In Favor of a WWOOF/HelpX Holiday

            A week ago, I left my last of four WWOOF/HelpX hosts, wrapping up two and a half months working on farms and in gardens around Ireland. I have been lucky enough to be able to travel abroad several times in my life, but this experience has been the most educational and satisfying of all of my journeys overseas. Would I recommend an Irish WWOOF/HelpX holiday to you? Yes, without hesitation. They're an especially cheap way to see the country -- a bed and most meals are provided in exchange for your work. But this shouldn't be your sole reason to WWOOF/HelpX (and treating the experience like a "cheap holiday" won't win you any favors with your hosts). Do it to learn about organic gardening, farming, construction, food preserving and sustainable living. Do it to experience different lifestyles. Do it to see how people actually live in Ireland -- more than you can glean from movies, books, tours, or from the brief encounters a typical holiday permits. Do it to get outside, to get physically stronger, muddy, tired out, and toughened up. Do it for any and all of these reasons that benefit you, and know that you're helping someone else in return.

            Depending on their needs and resources, hosts will welcome many different types of travelers. Twenty-somethings are common in the WWOOF and HelpX crowd, but various hosts will take (and sometimes prefer) older volunteers, couples, solo travelers, families, groups, the unexperienced and the skilled  -- those with carpentry and horse knowledge seemed to be in particularly high demand. Many hosts accept non-native speakers looking to improve their English, lots of them cater to vegetarians while some are strictly vegetarian, and placements can range from days to weeks to months.

            If I haven't convinced you yet, here are some of the top reasons I enjoyed the experience:

            Community exposure. It's possible to travel abroad and remain very insulated. It's possible to live three months in a country and still feel at arm's length from the culture. Much of my university study abroad experience felt this way: the French language learning school I attended provided a sort of cocoon between me and the native French population of the university; my closest friends were fellow international students; I was not confident enough (and perhaps just didn't drink enough) to strike up conversations with strangers. WWOOF and HelpX cuts through all of this. As a volunteer, you are for the most part living, eating, and working alongside your host. Furthermore, all of my hosts made an effort to involve me in their social circle, either introducing me to relatives, taking me to local music sessions, requesting my help on community projects, bringing me along to dinner parties, or acquainting me with other visitors to their homes.

            This involvement made me feel closer to my hosts, and so did the fact that we were participating in an exchange. I have had other experiences as a non-contributing guest in peoples' homes -- times when a host refused my help and tried to wait on me. It tends to make me uncomfortable. I spend a lot of time wondering whether I am being sufficiently polite and grateful for the occasion (a "thank you" often doesn't feel adequate for these situations). With WWOOFing and HelpXing, I was still respectful and grateful, but I felt like I was earning my keep -- my thank you was in the attention and enthusiasm that I put towards my work. Kitchens, living spaces, gardens, green spaces all felt more like home because I helped clean/manage/restore/create them.

            A third facet of the experience that I appreciated was the chance to have a base off the beaten track from which I could explore the area. At my first hosts', this meant several hours of bike rides on a borrowed bike and exploration of the town on foot, while at my later hosts' I hiked around and enjoyed bits and pieces of the countryside (back roads, old roads, sheep paths, hills, lakes, fields) that only the locals would know about.

            Lastly, I'm particularly glad that I took this trip now -- in the weird post-graduation haze -- to sample different lifestyles and decide my own priorities about the kind of home/job/community I want to make for myself. Would I want to cope with the maintenance of a compost toilet? Probably not. A year-round garden? I'd like to try. Grey water system? Definitely. I've admired the way houses are designed, picked up a few recipes, taken note of how a community orchard was put together, improved my skills with the handsaw, and gathered a bucketful of little tips to carry home with me (e.g. put coffee grounds in the corners of your raised beds to discourage slugs). I'm tempted to have traditional teatime back in Oregon, but I'm not sure if I trust myself with cookies always in the house.

            All this being said, WWOOF and HelpX can have their downsides. There's always a risk of landing with a host whose lifestyle or attitude is incompatible with your own. To this, I would say (as I learned myself), look for well-reviewed hosts, invest in a cell phone, bring some extra funds in case you need to stay in a hostel and find a replacement host, and ask questions (for example, ask your host in an email how far it is to the nearest town, how many hours they expect you to work, and on arrival ask any volunteers who are already there if they are comfortable and having a good time). Both the WWOOF and HelpX organizations give you the option of reporting a truly bad host, so hopefully these problems should be few and far between. Also, I would suggest turning to HelpX if you're in a tight spot and can't find WWOOF hosts -- I think the demand for HelpX hosts is slightly smaller, and the hosts I contacted were quicker to reply to my emails.

