A year ago we started the WOOFFING adventure, so where are we now?

I can hardly believe that a year has passed since we packed up the house, then the car and got on the ferry for our six month adventure in France. As predicted, life has not changed enormously, but we have retained some of the new ideas that we got while we were away.

We got back in April and straight away started to get the garden straight and kick it into productivity. Our garden is far from the giant fields and rambling woods that we had been working in while we were away and at a miniscule 16m2  we had a bit of a creative space challenge on our hands. We are quite pleased with the results though and while we have not by any stretch of the imagination been able to sustain ourselves in veg, we have had a steady stream of nice organic produce that seems to taste better just because you have grown it yourself!

The first task was to re-build our rather temporary raised bed that was collapsing. We went to a local recycled timber yard The Bristol Wood Recycling Project http://www.bwrp.org.uk and got some long planks of wood, cut them up, painted them with some old outdoor paint we found in the loft and screwed them all together. As our garden is gravel, decking and in parts just concrete, rather than hire a jackhammer to break up the concrete we decided to just make the raised bed as deep as possible and fill it up with soil. This at first looked like an expensive task but with the old soil from the old raised bed, the compost from the compost heap (our tenants didn’t look like they had been near it so there was lots of lovely six month old compost) and some topsoil sourced on freecycle - from a nice man digging up his garden for a patio we were nearly there. I then went to the city farm down the road and got some more compost http://www.swcityfarm.org.uk/ and with a couple of bags of peat free compost from the garden centre we were off! We also dug up some other parts of the garden to accommodate more veg and rearranged a lot of the dead or dying things in pots around the place.

We planted lambs lettuce, courgettes (plants donated by my mother), cabbages, parsnips, spinach, leaks, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, squash, beans and alpine strawberries. One of the strangest things was that we bought some tumbling tom tomato seeds to put in the hanging baskets which produced about 7 tomatoes. In contrast we managed to get about 20 self seeded tomato plants from the compost in the raised bed that have produced some lovely toms. I recently made green tomato chutney from some of these as we had so many I was worried they would all go rotten before they had a chance to ripen. We also discovered some potatoes growing in our compost bin, so replanted these which yielded a tiny crop of potatoes which tasted pretty good.

Here are some examples of our produce which we are still collecting:

  

The beer bottle herb garden

Camomile

Slightly mad courgette plants, and some of the tomatoes in the raised bed

The semi circular veg plot, complete with home made cloches (and more tomatoes)

Alpine strawberries in the hanging basket (and the sad looking tomatoes)

We made the cloches with garden wire, coat hangers and some plastic that I managed to get taut on the wire with the help of a hair dryer and hair straighteners! This basically involved sort of melting the plastic, so that it was less baggy and more likely to keep out the slugs – a constant problem. We have found the most effective antidote for slugs and snails is Tegan, who seems to enjoy collecting them every morning!

Apart from the garden we have steadily been catching up with family and friends which has meant happily visiting different bits of the UK we haven’t been to for a while. Of course we have also had to deal with the “back to work” thing (living on fresh air being kind of difficult long term!), or in my case looking for work. Andy went back to his old job and I think is secretly quite pleased to be back in the saddle on a daily basis (he cycles to work every day). While I have found something new and far more stimulating than my previous job which I realise with hindsight had been a pretty dismal experience. Tegan is back at nursery which she loves and lots of things are really the same as they were before, which in a way is quite nice and comforting.

One of the things that we have brought back with us is a change of diet. While we were already a vegetarian household before, (although Andy and Tegan do eat meat) we have become more diverse in our cooking and have been more adventurous with beans and pulses and things. Unfortunately cost means that we still go to the nasty supermarket but we are a lot more discerning when it comes to buying veg and try to buy things that haven’t travelled a million miles when you can buy the same thing from within the EU. Of course the whole ethical shopping issue can drive you nuts and we don’t have the answers other than to tread a medium line. It’s so hard to balance the organic, fair trade, locally grown and of course the cost of doing so. So, we try as hard as we can.

We have also been making our own bread and our sour dough mix that we started in France has survived the journey and still going strong!

Ooh, lovely bubbly yeast!

We have had a couple of DIY projects on the go, one of which was to create a cupboard under the stairs (mostly done with Dad help!).

