The heart of Wales

I have just spent the last two weeks in the heart of Wales, near Llanidloes and to some extent it has repaired my heart, too. Dave pointed out to me, as I tried to have a conversation with him from the top of a windy hill (there was no mobile reception at the farm, nestled as it was below the hill), that I was literally in the middle of Wales, both North to South, and East to West. As I chatted to him, and then to Jeni I was aware of ravens, buzzards and red kites flying above and below me – just magical.

The hosts have been welcoming WWOOFers into their lives for the past twenty years and host about one hundred during the course of each year, so they have evolved a very effective way of organising the time so that everyone gets a little taste of everything. There were only three of us there when I arrived: Penelope, from Australia; Luigi, from Italy and me, as they had been let down by a few other people at the last minute – they normally have about six or seven WWOOFers at a time. Each WWOOFer is usually put in charge of a specific bit of garden (I had the polytunnel and courgette/pumpkin beds) and a group of animals, and they are responsible for checking these every day – the garden for vegetable readiness and caterpillar/slug attack, and the animals to make sure they are still standing.

After breakfast and before mid-morning tea break we would check our animals and inspect and weed our gardens, then we would have a cuppa and usually go off together to do some joint task until lunchtime. After lunch we would either continue with the morning job or switch to a different task, finishing at 4.00pm with a cup of tea and chat. Supper was at about 7.00pm and consisted almost entirely of home-produced goodness.

There were chickens and ducks, Jacob sheep and Jersey cows, two of whom were milked every morning and evening, by hand. Luigi, who said he was 61 but looked in his mid-seventies, loved milking so took over the job from our hostess for the duration of his stay. However, as the cows are not tethered during milking they have to be fed a constant trickle of pellets to stop them getting bored and wandering off, so it was a two-person job. Luigi was a very demanding man who had never married and very soon Penelope refused to have anything to do with him, so I was asked to assist him one evening and from then on I was his new best friend and he just assumed that I would trundle out to the barn every morning at 9.00 and every evening at 5.30 to feed Tess and Clara! We seemed to get on OK although his English was not good, but my patience was sorely tried when he decided that he must have a video of himself milking the cow. Well, Franco Zeffirelli couldn’t have made more of a production out of it: first of all I had to be shown how to press the button on his mobile phone to start recording, and then I had to be positioned at the correct angle and then await his instruction to start. All of this took quite a lot of time, and during all of that time the cow was steadily munching her way through the pellets I had flung in the feed trough, so the inevitable always happened – the cow finished the pellets, got restless, stepped backwards causing Luigi to stop milking and the video was useless, plus it was so dark in the barn that you couldn’t see any detail anyway. This craziness continued for several milkings and then he roped in the new WWOOFer, Victoria from Spain, to act as cameraperson. We both tried to explain about the dark problem so the next day he turned up with a torch! I was just beginning to feel slightly hysterical when our host turned up to feed the chickens and he got roped in to doing the video – I couldn’t look at him, I was laughing so much that I thought Luigi would notice, but he was too absorbed in admiring the video of himself!

The sheep needed quite a lot of handling while I was there as a few of them had a very nasty conjunctivitis-like eye infection and needed to have ointment put in their eyes and also, they needed to be put into groups to go out with the rams, or to go into retirement, or just to be put out on the hill pending their turn for the one-way trip to the abattoir. Also, at this time it’s a good idea to give all the sheep a pedicure to try and avert foot problems once they get heavily pregnant, so we all had a go at foot-trimming. Of course, I’ve done quite a lot of foot trimming over the years, so I ended up supervising Victoria, while my hostess showed Penelope what to do. Neither of them was happy or comfortable doing it so Fran and I ended up doing most of them ourselves, and then it was time for ear tagging, at which point Penelope went off to her garden muttering that she was a Buddhist and we were pushing her to the limit! I can’t understand why she decided to come and stay at a working farm that eats meat in the first place, if that is how she feels. There was a distinct cooling off in her attitude after that and she left two days earlier than she’d booked for.

On another day, when the weather was not good enough for outdoor work, I made a hard Cheddar-type cheese using about a gallon of milk – I’ve never done that before, well not on my own, anyway. It appeared to be a success but as it has to be matured for at least three months I won’t be around to try it, but I did make some Ricotta on another day and that is eaten very fresh. I flavoured it with garlic, chives and black pepper and it was very tasty.

Fran makes a lot of wine (she aims to make 100 gallons this year!) and all round the kitchen were demi-johns all gurgling away. Once the initial fast fermentation stops they are all moved to the ‘brewery’, a wondrous storeroom lined with shelves and stacked floor to ceiling with hundreds of demi-johns containing all manner of wines and also some mead. We were going to spend a day bottling wine but there were so many problems with animals and also the weather was too good to be inside that it never actually happened. I did spend some time labelling all the jars of jam that were on the table in the middle of the room and putting them away in a walk-in cupboard, and also turning the cheeses that were also stored there on planks suspended by wire from the ceiling. What a great place to while away a rainy day!

