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

From the sublime to the ridiculous……..

So, just to recap, at the end of Feb we were just leaving the land of muck and magic and the strawbale house with no mod cons. Now we seem to be in our own private gite with a dishwasher, central heating and a splendidly speedy internet connection. We spent most of last week asking ourselves how this happened!

Actually, we know very well how this happened, the place we are at now is back in France, near Toulouse and we arranged to come here back in September before we even left the UK. This isn’t the only WWOOFing host that we pre-arranged to get to on a given date (we organised about 50% of them before we left the UK). It is however the only WWOOF that we have arrived at on the date we said we would! And so far no hitches, although a few surprises (where would we be without those!?).

The deal here is that we have to pay for our own food in exchange for our own separate house. This is in fact very anti-WWOOFFING and frowned upon by most people but the reason is that the family we are working for had a lot of WWOOFERS up until the end of last year and wanted to have more space for themselves by putting us up in a separate house opposite theirs. Because they have to pay for the heating and electricity for the house, we have to pay for the food. We also thought that after 5 months of living with other people it would be nice to have our own space, so were happy to agree to the plan.

One of the surprises was that the host only actually expects one of us to work and so last week felt more like a holiday than anything else! Andy and I shared the work so that whoever wasn’t working was generally looking after Tegan (although she did manage to get herself involved in a few activities). There is also another WWOOFER living with the family, who eats with us every other night, and we have eaten all together a couple of times. We are all living on a sort of country estate owned by the host’s parents (complete with iron gates with an electronic thingy to open them!). All a bit of a catapult from one side of the WWOOFING world to the other.

There is actually a rather interesting question about us sort of paying to do less work, as Andy and I have previously worked all the time and managed our time to fit in around both the demands of the hosts and Tegan’s needs. We would actually both like to work, but this doesn’t seem to be an option (not unless we want to be doing much more than our fair share since we are essentially only receiving free accommodation not food). I am sure however that not that many people would turn down the offer of a gite in the South West of France for just a few hours work a week! There is also a great opportunity for us to learn French here as the host and her husband are very patient and keen to help us learn. Of all the places we have been it seems like this is THE place we might actually get to gain some real French language skills!

The work itself has been mainly planting seeds and harvesting veggies – not as fascinating as some of the places we have been but a great opportunity to learn a bit more about growing veggies – something we hope to be doing more of when we get home.

Tegan inspecting the quality of the work

Tidy mud!

And playtime – of which there seems to have been a lot has meant that we have been able to travel around a bit and see some of the local sights, and even some friends from Bristol! Our friends Helen and Tom, and their daughter Lucia just so happened to be having a holiday in Toulouse last week so we went to see them. It was really nice to see some familiar faces and chat about home, other friends and sit in their garden and eat cake! It was great for Tegan to have a playmate for the day too as the kids here are much older than her. It is quite a stretch for our poor old brains to have to consider going back home in just over a month, so it is good to be reminded of the good things, like all the people we can catch up with when we get back! 

 

The mums

And the Dads

Mutual co-operation

Oh so cool

Le pique-nique

And more playtime

From the floor to the wall, basically, at some point………

We had a fun weekend last week in Pamplona (or Pampaloona as Tegan decided it was called) ambling around the streets and seeing the sights. It is a nice small city that has a pretty old town, notable for the running of the bulls and for the fact that the pilgrims route to Santiago de Compostella runs through it (this route actually went just past Can Santosha where we were staying too). We walked a bit along both of these routes marked on our tourist map and generally wandered around. One of the brilliant things about visiting Pamplona and all the other cities and sites during the winter is that while there are other tourists, there are not throngs of people and you can amble around easily, restaurants aren’t packed and the whole experience is much more chilled. 

Saturday in Pamplona was lovely and sunny, while on Sunday back at Can Santosha we woke up to snow. We really have had four seasons in a week here and it is incredible how it can snow one day, be sunny the next, then rain, wind, no wind, cold, really cold, but unfortunately not really warm! It was quite nice to stay in by the wood burner and lounge around a bit though. As we travel to all these amazing places the temptation is to want to go out and about for walks and trips to see places which is great, but means there isn’t much down time. We unfortunately didn’t get to see the squatter village we were going to see, but we did build a snowman, which Tegan named “French”.

French the snowman

Our weekend rest was followed by another amazing week of mud and muck and crazy weather, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Last week was mainly working on the floor, and this week involved mixing large quantities of “body coat” to go on the wall. Plastering this on the wall was the more easy bit as most of the work was in the preparation of the mixture, which this time included cow pooh (caca). So, the dung had to be found, collected in the trailer and mixed with sand, straw, and the barbotine clay mix (mud and water). Not too sure where the dung was sourced from but Siddhu went to collect it and then we had to wheelbarrow it from the trailer to the house as the track up to the house was too muddy for his van! We then had to mow the straw – this was Siddhu’s genius invention for making the straw smaller, breaking up a straw bale and then mowing it with a lawn mower! This was all mixed together with sand and bathfulls of barbotine (mixed this time in an old bath) and then stored inside the house to ferment before it could be put on the wall! So, yes we were now sharing a strawbale house with 2 other WWOOFERS, Siddhu and a giant pile of mud and cow pooh – can life get more bizzare?!

Siddhu mowing the straw

Tegan helping to mix the barbotine

Setting out the ingredients for the body coat mix- straw, sand, cow dung and barbotine.

Helping to build the box for the body coat mix in the dining room.