Before – complete with old chair that we found had been sealed into the wall.

After – all nice and clean.

We have also been doing quite a bit of cycling, walking and camping. This included an 85 mile trip from Barnstaple to Plymouth and I have to say involved leaving Tegan in Grandparent care for a weekend – something she loved.

 

Camping in Watchet

Watchet a la mer – gorgeous

Cycling the 85 miles (somewhere near the start)

Offa’s Dyke path with friend Rich, and a very sleepy Tegan

Tintern Abbey

Being in France and Spain was brilliant and the countryside amazing, but somehow we are still so comfortable living in our city environment where there is a strong level of community cohesion and where everything is so accessible. We can get out to the lovely green bits when we want to and Bristol just has so many festivals and events happening, especially in the summer months and it was fantastic to become part of these things again.

I have joined a local community group that is hoping to get a local chunk of waste land owned by private developers turned into a community green space http://saxon-road-green-space.blogspot.com/. We don’t know how likely this is to happen yet, but it is really good to get back into the local community.

We want to turn this, into…………..well,  something a bit more healthy for the local community.

I have been trying to keep up the renewed enthusiasm for my long forgotten photography hobby too. Being in France and Spain gave me lots of scope for taking pictures but I have also been trying to look closely at my local landscape.

Grid lines

Reflections

Rocket man (acrobat at a local arts festival)

Arc-en-ciel

Oh and I seem to have decided that trying (for the umpteenth time in 20 years or so) to learn to play the guitar again is a good idea. So I dusted off the strings (last strummed with Siddhu in his straw bale house) and have joined a guitar class. Don’t think there will be any albums out soon though.

We constantly reflect on our WWOOFING experience and it has definitely been a fantastic thing as a family that we will look back on for many years to come. I would recommend it to anyone who has a sense of adventure. Who knows what we will get up to next, hopefully something equally fulfilling and exciting. For now I think this blog may come to a close, but as we have quite enjoyed documenting our experiences there may be some more ramblings to follow, who knows!

Back to where we started, via another minor saga with the car

We are nearing the end of our time in France (and Spain since we are actually leaving via Bilbao) and it feels like we are just about ready to leave. We have enjoyed a great two weeks of holidaying since the end of the WWOOFING, it feels like so long ago already! So to continue where we left off last time, here are some more WWOOFING recollections……………..

Reflections on WWOOFING part 2

I think one of the amazing discoveries for me at least during this adventurette was that France has some amazingly beautiful and stunning places to visit. I had spent a lot of my childhood visiting France and while I have always thought it was quite a cool country, have never thought of it as being spectacular in any way. But we have been to some incredible places. Starting I think with the Pyrenees, where the mountain scenery seemed to elicit a wow round every other hair-pin bend. Some lovely little villages (and not just the ones that have been made pretty for the tourists) and some interesting old towns and cities. Some of our favourites were Albi, Montpellier, Ceret, Carcassonne, Millau and Montauban. The Cathar country in Aude was also somewhere that we saw as much of as we could (the Cathar castles are really worth a visit) but is definitely somewhere to explore further. We also discovered some really interesting bits of Spain and all the cities that we visited; Barcelona, Tarragona, Pamplona and Girona (they all seem to rhyme!) were beautiful and intriguing in their own ways.

Much of what we saw was just part of where we were living for the six months, and a lot we also went to visit during our days off, which were usually just the weekends.  We also managed to squeeze in quite a bit, travelling between places (and staying in the very cheapest and most cheerful of hotels as we did so!). It feels like we used our time pretty well to visit all that was around us without killing ourselves – we’ve realised that it’s easy to try to see absolutely everything and end up just feeling worn out. This is where having a toddler comes in handy – while Tegan is robust, it is easier to watch her for signs of being maxed out on the excitement front and quit while we are ahead.