            I left for this trip expecting rain, muddy fields, livestock tending, an outdoor lifestyle, cozy music sessions, and some quiet time to get my priorities in order and learn a bit more about farming. In reality, I had almost no contact with livestock (though dogs and cats abounded), and many of the farms were large gardens. I did hear some great music. I did pick up a lot of gardening tips and get some things mentally sorted. I spent hours outside most days. But I also received much more than I had imagined. I met people in Ireland who I'd be happy to visit again, and who I hope would be happy to see me. I helped get a community orchard up and running. I went kayaking at night. I tried set dancing. I went on night walks, got lost on a bike, climbed a smallish mountain three times, saw sheepdogs herding, found a warm Irish sweater, tried five or six varieties of cider and hitchhiked for the first time. And I'm returning satisfied. In the end, this was a holiday much less about escapism and much more about discovering how I want to direct and refashion my life when I return home.

Coomhola: Final Farm

            I arrived in Coomhola, West Cork, a little over ten days ago. We're situated on the slope of a little valley, with the lane running one direction up onto rocky, sheep-cropped hills, and the other direction over streams and along a river until it bumps into the end of an inlet on one side of the Beara Peninsula. The farm itself is the site of an old iron foundry, and has been gradually reclaimed from weeds and ruin by our lovely host and her WWOOFers. WWOOFers (there were three others when I got here, one now, and four more arriving tomorrow) stay in a semicircle of four trailers around the terraced garden. Given the general spideriness and chilliness of the trailers, my preferred hang-out spot is the "Little House," a little stone house built by WWOOFers, for WWOOFers, with kitchen, movie projector, couch, stove, disco ball, and guitars (pretty deluxe, no?).

            Most of our meals arrive in pots and on plates fresh from our host's kitchen. During the week she bakes fresh bread and whizzes together soups with ingredients like apple, lemon and feta (though never all three at once, as far as I'm aware). On the weekends we are left to whip up our own beans on toast and/or omelettes. And our cabinet, although low on spices (we've currently got salt, a few shakes of pepper, and curry powder), is always stocked with teas, digestives, ginger cookies, and homemade jams. Salads are easy gathering from the garden, which is also producing beans, zucchinis, pumpkins, nasturtiums and borage.

            Work here varies depending on who's asking. Our host has had us canning blackberry jam, processing and freezing apples, making apple wine, weeding, creating hanging baskets, fixing the roof of a tool shed, and gathering wood from the dump to recycle. Her adult daughter has been making chutney with us and instructed us how to pull up some invasive Japanese Knotweed and burn it (a tricky task with the wind, damp, and heaps of green material), while her daughter's partner had our help carting, splitting and stacking firewood, and their 3-year-old daughter has instructed us that "you are going to have to do everything I say," which mainly involves making grass-and-flower potions, carving rocks and watching her dance and sing.

            Downtime, however, has been plentiful. We start late in the mornings, have 2.5 days weekends, and have had many outings to Bantry for shopping, a bit of trad music and the Friday market, as well as a night of set dancing at a nearby pub. The set dancing, like the trad music sessions, requires much practice and memorization; a half-hour lesson prior to the open dance only prepared us for a single song. However, it was worth it to stay and watch the long-time dancers (one a girl of only nine or ten) linking hands, spinning, and nimbly galloping around the room.

            Last weekend, we walked two hours up the road to Priest's Leap, marked by a cross. What begins as a landscape of smaller green fields and hedges ends abruptly with the highest house in the valley, and the bare, sheep-grazed ridges begin, patchy with heather and gorse and stone splitting through the skin of the earth. Sheep can wander onto the road in places, and will often give you a stare before scrambling down the hillside. Priest's Leap perches at the blustery top of a ridge, which plunges down one side into a river valley with a view of the distant sea, and falls away on the other into County Kerry. The story one WWOOFer related to me was that a priest on horseback was pursued up the mountain (by whom it wasn't clear), and finding himself surrounded at the very top spurred his horse into a giant leap -- and wafted all the way down to the town of Bantry, several miles away.

The Scotland Report

A hike up the Pentlands

            Hello,

Reporting from Coomhola, Ireland here following a week's stay in the Edinburgh/Penicuik region of Scotland. "Yes" and "No" posters, stickers and buttons spattered the Scottish cities as they approached the referendum on Scottish independence on the 18th. I got a taste of both sides of the debate, from native Scots and more recent arrivals. The issue is very complicated, but the concerns I heard from the "No's" center on the uncertainty of what will happen to the border with England, Scottish currency (currently the pound, which First Minister Alexander Salmond believes Scotland could keep when independent, though England disagrees) and the negative impact independence could have on the economy. The "Yes's" I've spoken to believe that independence would allow for more progressive governance and the removal of nuclear weapons from the country. In the end, the "No's" won. However, talk before the referendum was of a potential "neverendum" (never-ending referendum), though my new Irish host reports that the U.K. may consider extensive devolution of several of its countries/regions.

