My first wwoof

[Sept 27, 2008]
We do about 5hrs of work a day. Work starts at 9am after make your own breakfast and goes until lunch around 1:30pm, an hour lunch, and then we work again until 3-4pm. We have two tea breaks also with English black tea usually, biscuits (cookies), and maybe a bit of dried fruit. Lunch is usually a bit late because of our tea break and dinner is around 7-8pm. We are always welcome to get snacks if we need them, but usually the meals are very filling.

Wwoofing isn't really about eating, so... in the past week I have weeded and turned up the soil for garden beds, removed 8-gauge wire from a fence and cleaned the bark off the wood posts, stuck poplar poles in the ground for a living gazebo, gathered sticks and brush which we burned in a huge bonfire, cracked walnuts while it rained yesterday, and 3 times a day we do the dishes. (This is in addition to our 5hrs of work each day). We end up working half of the daylight hours, but our hosts pretty much work dawn to dusk. In addition to doing outdoor work on their farm and keeping the B&B, there's the regular household work, taking care of their son Sol, and making lunch and dinner for us.

Gathering sticks to burn today was harder than the digging in the beds we'd been doing for the past few days. We'd load up an enormous blue tarp of sticks from the fields and drag it to the burn pile, taking 2-3 of us to haul it across the swampy meadows. The burn pile was next to the convergence of two streams and sopping wet from the rains yesterday. We got really muddy and needed wellies to keep our feet dry instead of our porous sneakers! (really really muddy shoes and pants)

Yesterday, the sheep were out in the yard mowing the grass. They're very good at it, but they are also very good at escaping. We kept having to chase them away from the vegetable beds and flowers and back to their designated area, which was not well enough fenced in. Today some escaped across the cattle grate into the road and we had to chase them back in. They're pretty nimble things and good at jumping through the bushes and on in particular seems to have a "grass is greener" mentality. So they can be a bit of a pain! And yes, we've done the quintessential counting of sheep.