It seems that we have learnt so much is hard to think what we would’ve liked to have done more of. I think for me, I would’ve liked to have learnt more French (although don’t feel either of us have done badly), but we quickly realised once we started that our priorities changed and shifted all the time. A lot of where we went was determined by where we were able to go, rather than where we necessarily wanted to go, which was tempered mainly by the fact that we were a family, and the fact that it was winter. So we often chose to go to stay with an English family in an area we liked doing things we really wanted to do, over a French host in a different area. It’s definitely a “see how it goes” experience as you just never know what you are going to get when you get there. So flexibility is the key for sure, which is not easy with a 2 year old, but we seem to have an amazingly adaptable little girl so I think we are lucky on that front! I think though if we had had more control over the places we chose, it would’ve made things easier if we had been able to spend longer in each place, and move around less. This is the trade off between seeing everything you possibly can, and spending a lot of time packing and repacking the car! This also was probably quite hard for Tegan, learning different sets of names in each place and different rules. Amazingly though, she got stuck into things and seemed pretty unfazed (she was let off car packing duties though!).

As we didn’t really know what we were going to find when we started out we don’t have any regrets about not doing specific things. However we did discover a bit of an interest in eco-building (or maybe just a love of getting muddy!), so I guess that is something that if we had been able to we would’ve spent more time doing. We also found that some places were like living in a community, which is not something that we particularly thought we wanted to do or would enjoy when we started out. The experiences that we did have though were really rewarding and definitely something that we would like to have had more of. It is kind of strange to think that living in some kind of collective space where you cook and eat together, work together and share all the tasks and responsibilities can be so refreshing. We thought it might be claustrophobic, but in fact it was amazing to live with groups of people who have so much to share and when those people are mostly fairly like minded it some how seems to work. It wasn’t all singing round the campfire exactly but somehow not having a TV and all the other distractions that we usually have, and just having the space to get to know new people and share ideas meant that there was a lot of enthusiasm for working together.

I am not really sure if we have had any particularly negative experiences (apart from “the caravan”! and we just laugh about that now). Whatever we have come across has just become part of our adventure and nothing has left a bad taste in our mouths or made us wish we had never left home. In fact it is the going home bit that is probably the hardest……..

Which is why it is a very good idea to have a holiday before you do!

We started our holiday with a few days at my aunt and uncle’s house in the Lot et Garonne. It was a nice pit stop to say goodbye and to stay in a familiar environment. We visited my Grandparents who always provide us with a nice cup of tea and an ear to bend with our crazy stories. We couldn’t help ourselves however when my Uncle mentioned that he had a fence he needed help with, and we flexed our WWOOFING muscles one last time on a garden fence!

Hammering fence posts

Tegan entertaining her great Grandparents

We then moved on to the penultimate stop on our trip – Urrugne in the Basque country. We have rented a gite really close to the sea and have spent most of the time being generally lazy and visiting some of the local sites. Although this is surfing territory we decided that we were not quite ready to brave the waves but managed to catch a surfing competition when we visited in Biarritz. Tegan has now added “surf board” to her vocabulary, along with the unrelated and even more useless “paege” (motorway toll) and decheterie (recycling point). 

We nosed around Biarritz, St. Jean de Luz, Hendaye and Espellette (where you can buy some ridiculously expensive items all related to their local chilli production). I haven’t tasted any of it, but surely they can’t be that special – I have never before encountered such expensive chillis! The area in general seems pretty expensive, although it is hard to tell if this is really the case or if it is just because this is the first time on our trip we have spent any length of time being real tourists. It also raised a question when it came to shopping – did we support local businesses, at inflated tourist prices or use the local supermarkets. I have to say that we did the latter, mainly out of necessity. 

We also went to San Sebastian in Spain (we are staying 4 km from the border) which turned out to be a beautiful city. The old, the new and the stormy coast line all seemed to blend well together to make it a very accessible and interesting place, with plenty of running around space for the small one.

We’ve been largely pretty lucky with the weather and even swum in the sea, and got a bit sunburnt. Photographic evidence of this feat and all other instances of me in a swimming costume seem to have remarkably disappeared, but other signs of having a lovely time are available below!

The beach at Biarritz

 

with some pretty crazy waves (popular with those surfiing types)

Tegan beheading the Easter bunny

Chillin’ at Hendaye

Kojak-etta with her new shades

Daniel Craig’s body double…….Andy hubstar!

On top of a mountain on the border of Spain and France, lovely.

I think it is fair to say that we have had a great last few days, and feel ready to brave the vast amount of repacking and reorganising that will face us when we get back. Before we got too “ah didn’t we have a lovely time” about it all though, we felt the need for one more drama………..

