WWOOF / Volunteers

As a food and travel writer, I firmly believe if you’re going to blog or write about restaurants, you need to spend some time working in one to fully understand how the business works. It’s one thing to sit at your perfectly set table on the receiving end of (hopefully) delicious food and fine tuned service, but an entirely different thing to understand how many hands are involved in making that meal appear in the minutes after you say, “I’d like the steak, please – medium rare.”

After my first week at Quinta Das Abelhas, I feel that anyone who eats – period – should spend some time WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), or at the very least, on a small, organic farm.  I’ve volunteered in Seattle at Marra Farm, a four acre plot within the city limits that produces more than 16,000 pounds of food for the local community. But dropping by to play urban farmer for an afternoon is drastically different from living the day-to-day reality of what goes into making a self-sufficient farm function.

My duties at Quinta Das Abelhas have run the gamut from harvesting basketfuls of vegetables from the gardens and readying beds for the winter with fertilizer and seeds to making quince jelly with fresh picked fruit, helping to remove mud from a trench after a heavy rainfall to building a stone wall.  After more than a decade of declaring defeat when working with yeast, Sophie even helped me bake my first successful loaf of bread. The list of what I’m learning about self-sufficiency is endless.  The beauty of volunteering in this kind of environment is that there is always something to do, the work is rarely repetitive and it’s fun. I love, love, love being here.

I decided to WWOOF with Quinta Das Abelhas because I try to eat locally and seasonally whenever possible and take great interest in knowing where food comes from.  Portugal is a far distance from Seattle (5,836 miles each way to be exact – I have a lot of carbon footprint making up to do), it’s a place I’ve wanted to visit for a long time and got a really good feeling about Andy and Sophie from their website and blog.  (I also saw a photo of a gigantic zucchini a friend’s father in Lisbon had grown and had a feeling that people around these parts knew a thing or two about farming.)  My gut was spot on. I know a lot of people who’d pay large sums of money for this kind of experience and to achieve the peace I’ve experienced here.

For starters, the property is stunningly beautiful. So even when you’re shoveling manure, you can’t help but have repeated “ah ha” moments.  I’m no skilled farm hand, but even so, you feel like you’re playing some small part in the success of a small, family run operation and that feels good.  It takes a lot of hands, heart and sweat to make this place run. For all of your hard work, volunteers are rewarded with amazing meals made by Andy and some of the sweetest slumbers ever – I’ve made no secret about how much I love living in my comfy, cozy yurt.  After volunteering with four other organizations over the past four months, working for kind people who truly care makes a huge difference.  (That’s probably the number one thing I’m grateful for.) Living at Quinta Das Abelhas is a simpler way of  life than I’m accustomed to, but it imparts such incredible feelings of calm and satisfaction, that I’m already scheming ways to adopt some of these aspects when I resume my usual urban routine.

My time at Quinta Das Abelhas has reiterated something I feel strongly about: More small farms means more locally produced food, which makes the planet happy.  Would you rather be on a first name basis with the farmers who grow your food or do you prefer food that has wracked up thousands of airline miles to make it to your plate?  A silly question, really. In a perfect world, less people would eat food produced in massive industrial farms and far off places and more would support the individual people who put so much care into making sure our food is safe, healthy and delicious. WWOOF and you’ll understand why.

Charyn Pfeuffer

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.

Next to the “Kitchen Caravan” was an old, feral herbage bed. Originally intended to be used by passionated cookers, it was overgrown with weeds, wild flowers and grass.

For a herbs fancier like me an absolute no-go. Herbs need to have space to grow, a lot of sun, water und abundant manure.

No sooner said than done. After digging lots of weed roots out, dunging with rotten horseshit (a great manure!), watering the plants and renewing the border the herbage bed is totally revitalised.

Marjoram, mint, thyme and apple mint do grow now in a new glory. What a pleasure!

Inga

Once upon a time there were three wwoofers and a host who wanted more than anything in the world to have a new bed to grow big and strong comfrey plants. So they set out one cloudy Monday morning, with their forks and spades, down the garden path, past the pond and into the realms of Sophie’s Garden.

They found the perfect spot at the edge of the garden just below the vines. But….there was a problem the big nasty, spiky couch grass had invaded the area and was spreading its invasive  roots everywhere. This evil weed had to be banished to a faraway land (i.e out of the garden not even on the compost heap) in order to allow the comfrey to grow and to prevent the couch grass ever returning.

After many hours of digging, weeding, watering and three barrowfuls of magical manure later the bed was ready!!!!!!!!!

The comfrey plants were tucked in tightly and given another drink to live happily ever after and the horrible couch grass was never to be seen again.

The defiant wwoofers and host finished for lunch (yummm) and prepared themselves for their next task of pruning the raspberries.

The End.

• How To Make A Raised Bed

It’s hot. It’s sweaty. There are flies. We have to work had to earn our bread. Andy rants. We cry for mercy. There is a cage for naughty wwoofers and bramble bushes for the ultimate scratchy punishment. There is horse shit to shovel and hills to climb and beasts to ride. And we get made to eat loads of rabbit food…

Although the aformentioned may be true (with slight exaggeration), there are so many unexpected delights to be experienced that we could never have prepared ourselves for… The plentiful garden which is so colourful and ripe and delicious; the genorosity and kindness of our hosts; the entertainment and discussions with the other wwoofers; the different culture and language; the beautiful weather; the incredible views; the precious time and nuturing from our hosts.. we no longer feel like visitors but part of a hardworking team that achieve lots each day.

We hurt a lot. But this is mostly from laughing… Andy & Sophie, you have really been the hostesses with the mostesses. Thank you awesome amounts from Ella & Ali.

I’m a wwoofer let me stay here forever.

I’ve been staying at Quinta das Abelhas as a wwoofer for the last week and tomorrow I’m moving on to another quinta to learn some more about sustainable agriculture practices. This was my first wwoofing experience and I have to say it’s been a positive learning experience. I’ve been in Portugal a while now and have only been speaking Portuguese and this was my first time living and working with anybody from England, or foreign immigrants in Portugal for that matter.  Sophie and Andy are really cool. I would recomend this place to wwoof at if you’re alright with getting up in the morning, and shoveling horse shit. That’s really the only constant task that needs to be done. Otherwise there are other tasks that come up like picking fruit, watering, cutting and stacking firewood, etc. As long as you do your part, which really isn’t a lot ot ask, they take good care of you and don’t treat you like a slave (most of the time). Andy is an excellent cook as well. They’ve got a forest-type garden that they’ve been establishing and it’s really interesting to walk around and check out how it was designed. If you’re into learning more about permaculture and sustainability, they’ve got tons of literature and some time for conversation.

cheers.