American in Montpellier: Farm #2!

Massively Massive blog update…

So, where were we last... Prague? Okay. Got it. So, I went back to Prien from Prague, and the next day, Manuel and I packed everything up, and went to Munich for the day. We were to a museum called the Alte Pinakothek (yes, I managed to get him into a proper art museum!), which had a pretty amazing collection. Something like 2 Leonardos, 3 Raphaels, a lot of Rubens... Lots of cool stuff, and we only saw a tiny bit of it! Wish we had had the stamina for another few hours, but 2 hours was about our limit. We did some walking around, and then tried to find a hostel for the night. Goodness. The cheapest double room we could get was around 80 euro for the night, and dorm rooms were obscenely expensive, as well, not to mention, fully booked. What!? Seriously, it’s a disgrace to have hostels so expensive. We ended up asking at a few proper hotels just for a comparison... And ended up with a hotel room for 60 euro with breakfast included. Dear Munich hostels: epic fail. So, it was a fun evening, actually, once we finally found our hotel…

The next morning, we drove about half an hour North to the tiny little town of Meilendorf, near Attenkirchen, where my next WWOOF farm was, called Natur-Garten Schönegge. Manuel dropped me off, and then drove back to Prien where he had a serious date with a large mountain. So... Bauernhof nummer 2! Schönegge was about as different from Stauderer as humanly possible... Which was utterly perfect.

The cool thing about it, is that the farm is this sort of group effort. It’s owned by two brothers, Horst and Erhard, and they live there in two houses with their families and children, who are all upwards of 20. Then, there are a few workers who are there mostly year-round, Urbahn, Bastian, Manuel, Kai, and some more seasonal workers as well. They were working a lot of the farm’s new project—building a school on the farm for disabled children, which will open next week. I don’t know quite how it’ll work, but there’s a lot of practical learning and farm work mixed in with the normal curriculum. So, pretty cool. Then, there are always a few interns, and then finally the WWOOFers. When I came there were 4 others, but then 3 of them left a few days after. So, it ended up being me, an intern (a 15-year old boy who looked about 12), the workers, and a boy named Tom. He was a WWOOFer last summer, but then came back periodically and helped to built the school. He’s from New Zealand, and is generally pretty awesome and a total hippie. His girlfriend Maria, from Bulgaria, came that weekend, and the 3 of us spent a fair amount of time together. Fantastic people.

There was finally another real WWOOFer, as well, Christophe, from France. We tried speaking a bit of French, and all I can say, is that my French has been cannibalized by my German. Good god. The worst is the little words that just slip in, like “aber” or “ja,” plus I wonder where the third definite article is. I actually said this, too (when I was talking about last summer’s internship) “J’ai pas trop arbeité.” (For those of you who don’t know French and German—I should have said travaillé, which means “to work,” but instead, I took the German verb arbeiten, and managed to put it in the French past perfect tense. Good job, Emily).

Anyways, so... Life on the farm was really good. Got up early, had breakfast with the other WWOOfers, and started work at 7:00ish the first week, and 8:00ish the second week. We would work for around 5 hours, doing all kinds of things—picking carrots, green onions, tomatoes, repotting plants, picking plums, picking grapes... and then we ate lunch around 1:00. We take turns cooking and cleaning, and I ended up doing a fair amount of cooking the second week, which was a little scary at first, to cook for a group of people, but it was good. Also, you can’t really cook anything bad when you’re cooking for hungry farm workers. We ate basically entirely veggies, most of which had been in the ground a few hours prior. I also made a lot of soup and bread, which was fun. Bread is my new favorite thing to make, I think. Kilo of flour, 2 packs of yeast, salt, warm water, warm oven, and BANG! Bread! We didn’t work in the afternoon, so I usually read or took a nap for a few hours (or tried to plan a certain trip to Oslo...), and the we would reconvene around 6 and have tea, make some dinner, play with sculpey, we even jammed once... Sometimes, when it was a nice night, we would make a big fire, and us and some of the family would hangout, sometimes grilling. Oh, we’d make Stockbrot! It’s basically just you basic bread recipe, and then you put a piece on a stick, and bake it over the fire! So cool! We also watched movies twice with the family, both times outside with a projector and a screen, which was cool. How many times does one get to watch a film while sitting in front of a campfire?

Emily, this is all very good and well, but... Where on earth are the pictures?? Ah, couldn’t have said it better myself!

So much mud on my boots and pants...

The lovely half-outdoor kitchen where I seemed to have spent most of my time.

Yay bio! (Organic)

Veggies! Lettuce, and broccoli, and cauliflower, and carrots, and green onions, and fennel, and radishes, and pumpkins, and squash and......

My own personal vendange... (aren't you proud, dad?)

Bread experiment. Didn’t really know what was doing... I felt very clever, though, because the kitchen was freezing (because it only has 2 walls), so I put the dough in the oven with a bowl of hot water below it, and it rose so well!

Piles of tomatoes for soup!

Fresh, made-from-total-scratch tomato soup! With something like 25 tomatoes. Delicious!

My beautiful bread! With Rosemary, too. The really impressive thing is that it’s a gas oven, and there’s no temperatures on it, so you just have to set it at a good-sized-looking flame and hope for the best...

Lunchtime!

Tomato greenhouse. Picking tomatoes is really nice for about 15 minutes, because they smell nice, and you’re not sitting in the dirt, but then they start to attack you, and you end up with your arms all yellow from the pollen, and with your hands literally black. Why they’re black, I really don’t know... Maybe just the dirt sticking to the pollen? It’s pretty satisfying work though, when you have 15 kilos of really pretty tomatoes.