WWOOFing Week #2 (of 4): Memorial Day Weekend, Chicken Palaces, Portland

Hey there, faithful readers!

Okay, so last weekend (memorial day weekend) was like hardcore planting time. We got sooo much stuff in the ground. I think they said they have 45 different kinds of fruits and vegetables here over the course of a year, and we planted most of them last weekend. Let me try to name a few:
Corn, like 2 kinds of onions, Cauliflower, Tomatoes, a bunch of herbs, Lettuce (I think), aand yeah, a bunch more. They were all little seedlings so I couldn't really tell what they were gonna be without the label things.

OH, also, we stopped by the local organic supermarket and I got awesome dark chocolate and chocolate milk from a local farm. That was just about one week without either for me, so it felt great to reunite.

I've also been eating pretty vegetarianly while I've been here, except for chicken stew one night last week and steak at the Memorial Day cookout. It's really not that bad, and I'm going to give some serious thought into whether or not I want to keep that up when I get back.

So I guess that's up to Monday.. The rest of the week was relatively uneventful. Lots of weeding and preparing beds still, but we had a side project too!

They have chickens here, and they usually have a place to hang out outdoors but it broke, so they've been indoors in their little place at night, and free to roam during the day. That was okay as a temporary solution, but chickens love strawberries, which are starting to show up, so the chickens have been stuck inside for a few days while we built a new outdoor home for them. It's partially covered, has egg-laying areas, and beams across the top for them to roost (= fly up to sleep. Apparently chickens have to have that or they go craaaazy). Aaand that's probably hard to imagine so here's a picture!

For size context.. well, I guess there are chickens. It's 16' long and just over 5' tall I think.

That came together pretty quickly. It was built from scratch, just 2x4s, chicken wire, and rubber tubes mostly. I just helped out towards the end, it was the main guy's (Stacy) creation.

Soo that takes us to Friday. It was a pretty standard day (more weeding... which is starting to get tedious, but I think we're almost, if not totally, done), but we went up to Portland in the evening with one of the couples who lives here (Stacy's son, his wife, and their 4 month old baby girl). It was pretty cool, and apparently it's the biggest city in Maine (with an area population of like 120,000.. heh). It was the night of the monthly Art Walk, where they have local galleries on this one street open up for visitors. It was also the opening night of a new cafe that serves and promotes local, organic food. That culture's pretty prominent up here, it's great. The guy we went with had actually helped to make a really cool mosaic bench in the restaurant (see picture), and he knew like everybody there. It was pretty cooool. Then we had dinner which was (I say this in good humor) frequently interrupted by the baby, but it's all good. It was an Asian vegetarian place and they had this soymeat that tasted just like chicken. That was also the first time I had used money in a while.

The mosaic bench is the one in the lower portion of this photo