We were looking for a free holiday when we found out about Wwoofing. Sara and I live in East London, and being Portuguese Sara gets thoroughly sick of grey skies and rainy days by the end of a long English winter and starts to pine for her homeland. When we hit upon Wwoofing Portugal it seemed the perfect way to sate both her longing for 30 degree temperatures and ours for growing fresh vegetables, having had to give up my tomato and chili plants when moving house last year. I didn’t really know anything about growing organic food and permaculture, having largely ignored the movement considering vegetables in the UK to be expensive enough already, but we were attracted by the yurts, the bees, and the prospect of debating the collapse of civilisation.
The joy of arrival was only slightly tempered by our accomodation being moved from the then-uninhabitable yurt to a cosier (smaller!) caravan, and we soon realised that this was a symptom of life at the Quinta being more relaxed than we could possibly have hoped. It’s no picnic, we get up at hours I normally only see from the other end of the day to shovel horse-shit and do the heavier jobs that are unbearable once the mist clears and the temperature climbs, but when we have time free in the day I recall Sophie suggesting we take a picnic to the river, so sometimes it is.
There is certainly a lot of work that I would not describe as fun. Scrubbing yurts and weeding (especially in the heat of the day) is in no way my particular cup of herbal tea, but I was surprised to find that once done, and done well as part of a team, the satisfaction is considerably greater than that gained from, say, skiving off in the shade to ‘blog’, as I’m doing now and do a lot back home.
I wouldn’t say that wwoofing is for everyone, but the great thing about Quinta des Abelhas is the relaxed attitude to it: no-one has ever asked me if I’ve done my 6 hours of work on a particular day, and they haven’t needed to. With such a variety of tasks available to get on with in our own time, everyone seems very happy to spend a few hours making a mosaic, some time in the garden, a dip in the pool to cool off and then off to the kitchen to bake bread. There was no question that taking two days off in the first week to go wild in Porto at San Joao would be a problem, and likewise when Matt screeched to a halt in the 4×4 when I was on the way to watch the football, saying “Need a volounteer to put the yurt up, it’s gonna rain!”, it didn’t occur to me to point out that I’d already done 6 hours work that day. If my employer in London asked me to work an extra hour for free I’d be laughing all the way home. I even missed the Holland game yesterday to watch Andy’s Geoff Lawton film, “Creating a Food Forest”, which was a revelation. It’s great to realise that there’s a way to live off the land without stripping it bare and spraying it with pesticides. I would recommend coming here to wanting to learn about permaculture, as long as you don’t mind shovelling shit at 7am.
