Farming…..

After a VERY cold night we had breakfast at the ‘station’ a communal area which sleeps about 5 people has two settees a log fire, this is where we have breakfast, lunch and dinner (dinner is cooked by us on the weekends, Shaun provides all the required ingredients) wow reading this back it sounds amazing it was actually not my standard! Especially when we have a resident mouse!

There are other fellow WWOOF’ers here, Piet from Germany, Fei Fei from China, Evita from Argentina, Marlene from France. A great set of people who were so welcoming.

Piet

Loves his food!

Fei Fei

A Chinese girl who does not how to cook rice!

Marlene

You can just hear her mind churning away ready to ask another question

Evita

Gets rash when she starts gardening, also she wants to protect animals. Me: “so are you vegetarian” Evita “no I eat meat” me “!?!!’ (Puzzled)

For farming work we had to do some weeding!!! I hate weeding at home and I travel half way around the world to do weeding!!!

As it was our first day we had to do 5.5 hours, this is very tough work, i was amazed that Shaun has to do this as well as other very hard work seven days a week. Alongside us was Pia, Shaun’s ex girlfriend, she is very knowledgeable about organic farming also has an astrological approach to farming and seeding. About half way through our weeding it started to hailstone, in this part of the country you can get the four seasons in one day, wind, sun, snow and rain!

We stopped for lunch at 1pm for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (my new favourite) and cheese with lettuce (Sangeet picked the lettuce from the farm, so you could not get any fresher and very tasty lettuce!)

After lunch Sangeet and I did another 1.5 hours of weeding. Afterwards we went to Balclutha a town about 30 minutes away, as Sangeet was cooking for everybody in the evening, we wanted to stock up on a couple of items. I also saw a laundrette there perfect for drying our clothes which I did later in the evening.

Before I went to the shops. I started the log fire, when we got back I saw Piet had done some improvements, good old German engineering! The fire was giving great warmth to the station.

In the evening we had another WWOOFer called Ruth from Germany. She together with Marlene helped Sangeet cook the dinner, we had lentil curry and potato, cauliflower curry. Everybody enjoyed the meal very much. Whatever is left is taken care of by Piet!

Ruth putting her nursing skills into use

After the fantastic dinner we all sat in the station chatting, every so often somebody would put another log in the fire…..the heat in the station was nice and very cosy. When we went back to our caravan it was freezing, it was tempting sleeping in the station with the mouse. On the way back to the caravan we noticed the sky, with so many stars it was a beautiful sight, unfortunately we could not stay out too long because of the extreme cold.