We managed to load our car to the brim, even fitting in an extra 14 bottles of wine in somewhere. And just as the last few things were slotting onto the roof box, quelle horreur, the key snapped off in the lock, with the roof box closed. Now on the face of it this was not a big disaster, we had most of the stuff we needed elsewhere in the car and most of the stuff that needed to go in the roof box was already in there. But, thinking ahead (unusual pastime not commonly undertaken by us!) we would be arriving back in Bristol at 8pm at night unable to get into the box. We would also prefer to have access to some of the things in there, and there was just that tiny worry that customs may fancy a nosey inside.

So, what do you do when you have a snapped off key stuck in the lock of the roof box? Well – we went to the supermarket where we had seen a key cutting shop and told them of our woe, where the nice lady produced the phone number of a locksmith/plumber (don’t know if these occupations commonly go together). To cut a long story short after waiting most of the day for him to be able to see us, he opened the box, and managed to get the broken key out. Genius! We were truly surprised by this feat having assumed that he would have to break the lock, but very relieved. Even more so as the roof box doesn’t belong to us (Matt if you’re reading this you can breath a sigh of relief too!).

So eventually we were on our way with a slightly fractious daughter (calmed with a bit of Easter chocolate) and have made it to Bilbao, calm once more. It seems quite fitting that we are leaving for the UK from Spain, as I think one of our favourite places on our WWOOFING tour was Can Santosha with Siddhu and his straw bale house. For the moment then I will sign off with a little poem that he told us (not his own but I am not sure who penned it originally). My rudimentary Spanish was just about good enough to work it out (apologies for any spelling errors), and I am sure the internet translation god will do a good enough job at translating it into English.

hasta manana si dios quiere

Que descanses bien

Llego la hora de acostarse

Y sonar tambien

Porque manana sera otro dia

Hay que vivirlo con alegra

The end of the WWOOFING era (for now at least!)

An ode to WWOOFing…….

 

Why would you leave your office chair

to go and play in the open air?

In fields, and woods, and muddy places

for a constant stream of different faces.

To be frozen, then sweaty and far from clean,

to embrace the great outdoors, and all that is green.

It seems such a crazy thing to do,

to learn about things that are good for you.

To know more about veggies and how they grow,

more about good food (there’s a lot we didn’t know)

More about wood and eco construction

about some alternative ways that we can function.

Of course to learn French bien sur we may cry

we know how to say c’est une maison en paille.

And for an adventure to see what we can do

with our car full of stuff and a daughter aged two.

It’s been a challenge, and often quite tiring

But it’s been a laugh and very inspiring.

We’ve met loads of people, some slightly strange

these travels seem to attract quite a range.

For now it’s back home, but who knows one day

we’ll find a new idea and a different place to play.

 

 

I think time’s up for the WOOFFING jeans……….

Andy’s second pair of gloves

So yes, we have now completed our last few days WWOOFING, despite Andy having done something to his back. He is recovering with the help of a hot water bottle and beer and still managed to plant the basil. One WWOOFER has gone and another one arrived and we are off for a holiday in the Basque country (with a pit stop in the Lot et Garronne to say goodbye to my aunt and uncle and grandparents). 

Tegan has clearly been learning too much about the use of red trays to grow things in:

Looks a bit uncomfortable to me

But has mostly been taking the art of playing with cars very seriously:

A Daddy constructed car ramp

We’ve been out and about in the fields and greenhouses as well as visiting some of the local sights:

“Can’t miss it” sign to the local pomme vendor

One of the beautiful places that we went was Cordes sur Ciel, an old town that in contrast to most of the picturesque villages around here actually looks like real people live there. We wondered around the old cobbled streets and had a lazy long picnic in an almost empty square.

Entrance to the old town.

We also cycled along some of the Canal Du Midi, just south of Toulouse. Unfortunately this turned out to be a slightly disappointing adventure as it was a REALLY windy day, so very hard work. Added to which the canal runs alongside a motorway. The canal is actually a UNESCO world heritage site and I am sure of great engineering genius, but I didn’t really think much of the scenery. Even Tegan got bored at shouting “lorry mummy!” at the top of her lungs every time one came thundering along.

Do you think they used a spirit level to plant these trees (along the canal)?

