sheep | wwoofinglyfree

We are at the end of a wonderful nine days with WWOOFing hosts in the beautiful region of Cambridge. We have had a great nine days here hanging out with three unique dogs, a few other animals and working in the garden. We have completely redone a garden from overgrown, out of control weeds to beautiful beds, rich with compost/manure and sown with a green crop. For those of you who don’t know, a green crop is a plant, in this case mustard seed that is grown between vegetable crops to keep the soil rich in nutrients for the next growing season. Before the green crop seeds or flowers, you cut it down, dig it into the soil and let it mulch down before planting your desired crop. It is a great way of putting nutrients back into your soil without using a commercial fertilizer. Generally a green crop is a plant that is hardy, easy to grow and sow, and quite fast growing.

We chipped a lot of wood from branches and logs we picked up from animal paddocks. I learned how to prune and train a climbing jasmine plant to grow around pillars of the porch. It was an interesting thing to learn but jasmine vines, when cut, release a very sticky substance, a type of latex, which is impossible to remove from clothing and needs to be washed off from skin with soapy water every ten minutes. I also was able to exercise my tractor driving skills, it is interesting which type of skills are never forgotten, this is one of them.

Here it is the time of year for harvesting, processing and preserving produce so we have been learning many different techniques throughout WWOOFing. In Cambridge we collected, peeled, cored and cooked the apples for preserving. The apple production was not very good because in New Zealand this year we have had a terrible wasp problem and they love eating apples. The reason for the increase in wasp population is due to an increase in population of insects called ‘willow aphids’, which grow on willow trees and are a food source for wasps. Willows have been used in New Zealand as a form of riverbank erosion control for over a century so they are highly abundant throughout the country.

We are now continuing our WWOOFing journey on a sheep farm in the Hunua Ranges, a green forest/farming area on the outskirts of Auckland.