At the end of the week Siddhu and the two other Spanish WWOOFERS (Vero and Jose) went to a conference on bio building, which we were also invited to. However, since our Spanish hadn’t progressed much past “dos cervezas por favor” we reluctantly decided not to go. We did join day two of the conference though which involved going to visit some other eco builds in the area, and managed to see a house built using traditional stone masonry. Unfortunately the travelling around was so time consuming that we didn’t stay to see more than this and travelling around in a group of 40 with a small boisterous toddler was quiet tiring. We stayed long enough for me to attempt to drink wine the Spanish way and for Tegan to chat to the animals at the farm and then went back to the house to start packing for our trip back to France the next day.

  

Just about in my mouth!

Seriously unusual looking turkey

We have had a fantastic time here but again it was time to move on, partly as we had already arranged our next WWOOF back in France and partly because you can have too much of a good thing (and I REALLY wanted a proper shower!). In a way it is good to have to live without all the electricity, water and heating that we are used to just to make us appreciate them more. It has also been really interesting to see how you can build a house spending very little money using naturally sourced materials, but instead of spending money we were spending time and energy which is a really great feeling.

We feel like we have learnt a lot, not just about straw bale houses but from meeting Siddhu and Vero and Jose who are really positive and interesting people. Tegan thoroughly enjoyed herself, especially making friends with Vero and has been coming out with all kinds of new language – a sample includes, “Buenos dias, hasta banana, at some point, basically, similar, I think so”. This in part shows us how adaptable she is to learning new things, but also indicates which phrases we use a lot!

 

Tegan and her new friend Vero

A parting shot of an amazing place 

A holiday, a change of scene and lots and lots of mud!

Following our last WWOOF we spent 4 days being complete tourists in Barcelona which was just lovely. There was quite a bit of rain on the first day which was a bit of a pain (although Tegan is happy as she got a Mini mouse umbrella from the experience) but we found ourselves a cheap hotel outside the city and a short bus trip each day took us to the centre. We pottered around the sites and discovered that paying 10 Euro a day for the menu of the day option in a restaurant was the way to eat cheaply – this only went wrong once when we made a bad choice of restaurant. Tegan enjoyed running around the Parc Guell while we managed to get a fairly good look at the Gaudi architecture. This amazing architectural style is all over the city and quite incredible.

.

Such a lovely pink colour…..

Through the arch in Parc Guelle

Some Gaudi inspired buildings

After absorbing the culture and recharging our batteries for a few days it was time to go to a new place – too much free time is never such a good idea when you are WWOOFING! As is usual with trying to find new places to go, it takes a bit of time to find somewhere that is right for us, and to find people that want us. It usually involves a bit of rejection on both sides and after we had decided not to contact the “Roody Noodies” as we called them (the nudist colony that only wanted 2 hours of work a day), and turned down an offer to deconstruct bread ovens we settled on Can Santosha near Pamplona. It took us quite a while to make the decision to go here though as the host sounded interesting, a bit bonkers, kind of fun, but above all was brutally honest about the conditions of the place, an eco build. I quote from his e-mail: 

“The project is in the first times, a few incomodities are here (small place for all the people, uncovered toilet outside, shower with heated water in the kitchen). In winter, water is available in only one tap outside (when not iced; if iced, in the same water tank, breaking the ice layer!). Electricity only when generator is on (short times on day, while working). Here, winter is cold outdoors (where must of the job should be done),  except inside the kitchen, where we are comfortably warm. Outdoors is moody, too, when raining, and sometimes snowed.”

But the project sounded so interesting – building a house out of straw bales! So we decided that we could cope with at least some of these “incommodities” for a week at least and decided to give it a go………..

Well, we have had the most amazing week so far, it is cold, but the scenery is stunning and mostly it is that crisp sunny cold rather than miserable grey. We did have to break ice on the water tank every morning for the first few days, the toilet is a bucket surrounded by straw bales, and there is only occasional electricity (when we need to turn the generator on to use the tools for work). But we have used the washing machine, and the bizarre internet connection (via 3G for those in the know???) and there have been lots of new foods to try, including sea weed – very nutritious apparently. I think above all the host is quite a character who seems to be positive about everything, enjoys having Tegan around and is happy for us to get stuck in. There are three other WWOOFERS here (a guy from Bulgaria who was here when we got here, and a Spanish couple who arrived after us and have been WWOOFING in Spain for 2 years). Our room is a snuggy attic room above the kitchen – really warm and cosy (although at only 1.5 m high at the highest point only Tegan can stand up in it!). We have even managed to wash in a giant plastic bowl – a definite achievement, since the water had to be heated on the gas stove first, and, well, Tegan was the only one that actually fitted in the bucket! 

We have done a load of different things…………I "plastered” one of the walls (with straw and mud) and we both did something similar with some of the floor, spreading barbatine (a mud/clay mix) and straw 5cms thick. Andy also had to clean some of the bee hives (and discovered quite a bit of honey!) and chopped wood with a chain saw. Tegan has been entertaining everyone and doing a bit of painting (pictures) in her spare time.

So below are a few photos of the crazy experiences we have been having – mud everywhere! We are now in Pamplona for the day chilling out and being tourists again. Tomorrow we are visiting a deserted village that has become a famous squat, with our host and the other WWOOFERS. There are several deserted villages around as there was a dam and reservoir built about 40 years ago and apparently the government bought up the villages and evacuated the people as most of their farm land had been used for the project. It seems they have stayed empty ever since. We are staying here at least another week and then plan to go back to France.

Can Santosha

Sawing logs

    

Mixing barbotine and straw

   

Covered in mud

Cleaning the bee hives

Laying the floor

The sink

The toilet