Here it is ! It is time to experience wwoofing. We will finally get a better idea of what this really means! We arrived on friday evening by train. We’ll try to describe this 1st experience as well as we can: who is Rhondda, how is her farm, the work we have done, etc. Sorry, it may be a bit long, but the last 3 days have been quite intense!

Rhondda and the farm

Let’s start from the very beginning… Rhonda, our host and “boss” for the week-end, picks us up on friday evening at Bowral station, a few kilometers from her farm located in Robertson. She is 20 minutes late because she has finished her day job later then expected. She has just left Canberra where she works during the week as a lawyer (yes, quite unusual… Rhondda seems not to be the traditional farmer, but you will soon figure it out…). She should have been with her husband Paul, but he couldn’t make it: he has to take a plane on sunday morning to Kuala Lumpur, to hold a conference. If we’ve understood correctly, Paul is a professor in “international strategy”. this should give you a first idea of who our hosts really are! As you can understand, they are having quite an unusual life. They are working in Canberra during the week, and in their farm during the week-end, which comes roughly to 8 days of work a week…

So, our hosts seem to be hard workers, but it also seems that they make a good living. We’ve understood that when Rhondda showed us our accomodation for the week-end. We were expecting some kind of shed where you sleep with the animals (we’ll see in the future if some wwoofing places are like that!) but for this time we are apparently lucky because our accomadation is a pretty cottage. It is actually a house, with 3 bedrooms, kitchen, washroom with towels, living room with chimney, TV. Yes, we are lucky. Thanks a lot Rhondda for this amazing accomodation!

Rhondda is living in the house not far from the cottage…I skip the details but in a few words, it’s quite a big nice house, with view on the property and the cost in the distance, swimming-pool, double garage, etc. As we arrived on friday night, we couldn’t see what the property looks like. We will have surprises for the next day!

So on saturday morning, after a really good night in the cottage, this is now time to work! We meet Rhondda at 9am. She briefly show us the property before we start working. She owns a “small” property of 38 ha on which there is her house, our cottage, 2 orchards with around 300 apple trees, a veggie patch, the cider house, a machinery shed, 5-6 pastures and a shelter for the 30 cows, their veals, and the bull. Yes, Rhondda doesn’t only have the cider house, she also take care of a cattle (we told you she was not an usual person…)

We are now done with the introducing, time has come for wwoofing. We are here to help Rhondda for the week-end in the cider house. The plan is : bottling the 2013 cider on saturday, and press the freshly picked-up 2014 apples on sunday and monday. Good timing for us because it saves us the picking!

Saturday: bottling

We are four today: Rhondda, Marie and I, and Tony (a former chef who decided to do something else for a while). Bottling is a work quite easy and fine. It just needs some organization but this is not that difficult: washing the bottle, washing the caps, filling the bottles, putting the caps on, storing the bottles. Quickly the whole team reaches a good pace, and as we are four we are now quite fast!

It appears that being 4 was a good thing, because in the afternoon, we had to cope with an emergency. The cattle has decided to attack the silages (their food for next winter) which is stored in their pasture… We need to move them rapidly to another one to save the silages. Of course, Jason, the guy who is supposed to take care of the cattle is away this afternoon… Anyway, we need to fix this situation. No worries! Marie and Rhondda keep bottling at the cider house while Tony and I are trying to move the cattle from one pasture to another. Even if Tony had never done that before (neither do I), after 1 hour, we finally manage to move the cattle. Done! It was not part of the plan but it was actually quite fun!

This is now time to go back to the cider house and give a hand to Rhondda and Marie for the end of the bottling. They have done a great job too. We now have to store all the new cider bottles. At the end of the day, we had washed, filled et capsed 275 bottles (around 200 litres). Rhondda seems satisfied, this must be a good job!

Our first day of work is over and we are quite tired. We share our dinner with Rhondda and two friends of hers, a german couple who live at a few kilometers from Robertson. This is the oportuny to share a few glasses of Rhondda’s cider. We really enjoyed it!

Sunday: pressing the apples

As we had done a good job on saturday, we meet Rhondda at 10am this morning to start pressing the first apples of the year. But Rhondda has some lawyer job to do so we really start our work at the cider house at around noon. We have plenty of work ahead because it has to be done manually : washing the apples, selecting the fruit ready to press, and for the others, getting rid of the parts which are not good. That is done with a knife… This is a long job but now we understand why her cider is so good!

Four hours later, apples are washed, selected and crushed. We only have to press them now. Rhondda expects that if should only take us one hour. Once mixed apples are in the hydraulic press, this should be fast indeed. However, it seems that we might have been a bit too fast doing the job… While the press is working, we ask Rhondda : “Is it normal that the lid is going up?” “What do you mean?” We hardly have the time to check the press that we’ve heard a massive noise. The membrane that contained the pressured water had poped out making the press lid and the crushed apples fly away all over the cider house! The lid was not correctly sealed… Fortunately, everybody was fine.

Like Rhondda said standard pressing should have lasted 1 hour at most, but now we have to clean the cider house, and to fix the press. We start to be tired, but we are all right… At 7h30pm, the cider house is clean, the press is fixed, and we have made more than 150 liters of cider. All’s well that ends well! After this long day, we have a rapid dinner with Rhondda and we go to bed.

Monday: Day off

Rhondda is satisfied with the job we’ve done the two last days, so monday is a day off. Jason, the guy who take care of the cattle has invited us to see his own cattle composed of 400 dairy cows. We arrive at his farm to see the milking. With his installation, 400 cows are milked in 45 minutes.

This visit is the end of a really nice week-end. This 1st wwoofing experience has really been great. Rhondda seems happy too. We were her 1st wwoofers at the farm! Tonight, we are leaving for Melbourne, where we will spend the next two weeks. After that, we are planning to go back in New South Wales and to do some other wwoofing. We may go back to Rhondda’s to help her during another week-end!