            While in Scotland I was hosted by four of my parents' friends (two households) from their Edinburgh/Midlothian days, and was able to meet a fifth in a café on a rainy Edinburgh afternoon. They kept me well fed with meals including tender asparagus in sauce and haggis pizza. The haggis was a first for me, but I'm not sure it entirely counts since I told myself I was eating a creatively spiced sausage.

            I spent most of my week in the town of Penicuik, about an hour's bus ride from the heart of Edinburgh. I went walking twice through the Penicuik House Estate -- woods, fields, and a river all rolling up to a palatial house now undergoing restoration after a fire that gutted the interior years and years ago. 

Penicuik House

Curling pond on Penicuik House Estate

The estate is also home to a garden dubbed "The Lost Garden" -- a substantial walled plot of land that has lain dormant and is partially planted with orderly rows of as-yet-unharvested Christmas trees (now at least three times as high as your typical Christmas tree). The garden used to have a mushroom house, glasshouses, living quarters for gardeners, and it supplied peaches to the Prince of Wales. The Penicuik Community Development Trust, with the help of young people and other volunteers, are reclaiming parts of the garden. While I was in Penicuik, their potato harvest was selling like hotcakes.  

            Open Doors day in Penicuik occured during my stay, with various buildings and organizations opening their normally private or off-limits spaces to the community. I lent a hand with a papermaking demo in the back of the Pen-y-Coe Press, former home of a post office and bank, current printing/stationary/bits-of-everything store run by the Penicuik Community Development Trust and volunteers. Passers through were treated to a firing up of the 50-odd-year-old Heidelberg Press, which whisks papers to and from the printing mechanism with a windmill-like arm and an impressive noise. Another Penicuik highlight was the film night at the town hall. The Great Dictator with Charlie Chaplin was lighter and more absurd than I expected from a movie about Germany under Hitler. One scene mocks Hitler (Chaplin), showing him perform a bizarrely graceful dance with a floating globe.

St. Andrews Cathedral

            I was lucky to have a host generous enough to drive me to St. Andrews to investigate the university there. I won't say too much about it. Pluses: the ruins of a giant old cathedral; the sea; a friendly, relaxed atmosphere; a shop with daring flavors of ice cream; and creative writing instructors who not only publish collections and novels, but also write for radio and television (a new avenue of interest -- writing for performance?). Minuses: rumors of St. Andrews being a) a bit boring, and b) expensive, with few scholarships; a strange abundance of American and possibly Canadian accents. I guess that last is only a somewhat minus, but it seems a shame to go to graduate school abroad and end up living in a pocket of people from your own country.

            The time I spent in Edinburgh city proper included a climb up Scott's Monument (cramped, dizzying, beautiful views), a visit to the National Gallery (a new discovery, John Duncan) and Museum of Modern Art (unsettling, good scone, bad sandwich), a trip up Calton Hill (a strange mishmash of buildings), wandering on the Royal Mile (touristy, interesting performance art, pretty T-shirts), and a quick walk to Edinburgh University (intimidatingly urban with nice, handy shops + big, gorgeous park nearby).

Edinburgh, with Scott's monument at left

            I feel like I have left out many kindnesses and several bits of interest because I'm not directly mentioning my hosts, but I send a big thanks to them for their above and beyond generosity, and I hope to meet them again in the future. For now, goodnight.

Adventures in Night Kayaking

            As hinted in my last post, night kayaking has occurred and it was fantastic. I joined a group going paddling with Atlantic Sea Kayaking on the edge of an inlet just as the sun had set. We piled on layers, including waterproof-trouser-suspender-type-jobs, a waterproof jacket, life vest and a spray skirt that fits over the cockpit and keeps your legs dry, then, with a short lesson on how to hold your paddle, headed for the boats. Everyone but the two guides were in double kayaks, and I was paired with Matthew, whose face I must have seen for approximately 30 seconds, but who was a really lovely guy and an experienced instructor at another business down the coast. According to one of our guides, he was "alright, unless you let him listen to techno music." I gladly let him steer, and he proceeded mostly on course but occasionally bearing down full speed on buoys, rocking the kayak, challenging me to row as fast as I could, turning us around so we could row backwards, and pondering whether, as rumor had it, swans could break a person's arm with their beak (we saw three swans, all apparently unfazed by our presence, but very possibly doing some devious scheming).

