the uncomfortable bench in the dining room just because a tarantula has entered your sleeping premisis, that is silly.
• Planting pineapple is as simple as chopping the green leaves off of the top of the fruit and putting it in the ground. I also learned how to harvest a pineapple and how to know when it is ready. A plant takes a year to produce one fruit.
• Harvesting banana means actually chopping down the whole tree once the flower has fallen off. This can be done in one machede swipe. Pretty cool. The tree will regrown entirely and produce more fruit in a year as well.
• Harvesting Yucca means digging out the root of the plant once it is about 2 meters high. Then to replant you can just chop the stem up into smaller pieces (maybe about 8 inches long) and just plant the stem.
• Compost. A mixture of greeen matter and brown matter (live weeds and dead leaves) with manure works really well. Any kind of compost should really be turned once a week. If you take human crap and just leave it in a covered bucket for about a year (mixed in with woood chips) that will produce valuable compost as well.

There were probably some other valuable lessons in there but those were the big ones. I think the experience here was pretty good, though I would have liked to work on some more planting and transplanting. I tihnk there will be much more of that at the next farm or more of it if I return to Earth Rose.

So in some not so great news I got really sick yesterday with a fever. Today was better and I am hoping that I am less sick tomorrow since I have about 5 hours of travel ahead of me.

Adrian and I went to Luz and Guillermo's today and it wa sad to say bye to that family. I hope I can get back to see them before I go back to the states.

So that is it for now from the Earth Rose Farm.

-Ravi