Migrant Worker
3 December 2006
The is always plenty of work to do on a Kona coffee farm. For the
past months we've had a migrant worker living with us. Hart
is actually my brother-in-law and he's in the process of moving from
Missouri to Colorado. With a month between jobs, that was the
perfect time for him to earn a little extra cash working on the
farm. I did my best to keep him busy, not easy because he is a
fast and proficient worker.
We started with the barn's roof trusses
on the morning he arrived. The
trusses themselves went on in a few hours but that was followed by days
worth of installing all the bracing, more painting and finally
installing all the roofing plastic. There's only one small
section of roof that isn't installed yet and that's the secret roof
access hatch. Shhh, don't tell anyone, I want to build that on my
own when nobody is looking.
The barn has been a priority for so long that many of the farm chores
were getting neglected. Any time I was busy and Hart had a few
minutes, he'd grab the weed eater or jump on the mower and find a
neglected corner of the farm that needed some manicuring. After a
month of his hard work, the place looks more like a golf course now
than a farm, I only hope I can keep it that way for awhile.
It's also the height of the harvest season so no migrant worker can
escape some time behind the coffee pulper. I took full advantage of the
help to pulp as much coffee as possible. Unfortunately the good
pulper isn't set up and working yet so everything had to be run through
our little pulper. It is much more labor intensive than the good
pulper will eventually be. A couple hours of picking out unpulped
cherry is about as much as anybody can take in one sitting.
Of course there's always plenty of digging to be done too. I've
made unsuspecting visitors dig so you can bet that paid labor would get
to know the rocky ground we have here in Kona. The first digging
exercise was leveling out an area for a retaining wall and footing for
the barn stairs. It wasn't a huge amount of digging but still
enough for a blister or two. The second major digging job was
spreading mulch. We could use the tractor to fill the trailer but
shoveling the mulch back out of the trailer had to be done by
hand. We filled and emptied that trailer at least a half dozen
times before finally calling it a day.
Other work we did include finishing a rock wall, building a mailbox,
installing a water trough for the goats, fixing the electric fence,
pruning some macadamia nut trees, fertilizing all the fields,
installing some window blinds, and cleaning up so everything looked
good for farm tours. Of course you can't forget all the little
daily tasks such as walking the goats to and from their pen.
We did manage to find some time for playing and relaxing. Those
pictures will have to wait until next week's post.
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