by Eleonora Ciampi
We received the following musings from a WWOOFer a while back, too beautiful not to share in full.
We feel it reflects quite beautifully what the day to day life can look like on a farm, for you who are still considering becoming a member and departing on your first WWOOF experience.
You can find Eleonora on Instagram @sailor.mooood
I’m glad you found something you like: this is what Angelica, my Swedish wwoof host, says to her son Gabriel who is 11 years old and is explaining to us, in impeccable English learnt on YouTube (according to him), that playing golf with his grandfather thrilled him.
Horizons that do not belong to me (golf, children, YouTube), nor do they reflect those in which we find ourselves as this dialogue takes place: in Angelica’s long vegetable gardens on the forest edge of Sweden’s west coast, a little above Gothenburg and right next to a seemingly nameless lake, during a break (in Sweden they call it Fika) from working in the fields. Yet that sentence resonates in me immediately, or rather takes root, like a seed meticulously planted in its own patch of soil.
I jot it down on a phone note shortly afterwards and read it again when I am at home. Now that note is a long list of quotes and impressions that struck me during my very long two weeks of wwoofing.
At last, I have found something I like, something that allows me to recognise myself in an ancient sense of belonging that starts from my grandfather who used to grow beef tomatoes to make ‘passata’ (sauce) and arrives at Angelica, who explains to me how she built the bio-lake that serves as a reservoir for rainwater to water the fields in a way that is admittedly laborious, but really clever.
The days pass very slowly at Angelica’s farm and even more so at the woofer house, that giant three-storey Swedish-style house that hosted me: above are Gert and Akasha, a couple of old hippies (and from what I understand, still practising) who own everything: fields, meadows, dwelling; on the intermediate floor the communal spaces: a kitchen where I will spend a lot of time cooking with my new friends, a living room with a large TV, where every night we will watch at least two episodes of The Office before falling asleep, and a yoga room; downstairs, our rooms: simple and bright with a couple of spiders in each corner, the subtle and harmless kind, who stand still night and day to watch over the rhythms of the house.
Work starts at 8 and ends, according to agreement, at 1 ‘with a little flex’, my wwoofing companions tell me straight away: in fact, we not always finish at 1, often at 2, one day at 4.30. But I never mind working in those gardens, and Angelica always wants to make sure that we would have free hours or even extra free days to compensate. I immediately realise that Angelica’s farm is a CSA and as such has specific needs: in my mind the comparison immediately goes to my previous “invented” wwoofing experience from a summer ago (I call it that because I didn’t sign up anywhere but just sent a message on Instagram: hello, can I come and help you in the fields for a week?) in Val Varaita, an hour and a half from home, at CRESCO, one of the few CSAs in Piedmont.
That is, Community Supported Agriculture: there are people who pay a fixed fee to receive boxes of organic fruit and vegetables in return. It is an idea to create a community, to supply the city with healthy and fair food, and to support farms that in return take the trouble to manage the land wisely, literally caring for the soil and rehabilitating to life some of those fields that we are used to seeing invaded by the monocultures of corn for fodder, in the Piedmont countryside.
In Sweden, the CSA is inspired by the same principles, but here everything seems wilder: the forest with its tall trees, where you can see a baby deer peeking out, is really just a stone’s throw away, and while you are tearing weeds from the carrot seedlings, you may stop for a second and hear the screech of an eagle above your head.
Well, in short, there is a lot of work and you start early and independently by reading the tasks to be completed (updated weekly) on the blackboard in the packing room: Angelica is keen to let us choose what we prefer to do and I, for example, love weeding and transplanting seedlings for the next season. But I will also often find myself tending to plants eaten by cabbage larvae (just like in my grandfather’s garden).
Then, when Angelica arrives, around 9/9:30, she brings with her a load of orders cleverly divided into excel files that betray her scientific background (which she reveals to me one day during a car journey): the file is neat and allows us to work out how much harvesting we need to do for each vegetable. So the magic begins: everyone offers to harvest something different and, box in hand, we divide between the fields for lettuce, cabbage, onions, apples, potatoes and ribs and the Green Houses for tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and courgettes. The aubergines here cannot grow: a small spider chokes all the leaves and the flowers wither, one morning I had the thankless task of exterminating them all.
Next to these fields there is also a small shop selling direct sales which reads in white on wood: GÅRDSBUTIK. Butik because it is the Swedish word for ‘shop’, but also because it is a small atelier of preciousness.
The cherry tomatoes that grow copiously in clusters look like glittering necklaces for elegant ladies, and each vegetable is cared for and buffed to perfection before being deemed suitable for sale.
At the market in Candiolo (the little village 15 km from Turin where I live and garden with my dad) I got used to it like this: the dirtier the soil, the rougher it is, the more organic it is, the more I want it. Here, however, it seems to be the opposite: customers complain if the apples are imperfect and demand carrots of the same size divided into precise 500g bunches.
In short, the rest of the morning is spent like this: weighing vegetables, packing orders and placing them in the refrigerated room from which they will be taken in the afternoon and distributed to customers.
From the Swedish vegetables I have learnt that it is no longer true that in the north they only eat roots and what grows underground: salads, tomatoes and curcubitaceous plants also do well, because by now the sun is beating down even here, the temperatures have stabilised between 20 and 25 degrees and the rains are intermittent and not excessive.
I have also learnt that pulling carrots trying to guess from the clump which one is the best is one of life’s satisfactions.
Or rather, something I enjoy. Which isn’t much, but it’s all that matters.
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Wwoof (World Wide Opportunities on Organics Farm) is an association that exists in almost every country in the world and allows you to travel to farms and do agricultural volunteer work in exchange for room and board. I have always been in love with Scandinavia and visited it on 4 different occasions before this summer, but wwoofing allowed me to experience culture, places and agricultural knowledge together in a different, immersive and fair way.
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