I truly apologize for not being able to update my blog for such a long time. At the first farm I had access to the internet via my host’s computer but did not have time to make an update. Anyway, the update will be made now. It is long, so take off your shoes, sit back and enjoy.
So, where to start? Probably with the journey to Najac. First of all, Najac is named one of the most beautiful cities in France, which amazingly seems to be true. It is located in Midi-Pyrenees (the southwest part of France). It sits atop a large hill with an ancient castle and church built in the 1300s. That is pretty freaking old. Well, you would assume that such a cool city would be fairly easy to get to… Nope! It required a flight to Toulouse, a train to Tessonieres, a bus to le Gupie and then a van to Najac. It was so confusing but somehow I made it there without breaking the bank and without sleeping in a train station. Cheers. The bus ride was the most exciting part of the travel. The driver had to be nuts driving so fast on these tiny twisty-turvy roads through the French countryside. It was hard to get any good pictures and some turned out a bit blurry but here is a bit of what the ride looked like.
We hoped into his badass Land Rover and drove to La Singlarie ( the name of the farm). It was not quite what I had been expecting. The farm was huge (55 Hectares) and it has many many many buildings. One of the buildings was just absolutely beautiful. I assumed this would be the families house. As it were, this building was a series of Gites (condos) which the family rents to vacationers. Unfortunately for them but fortunately for me, there were no vacationers in the first gite. What did that mean for me? Yep. Uh huh. Oui. I got to stay there for two whole weeks (shared with two other Irish WWOOFers, Shawn and Amy). Here are some pictures although they do not do the accommodation justice.
So hopefully that gave you all somewhat of an idea of my lodging lifestyle. It was nicer than any place I have every stayed at on vacation, and it was well, free. The family we stayed with lived in the house with the picture of the jeep. There was Freya (their 19 year old daughter studying in Toulouse), Connor (17 year old boy) and Jamie and Ali. They were all very nice and very hospitable. In fact, they cooked us meals two times a day. It was not mac-and-cheese either. Ali cooked us gourmet meals everyday with almost everything grown on the farm (including the meat as it was a meat farm). Not only was that but all the bread on the farm homemade every day. Beat that! The only meal we had to cook was for our breakfasts. That is with exception to the day I cooked dinner. I cooked up one of the farms ducks as a honey orange roast with herb roasted potatoes and creamed butter beans with Cantal cheese. It was delectable.
Another misconception I had about the farm is that it would basically just be a vacation in which I had to do a bit of work in a garden. Wrong. That assumption could not have been further from the truth. We worked our asses off. There was an array of different responsibilities that we had to do.
Every morning we were required to go around and feed/check-on all of the animals. Sounds easy? First we would feed Gorgon & Zola (haha?) these two pet pigs that are just hugely obese and disgusting. Every day one of those pigs would eat its food too fast and start shrieking because its food was stuck in its throat. Stupid pig. Next we would head over to the pigs being raised for slaughter. We had to wheelbarrow a huge thing of cut hay and dry food up this never-ending hill. The scary part was that the pigs would run around and through your legs and at 150 kilos each (330 lbs) it is pretty easy to be knocked over. After feeding them, we had to walk around their electric fence to make sure that nothing had fallen on it. Luckily I never got shocked doing this, but Shawn and Amy (the Irish folk) were not so lucky.
After the pigs, we had to go check on the cows. I think technically we were supposed to be doing more than what we actually did. Basically, we would walk down the hill, count to make sure there was 15 and leave. If you were unlucky enough to do this with Jamie it would require shouting Beehh loudly and slowly getting closer and closer to the cows until you can touch their face. Keep in mind these are not those friendly dairy cows that are used to people touching them. These cows had horns, big horns and they were not scared to use them.
Last but not least of our chores was to take care of the chickens. Now just remember that when I say chores, these are just daily routines and do not even include the other projects that we worked on. This routine is completed twice a day and sometimes three depending on the animals. The chickens merely consisted of feeding the free range chickens that are used for eggs and also the chickens, ducks and guinea fowl being raised for meat. When I say free range I literally mean free range. The chickens that lay eggs are totally free to run away at any point but none of them do (because of food of course). They were my favorite of all the animals. We named one Poppit that kept coming around any time we were working on a project. Then there was Norman the Mormon; he was a rooster, the only rooster (or cock) and therefore had promiscuous sex with all of his wives in broad daylight. Well done Norman. The chickens raised for meat were just loud and annoying, that is except for when we were eating them, hehe.
As for the chores go, there were basically two big assignments (although each took several days): To cut and spruce up the farm for the guests renting the gites which included cutting hay, weeding, mowing, and lots of other manual labor, the second was to build a pig pen which was just a crazy job.
The cutting of the hay was around electric fenses, in the garden of the gites and in the garden of Jamie’s house. Our first workday was 12 hours (as all of our days, by the way) and we spent the entire time behind the gites. It actually was not even a very large area. The problem was that hay, weeds and animals had built up a 3 foot mess all over the whole garden. We had to use a metal weed wacker to initially cut the grass. Then we had to get the big clumps of weed with hand sheers. Finally we mowed the lawn three times before it turned out okay. The good news is that the work impressed Jamie and he told his son Conner that from now on he had to cut it to that standard. Poor kid. So this exercise continued for several days and we also trimmed huge trees that had branches so low they looked like bushes. The thing about this farm is that nothing goes to waste, literally nothing. All the hay that we cut was to be wheelbarrowed around the farm to respective animals as to not waste it. What an exercise.
Our second big assignment took a week and at some points seemed like the most hellish week of my entire life. Unfortunately during my stay my camera had died and I wish I had taken stage by stage pictures because it was just phenomenal. To start, the pen had only its walls built out of trees that were of course cut and made into wood planks on the farm. It had an area of about 400 feet squared (40 meters squared for the europeans). It was on an incline and the ground inside consisted of just what one thinks a pig sty would consist of: torn up mud and hay. The first goal was to dig down 6 inches across the entire pen but keeping the slope of the land. Two days and three hundred blisters and bruised hands later, we finished. It looked beautiful, or at least as beautiful as a pig sty can look. Next step: create a hardcore for the concrete to set into ( basically just a layer of small rocks). As mentioned, the farm saved as much as possible. Naturally, they do not have a pile of small rocks laying around, but they did have a pile of boulders from the fields. Our job: take a sledgehammer and turn enough boulders into small rocks to completely cover 400 square feet of earth. Easy? No. Another day and a half later and many more blisters and this task was complete. Thank God that I brought back pain hot/cold pads with me. They made into good use. But wait, the project is not done. Next we had to concrete everything. This only took a day and a half and was probably the msot fun part of the project because you really could see the product of your hard work quickly. The thing that made it the hardest was the size of the mixer. It was tiny which meant we had to make hundreds of loads of concrete, each which came out a bit differently. Shoveling the sand, gravel and the cement into the mixer and then carrying wet concrete in a wheelbarrow to location was not a walk in the park, either. We got it done in due time, but because of the different mixes and our experience, the concrete came out a bit porous. Porous concrete will crack and break when water freezes in its cracks. That meant I had to go back over and stucko everything with a sand/concrete mixture. It sucked, but it came out beautifully. I wish you could see it. Stupid camera.
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