            Light disappeared early on in our 2.5 hour trip, fading until the main points visible were the skyline, the lights on piers and of the houses in nearby Castletownshend, the neon vests worn by those steering, and most importantly, the red headlamps of our guides, one flashing, one steady. Every so often, the guides would gather us to speak about a point of interest, such as the nearby Spanish graves or the castle where the ghost of a pirate is said to appear punctually on such-and-such a day every year. Mostly, though, we were just paddling, past caves that sucked the water in and spat it out again, past moored boats and indistinct trees. Then, at one point, the dip of our paddles in the water began to stir up tiny trails of shimmer --bioluminescent plankton that flash when the water is disturbed. Close to the shoreline, as the night grew darker, the plankton were plentiful, sparkling in great clouds when you pulled your paddle deep, and winking along the ripples if you skimmed the water or sent splashes along the surface. Tiny underwater constellations. We would get so distracted flipping our paddles beneath the water that we would bump into trees that had toppled at the water's edge, or ram passing fellow kayaks.

            All in all a wonderful evening, and tomorrow I pay for it with a few hours gardening. A good deal, I reckon.

Skibbereen

View of Lough Hyne and the ocean

            I've now been at my new host's near Skibbereen for a week. We're close enough to the ocean for people to harvest seaweed for mulch and for the fish and chips to be fresh and flakey (options for fry sauce include curry and sweet chili). Days alternate between easy lulls I spend reading, drinking tea and on the computer -- hurrah for WiFi -- and harder sessions of garden work. My host's polytunnels are especially lush. Two long, covered tunnels host some expected vegetables -- zucchini, onions, eggplant, garlic, basil (at least four types including lemon and thai), salad greens, along with some more unusual tenants -- a grape arbor, a kiwi tree, a pen of corn, peppers and a fig tree scraping the ceiling. Grabbing a fistful of weeds in the tunnel more often than not turns up a few orange and red nasturtiums, which carpet the otherwise empty parts of the raised beds.

            So, a bit of weeding there, but most of my work time has been spent at the newish Community Orchard, which is gearing up for Skibbereen's Food Festival next week. 

Skibbereen's Community Orchard

The orchard's creators designed it as an educational space for the community, so in typical backyard garden fashion it is small, with apple trees, strawberries, flowers, blackcurrants and some small unsown beds to be adopted by local schools. A principal goal is to create paths around the trees and beds for visiting tours of schoolchildren, and to that end I've been a part of a team of community members and visitors clearing grass and topsoil, laying cardboard, covering the cardboard with bark mulch and doing other small jobs to ready the space. I have four tiny new calluses on my palms from all the shoveling. Maybe most exciting is the nearly six-foot tall willow snail one woman is weaving next to the entrance. People have been pulling into the convenience store parking lot across the road to give the space (the snail?) a longer look.

Apple tree mulched with seaweed at the Community Orchard

            My host has also invited me to take part in dinners with friends, one in which the Alsatian stew called Baeckoffe was the main course. The key to Baeckoffe, according to our Alsatian host, is a lot of white wine and a long cooking process; the cook starts the stew at a very high temperature and lowers it gradually over several hours. This mimicks the baker's cooling oven in which the stew was traditionally cooked after the baker had made his bread. Unfortunately, I didn't get her Baeckoffe recipe. My favorite recipe that we've made at home, however, goes something like this:

Zucchini Pancakes

(makes eight small pancakes, serves two)

2 eggs, beaten

1 medium zucchini, grated

1/2 cup cheddar, grated

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/3 cup of flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

Smoked paprika

Splash of milk (if needed)

Combine all -- you're aiming for a consistency that, like regular pancakes, is liquid enough to spread when dropped but isn't entirely runny (I don't think I'll be writing cookbooks any time soon). Fry in butter and/or olive oil until golden brown on both sides.

We ate these with ratatouille and basil leaves, but they'd probably be good with any kind of vegetable side.

           

            I also had the chance to hike up the hill next to nearby Lough Hyne (pronounced Loch Ein)...

 

...and see the holy wells at its foot. The water from the wells is said to be good for the eyes. The pagan well -- a spring sheltered under a ring of moss at the foot of a tree, is decorated with beads and ribbon, a cheerful fuchsia car air freshener, a lego man, painted stones, and tiny statues, one of a smiling old woman, and another which looks suspiciously like a Virgin Mary. Up the road, the Catholic well seems to be engaging in a little one-upmanship, with a whitewashed stone altar and rhododendrons.

            Plans seem to be in the works for a nighttime kayaking trip on Lough Hyne tomorrow. It would be my first time kayaking, and it seems a little daunting... I'll try to post a report soon.