Of course our thoughts have been turned most importantly to the holiday we are about to have, but also to going home. Part of the going home thing is also about reflecting a bit on what we’ve been doing. We have had a truly memorable experience, one that has not always been easy as moving from place to place with a car load of stuff is fairly hard work. I think that is why people buy VW camper vans…………….But one that we have totally enjoyed and has given us so many things to think about.

Reflections on WWOOFING part 1

We have met people who only eat raw food, someone who believes she can talk to fairies, heard about people who live off sunlight, and people who are “breathaireans” ie live off fresh air. We have met long term and short term WWOOFERS and hosts, some old, some very young and from loads of different places. Some with real goals to set up their own organic farms or live in communities, and some who like us want to have a bit of an adventure in the great outdoors.

These people have ranged from the logical, ethical, politically and environmentally active thinky types, to the spiritual, meditative, hippy, would be Buddhist, back to nature types. In between there seem to be the just love the outdoors types, and the just having fun doing something different types. I am still not entirely sure where we fit into this spectrum, although we have worked out well enough what we are not. I also know that mostly it doesn’t matter how you see yourself as long as you are honest about what you think you are doing. It seems that there are some people who get spirituality and ethical living rather mixed up, and others who think because you embrace some alternative sides of life, that you have to sign up to a prescribed package of ideals. This idea undoubtedly leads to a certain amount of hypocrisy and as with any of these things, it’s never black and white. As a fellow WWOOFER said to us, “it’s fine to be a vegetarian but most lentils and similar foodstuffs are flown in to the west from other countries”. A few examples of some of the mixed ideas that we have come across are:

Singing the praises of organic food and then shopping at Lidl.

Living in a beautiful place next to nature, but needing to own a gas guzzling 4 wheel drive to get to it.

Someone who had apparently given up a lot of her possessions, including her mobile phone and was constantly on the landline anyway.

Organic chocolate – surely it’s bad for you anyway!

I think it is fair to say that we’ve learnt a lot more than we thought we would, also possibly slightly less French! I have now finished reading Harry Potter in French and have a plethora of new vocabulary including broomstick, magic wand and casting a spell. All very functional! We have learnt a lot of practical stuff – how to grow all sorts of plants, put up fences, make bread, plaster a straw bale house, some of the ins and outs of collecting, storing and burning wood, planting fruit trees and encountered all sorts of new food.

We’ve also discovered a lot about what it’s like to travel around with a toddler and what it’s like to simultaneously work and look after such a small human being. We have learnt what it’s like to live with each other pretty much 24 hours a day and what it’s like to live in other people’s homes, work according to other people’s home rules and cope with all kinds of things that we don’t do ourselves at home. I suppose some of the best examples of this would be living without electricity or running water, using an outside compost toilet and putting on a generator to run the washing machine. Other examples would include early morning meditation (that we didn’t actually participate in), and letting your young children “explore their own limits” ie letting them play with fire and sharp things in the hope that they learn their function before they injure themselves!

The question I suppose now is what are are going to do with all these pieces of information!? Will we go back home and forget it all, put it in the the dim and distant memory of travel experiences, or will we buy a VW camper van, sell the house and commit to a life of hippy freedom? I suspect the answer to this is somewhere in the middle of these extremes, and we do hope to be able to sort out our garden and grow some veggies in a slightly more organised way. We are indeed mulling over all sorts of ideas, but the reality is probably that life will be more or less the same as it was before (I can hear all our friends and family breathing a huge sigh of relief!).

It is food for thought though – what will happen next, and will we do it again? As I write this there are all sorts of other thoughts leaping into my head about our adventures. These include our discoveries of some amazing bits of France (and Spain), thinking about what we are looking forward to most about going home and what we missed. Also trying to work out what we would have liked to have learnt more about and what the negative things were (none of these are coming to mind right now). I think this is why, assuming there are people actually reading this, we need at least a part 2, and maybe part 3 of the thinky bits. So more later……………….!

For now there are a few more photos of us all to keep you all amused.

Andy chillin on one of our numerous picnics

Some time to play

And time to make biscuits!

Planting and pottering

Seed trays ready to be loaded with soil

The “click-clack” machine that makes little indentations in the soil for the seeds

Seeds just planted

Evidence of some work being done at least!

