Three farms, four weeks

The neat thing about wwoofing (Willing Workers On Organic Farms, or Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, whichever you prefer) is that I get such an incredible snapshot of people's lives. The daily rhythm of life and the people I meet are so different at each farm, as different as the matching set of bowls from Japan displayed on the kitchen shelves from the mismatched and broken-handled mugs in the cupboards. There are so many ways to compose a life.

First stop, Hikurangi. I stayed with Graeme and Dora, two lovely and kind people who raise beef cattle. The rammed-earth people. They are still putting the finishing touches on it, and it looks pretty similar to a traditional home - wood trim, doors, and stairs - but the main walls are in fact rammed earth. You need an earth-ramming machine to do it the way they did, building a wooden frame the width of the wall and dumping the earth (mixed with some water and maybe some sand?) inside. You then climb inside the frame and ram the earth down with the machine. (I didn't get to see the machine since they have since sold it, but I gather it is somewhat related to a jackhammer.) Eventually the wall gets too high for someone to stand in it, so you make layers to put on top of each other - I could see the seams in the walls, which were not painted and were very beautiful.
The most amazing thing about Graeme and Dora's place (other than the terrific feeling of being on top of the world) was that it is entirely powered by wind and sun. They have one wind turbine and some solar panels that somehow pump energy into big batteries, where it is stored for use. The hilltop property is wonderfully windy, and their back-up petrol-powered generator came on only once during the two weeks I was there.
A week into my stay in Hikurangi, a wonderful German couple, Katharina and Torben, joined me at Graeme and Dora's. We spent most of our time indoors since the cyclone above New Zealand gave Hikurangi a seven-day shower. We wondered if we would get to see the sun again as we painted, sanded, oiled, and cleaned wooden beams inside the house, but by the end of the week the sun peeked its head out long enough for us to get in a swim at the beach. Beautiful beaches, by the way. Most have rolling green hills behind them, with cows and sheep grazing nearby. Some have that turqoise water that you see in tourist brochures.

The Germans and I drove Leo (short for Leopold, their 20-year-old campervan) to Kerikeri (ok, you're right, I didn't do any driving - it was a standard of course), where we stayed with Marty and Becky at Kerikeri Organics for a week. Marty runs an organic shop with everything from his own beet root and coriander to split red lentils and sesame oil or dish detergent. We spent all our working hours outside (the cyclone had gone over to the Cook Islands). Wonderful earthy smells of spring onions, dill, fennell, lettuce and basil as we weeded them; lots of shoveling and composting to prepare for the courgette crop (zucchini - and I thought I wouldn't have to learn a second language if I went to New Zealand); preparing for Sunday market: 15 stalks of coriander, clipped and bagged; six fennell, roots trimmed; six celery, rinsed and bagged; 15 lettuce, roots kept but cleaned so they would keep longer; a few handfulls of scarlet runner beans, good off the vine.

Farm number three: Puriri Organics, Kaitaia. Bananas, avocados, and cherimoyas (from South America - green with a creamy, seedy and very sweet inside), none of which, very sadly, were in season. Andrea, our host, is one of the most busy people I have ever met, but very welcoming and also an excellent chef. I shared a flat with another German (they are all over New Zealand!), Christina, and we spent most of our time battling weeds, mulching, and pruning avocado and banana trees (I'm not half-bad with a machete on the banana leaves). We also got to do a wee bit of mosaic - Andrea is a mosaic artist, and many of the floors, mirrors, patio, stairs, and even the grill outside are covered in it. Christina and I put together a hodge-podge of tiles on a garden block and decided we are better at farming than visual art, but creating art is always fun, eh?