County Clare: Farm #2

A bit of County Clare

I came to my next host's in County Clare just at the start of blackberry season. Bales are out in the nearby pastures, and the silage wrapped in black plastic is still in the early stages of fermentation, and smells like apples and oats. In terms of lifestyle, the change from my last host's home is striking. In Kilkenny, there was the familiarity of the television being a family hub in the evenings after dinner, and modern conveniences were expected and desired. Here, an environmental conscience takes precedent. The roof of the house is a green roof, sprouting a thin layer of plants, the toilet is a compost toilet, and there is no television in sight. Meals (besides breakfast, which is porridge or a seeds and raisins granola called flapjack) are about 60% garden harvest and 40% dried bulk foods, such as lentils, millet, pasta and beans.
My tasks here have included flooring, pulling onions and stringing them for storage (an onion stringing tutorial may be forthcoming), mulching the former onion bed with newspaper, straw and grass trimmings, tending ducks, watering a polytunnel where tomatoes, herbs, lettuce, zucchini and calendula flowers shelter from the wind, planting lettuce in seed modules, and cutting grass and weeds away from an electric fence with a scythe and shears. In return I have my own guesthouse/cabin (where I sometimes room with a mammoth spider whose feet sound like tiny mice feet, and who I have several times banished into the cold night), good meals, stories, gardening knowledge, and rides into the village to listen to the local music sessions.
A curious thing happened at the first session I visited. My host had been invited to join in on his fiddle at a little pub "in the middle of nowhere," as he put it -- with no houses or stores nearby. The room was half filled with Japanese participants in an Irish music camp, gripping their fiddles and flutes and whistles and waiting for a song they recognized, and the rest of the room was occupied by local musicians, with a sprinkling of instrument-less people in the corners. One of these last was a young woman about my age, vaguely familiar looking, who finally came over in a break between songs and re-introduced herself as the girl I had met briefly at my almost host's in Roscommon (a whole different part of Ireland), and who had exchanged contact information with me in case we had a chance to meet again. She told me she was milking, child bossing, and yogurt and cheese making at a farm while some of the family was on holiday in Germany. I thought this was extremely coincidental, considering that my host's family was also in Germany, but in fact, as it turns out, they are traveling together. Small world.
I had a chance later in the week to visit her farm, which is quite beautiful and looks like a ton of work, with cows, horses (draft horses, nonetheless, and a barnful of equipment to use them to farm with), ponies, turkeys, goats, dog, cats, kids, garden, and a pet crow. I helped out a little spreading straw for the horses and moving farm equipment, then had a good time testing the difference between cow's and goat's milk (definitely a difference -- goat's milk is more pungent) and playing a railroad-related board game. A veteran goat-milker, she also gave me a basic lesson in milking (pinch with thumb and index finger, and don't worry about being gentle -- they've got teats of iron).
During my stay, I've also had the chance to visit and volunteer at the Irish Seed Savers' Association near Scariff. The Association owns twenty acres of land, with several orchards, greenhouses and gardens, and puts on workshops, cooking demonstrations, apple tasting tours, volunteer days and open days.

Cabin with green roof at Seed Savers -- an example of my host's green building techniques

Seed saving -- basically the harvest and replanting of seeds -- is done in order to preserve non-commercial varieties of plants, which supports biodiversity and food security (in the case of a disease or pest problem, a large variety of plants means that there is a bigger chance that one is resistant -- plus, these plants don't require environments cultivated with chemicals to survive, as some commercial varieties do), among other reasons. The Association got a head start with the efforts of an individual, Dr. Keith Lamb, who bicycled around Ireland gathering trees in the 1940s. Sort of a reverse Johnny Appleseed, was my first thought.
Currently, I've got the house to myself while my hosts visit Germany. Keeping me company is a wily little puppy named Bran, who is described as a "dwarf collie," (quite cute, with a head just too big for his body and stubby legs). He enjoys staring at me with black eyeliner eyes and running barking into the night. I think he finds me sort of boring, being used to the bustle of a large family. I try to make up for it with long walks every day.

Bran, the troublemaker.

I'm signing off for now. Next up is a house in West Cork, southward.

A Taste of Things to Come

Blog posts will be infrequent (nonexistent?) over the next week or so, while I am out in beautiful County Clare without fast internet.
Recent days have been spent:
Harvesting onions and blackcurrants
Stringing onions for storage
Flooring
Clearing grass and weeds away from an electric fence with a scythe
Tending ducks
Reading
Going to pubs for evening music sessions
Visiting a nearby farm for a goat milking experience, hike, and a board game

Good times!