We have been with our Toulouse hosts for nearly three weeks now and have been having a pretty relaxing time of it. After snow and some freezing temperatures last week I finally broke out the suncream yesterday and found out that plastic greenhouses in the sun can get very hot indeed. And this is only the start of spring. We have spent most of the time doing a combination of harvesting veggies for veggie boxes, sewing seeds, transplanting and thinning out seedlings and pulling up and weeding old and unwanted plants. It’s good to be involved in all the processes so we can see what happens to the end product as well being able to see how the teeny tiny seeds get to be well on their way to being edible green things. While the Ware-Jewell “sling it in a pot of dirty brown mud stuff and hope it grows” approach has produced some edible results at home, it is a bit of an education to see how much love and attention goes into producing healthy looking tasty veggies.

And the best thing is that there are rows and rows of delicious green things, without any chemicals, completely organic all looking just as delicious as those that have been plumped up and protected with nasty spray stuff. I have no idea what the organic vegetable death rate is compared to those dosed up to their little leaves with anti bug potion. Nor am I sure how the productivity levels, financial and time costs of organic versus non organic veg are. But all the plants that we have been working with look nice and edible to me and you can’t help wondering why more people don’t grow stuff organically. It undoubtedly helps if you have volunteers rather than employees readily reaping and sowing the produce eagerly attempting to improve their French………….

 

Breaking up the soil and adding stuff made from chicken pooh (Tegan couldn’t resist helping when she saw the mud!).

Lots of little seedlings in the small greenhouse

The big plants in the giant greenhouse

Harvesting “blet” – we think this is some kind of swiss chard

Preparing the ground for radishes

Apart from working in the field and greenhouses, Andy has also been helping to shift rubble from a wall being knocked down at the house, to the field where it is needed to add bulk to a dirt track. The host (Berengere), or rather her Dad is building a WWOOFers dormitory and while Andy was bashing down bricks and moving them, I helped to move the compost toilet from the barn to the dormitory site. Yes it was empty!

The hole in the wall

And the compost toilet in bits

It does feel like we are being ridiculously lazy here having spent the last five months sharing the workload and looking after Tegan at the same time. Here, when one of us works, the other is fully occupied with Tegan, the latter being definitely the harder job! We have made biscuits and bread, been for bike rides, checked out several playgrounds, been to a few markets and ensured that she has a daily nap. Tegan has also developed her very own version of table tennis, which involves running off with the ball and hiding it somewhere in the garden, usually difficult for adults to get to (like under a big bush). This only resembles table tennis in the fact that table tennis bats need to be carried at all times to give it an air of authenticity. In fact this is all a bit like being at home (except for the table tennis) and while running round after her and working at the same time is more challenging and more fun, it is good to get an idea of what real life may be like again when we get home. I already miss the hectic pace of trying to do at least three things at once while making sure she hasn’t eaten a mouthful of anything she shouldn’t have though!

Early borrowing of my clothes has started with a headscarf

And practising riding a scooter

I do actually think that our French is improving at last! I wouldn’t say that either of us is about to apply to the UN for a translators job, but we are learning all sorts of different vocabulary (mainly plant related) and the fact that we are taking it in turns to work means we have had more time to to some studying. Actually Andy has done some studying and is 2/3 of the way through his teach yourself French book. I am on page 73 of Harry Potter “a l’Ecole des Sorciers” (also known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone), having decided that a children’s book full of useful magic-esque vocabulary would do just fine. And I have seen the film. It does also help that Tegan seems very keen on all the French children’s books in the house. It definitely helps to work out what they are about before trying to read them to her, although it seems that most of them are variations of stories about wolves and goats.

We have also been out and about to Toulouse again, and to Montauban where we got to practice some “hunt the parking space”. I think it is because there are lots of free car parks here (and in Spain) that means the notion of a parking space seems to get badly confused with the bit of road inside a car park designed to actually let you drive around it. And best not to actually be trying to park when someone else has seen the space……….We had a peaceful time though in Albi where we went to the Toulouse-Lautrec museum and had a look round the amazing cathedral. We also managed to go to “Atlantis” – a sort of indoor water park where Tegan got to splash around in the fun pools and we all got to play in the jacuzzis.

Archways in Montauban

Cathedral Sainte-Cecile in Albi