There was a huge amount of tomatoes in the polytunnel, ripening faster than we could eat them, so I emailed Jeni and begged her to send the Tomato Relish recipe by return, so that I could make some before I left. Victoria prepared all the tomatoes and onions one evening while I was cooking supper for everyone, and then we made the relish on the Friday. We were both leaving on the Saturday but were persuaded to stay for lunch so that we could try the relish. I protested that it should be left to mature for a bit before sampling, but they insisted and were delighted by the flavour, so I have left the recipe with Fran so that she can make some more with other WWOOFers. It’s strange to think that this recipe is now in Bolivia (Jeni gave it to her WWOOF host out there), and now it could be passed on to other international WWOOFers to take back to their countries.

I’ve had a brilliant two weeks and am seriously thinking of coming back next year to stay for longer – it’s the most ‘at home’ I’ve felt for a long time, offering me just the right balance of all the things I love to do, and the potential to do so much more with more time. I’m now in South Wales, near Cardigan but I’ll tell you all about that another time!

Back to Oswestry - again!

For about two and a half weeks from the middle of September I have been house-sitting for some previous WWOOF hosts near Oswestry in Shropshire, while they went over to Brittany to do some work on a tiny cottage they have there.

This place is one that I went to first in June 2010 and again with Jeni in April this year, and has three acres of gardens that they are gradually trying to reclaim. It is quite fascinating to see what they have achieved since I first visited. They don’t have very many WWOOFers per year, but they had a couple of New Zealanders this summer for just over two weeks, and with their help they have now built some more rustic steps (Jeni and I did some in April) and built on a raised decked area in front of the summer house, plus they continued cutting back and down some of the more overgrown areas.

Basically, the house sitting consisted of looking after the two cats and Jasper, the Miniature Schnauzer that arrived with them in April for two weeks and has never gone home to Dawn’s son in London! He was actually quite nice company as I was totally by myself in the middle of nowhere for two weeks, and it saved me having to talk to myself! As Jeni says, I’m very good at anthropomorphisising (spellcheck did not recognise this word so I don’t know whether it’s a real word or not!) so it wasn’t long before I thought I knew what he was thinking – I could become (am, already?) a very eccentric old woman.

Every day, when the weather was fine enough, the two of us would venture into the garden after breakfast and do some work, either in the vegetable patch or in the larger ‘pleasure’ garden. I was mainly weeding the veg beds and removing the finished peas and broad beans, and after two weeks I had cleared three of the raised beds and replanted another one with kale, and also sown some winter spinach. It was quite strange to remove the dead pea plants that Jeni and I had planted out in April and also to see how some of the later sowings had grown – the parsnips we sowed looked particularly impressive. When the weather was not so good I weeded the greenhouses and plaited the onions that were drying in the shed, so that they could be hung up over winter.

In the larger garden I tackled weeding paths and steps and also dug out some massive fern roots and ash saplings from the heather and conifer bed, and dug up a row of encroaching shrubs from along the driveway. I don’t know what they were – there is so much in this garden that I don’t recognise – but they spread by underground runners, so it won’t be long before they start to encroach again. I also weeded the ‘Jeni bed’ created by Jeni in April, and the ‘Jan bed’, on the opposite side of the steps, that I created back in 2010! I also started a ‘dead hedge’ on one boundary where sheep were getting in in the spring. A dead hedge is just a few stakes driven into the ground about three feet apart and then any small branches or woody stems from cutting back and pruning are woven in and out to form a strong barrier that should last for a few years and can be added to as and when more material becomes available.

I found the time that I was on my own quite trying at times, as I realised that, once I stop travelling, I will be living by myself all the time and I don’t relish that idea at all, so it made me rather sad and introspective. Luckily I had a couple of bracing chats with Jeni during that time and also with my Mum and that helped put things back into perspective a bit. I was still very glad when Dawn and Tony came home, and probably didn’t stop yakking for hours! I had hardly spoken to another human being for two weeks, apart from the checkout girl in Morrisons ‘Do you want help with your packing?’ – ‘No, It’s OK thanks’ and a rather strange chap who accosted me outside Oswestry post office on a Sunday morning to ask if I could direct him to Wilkinsons. As it was literally opposite where we were standing, I didn’t have too much difficulty! I then wondered, later on, whether that was some sort of chat up line that I’d failed to recognise!!

I am now embarked on a tour of Wales that should take me up to mid-December when I shall retreat to Mum’s for the Christmas festivities, before trying to think where to go in the New Year – I don’t somehow think it will be Scotland – perhaps I could go back to the South West and hope for a mild winter and lots of lovely log-burning stoves!