A Day in the Life

For the last two weeks, Pete and I have been WWOOFing in New Zealand. It’s basically the same thing that we were doing in Hawaii, but we’re working more hours, and getting both food and housing in exchange.

There are over 800 “farms” listed in the WWOOF (willing workers on organic farms) book, but most of them are what are known as “lifestyle blocks,” which is basically an eco-friendly home with a veggie garden, some chickens (“chooks”), and a yard full of recently planted native trees. It’s great that these lifestyle blocks exist, but less great when they’re masquerading as farms and you end up weeding someone’s carrots and beans for a week while they’re at work. This is what happened to us with our first host.

We spent a week in McQueen’s Valley, near Tai Tapu (Little River), confronting the gorse problem. When we arrived on this homestead-in-progress, we quickly learned what gorse was—a native plant with innocent-looking yellow flowers, and thousands of hairlike spikes, just waiting to implant themselves in your unsuspecting fingertips. The plant can grow as large as ten feet tall, from what we encountered, and once it flowers, spreads millions of tiny seeds per square foot of soil.

Chores weren’t limited to gorse-cutting, we also weeded the veggie garden, built a sheep paddock, and watched their three-year-old son, John. It was an interesting introduction to WWOOFing in New Zealand, and we were becoming skeptical, but we’d already made plans to stay at another farm/lifestyle block, called Blue Gums, where we are now.

Blue Gums is another place on the Banks Peninsula, located in the tiny “town” of Purau, a 30-minute hike and ten-minute ferry ride to the nearest proper town, Lyttleton. Here’s what life on the farm is like:

7:30 a.m.: Wake up to the sun as it rises over the mountains that surround us. The sound of sheep, birds, and cows is already peaking. I get up to make tea and get ready for the day. Maika and Gunther, the older German couple who are our hosts, don’t seem to care what time we start working, so we have a leisurely morning, reading, sipping tea, and maybe sitting on our porch enjoying the mountain views. We’re in a beautiful cabin at the top of a small mountain, a half-mile up the steep driveway from our hosts’ house.

9:00 a.m.: We walk down the driveway and have breakfast at our hosts’ house, usually homemade granola or some treat that Maika has baked. Since they work during the week, we help ourselves.

9:30. a.m.: Grab our tools and start working. Most of the work here consists of reforesting steep hills with native trees. New Zealand has been overrun with non-native pine forests, and where there are no pines, you’ll often find eroding hills. The hill above our cabin is one of the areas that we’re working on reforesting. So far we’ve planted over 130 trees on it.

11:00 a.m.: Tea time! New Zealanders love to drink tea, given that most of them are ex-pats from Europe (often from England and Scotland, given that most of New Zealand was “settled” by the British). Usually Peter and I skip this tea time and just have a cuppa after lunch instead.

1:00 p.m.: After a morning of planting in the sun (the temperature is getting well into the 70s during the day), we’ve worked up an appetite. If lunch isn’t leftover dinner, Peter likes to have eggs. With eight hens laying, they are always in abundance and very fresh.

1:45 p.m.: Back to work. Yesterday we put together a bunch of wooden frames that will go into the bee hives that we’d harvested honey from the night before. Four frames produced over 14 pounds of honey—and with all of the tea drinking around here they need it. They chose to harvest the honey since they’d run out, but usually there are 12-15 frames, so you could imagine how much honey they get.

4:00 p.m.: The day is done. This could mean more tea, or just some relaxing on the porch with a book until dinner. I prefer the latter.

7:00 p.m.: Dinner around here, at least on the weekends, is a collective effort. Last Friday night we made a bunch of pizzas in the outdoor clay pizza oven, which was really cool. All of the neighbors (who also have WWOOFers) came and we each designed our own pizza, and then cooked it in the oven, which took less than five minutes per pizza. The food is vegetarian and usually contains something that’s been grown on the property.

9:00 p.m.: If you’re a hardcore tea-lover, you’ll drink more tea after dinner. It’s kind of comical how much tea is consumed in a day. If you’re tired and want to sneak back to your cabin on the hill, then now’s the time.

We’ve just agreed to stay another week. I think we’d be crazy not to.