A Weeks worth of WWOOFing

So Lindsay and I have been in Cooroy Woofing for just over a week now and we are having a fantastic time. If you have looked at Lindsay's latest facebook album than you know that in my previous blog when I said this place was paradise I wasn't kidding. We have done such an array of activities here so I will try to recap as many as I can, but I will most likely forget some.

A typical day for us here on the farm starts out around 8 am. Lindsay and I have the same breakfast in our cottage every morning and I am not complaining. We make a pot of chai tea, and have toast with peanut butter, honey from the bees here, and sliced banana, also from the farm. We usually start the morning with some weeding or the furniture refurbishment project we have been working. After about 2 hrs of work or 2.5 hrs we come in for morning tea. Morning tea is a great part of the day; we make fresh squeezed orange juice and enjoy an assortment of locally baked treats. After about a half hour break we get back to work until lunch. The next couple of hours of work can be anything from mulching to clearing or my favorite the poo run.

The day we went on a poo run was surprisingly one of the most fun. Sandra called us one morning while we were down at our cottage working on the furniture and said "girls we will pick you up in the truck shortly we are going on a poo run". Lindsay and I didn't really know what this entailed, but we could gather from the title that it would involve collecting manure somehow. Well, the truck pulled up, with a large trailer attached, and Lindsay and I hopped in the bed of the truck for this new adventure. Btw riding in the bakc of the truck was really fun. We drove to a large field on their property where cattle graze and from the looks of some of the poo we saw also horses. Once out in the field we hopped out with buckets and spades and started scooping up fresh looking paddies. We had a lot of fun thinking of all the different poo puns, and our host Sandra had some pretty good ones. I won't write them all here because Lindsay will definitely put them in a facebook album. It took about an hour with four of us working to fill the the trailer of the truck. One the way back to the house we also stopped to throw some fresh cut hay into the back of the trailer. By the time we got back to the house we had already worked about three hours between the work on the furniture and the poo. We had a delicious lunch as usual on the veranda and then it was back to work for us. We weeded for an hour and Lindsay and I were both starting to feel a little tired, we had already been here for about 4 days working, and picking poo is much more labour intensive than it sounds. We had hoped the weeding would be the end of our work for the day, but we were wrong we still had two hours of mulching ahead of us. This was probably the hardest day we had on the farm so far, but it was also a really fun day, and I think Rob (Sandra's son) told his dad how hard we working because he guilted Sandra into letting us sleep in the next day.

Lindsay and I have done some other really fun projects here; for example we planted an herb garden with lemon grass, coriander, parsley etc, we chopped down some yuka trees and dug out their roots, and we picked citrus. Oh and we also had the job of feeding the colt in the morning before Ken (Sandra's husband) came back from mustering cattle out west. We lost the responsibility when on the morning Ken and Rob came back Lindsay and I went out to feed the colt as usual, but everything did not go as usual. We didn't know that there would be two new horses down near where the colt is kept and they were not in a paddock. The horses saw us an immediately associated us with food. We out smarted them and went around the shed (where the hay is kept), but then I had to carry the bail of hay through horse territory over to the colt's paddock. I decided the best method would be to run for it, Lindsay I also thought this would be the best method but she was running in the opposite direction away from the horses. The only problem with this method for me is that horses can also run and a hell of a lot faster than me. Luckily, I made it to the colt's paddock and threw the hay over the fence without the other horses getting any. It was a pretty funny start to the morning.

We have also been doing a lot of cooking and baking for the family while we are here. We prepared appetizers one night when they had some company. We made guacamole with pita chips, baked brie with raspberry jam wrapped in pastry dough, and bruchetta. Everyone was very impressed with our culinary skills. We also made Lindsay's spinach pie, an apple pie, and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. As you can probably tell we eat a lot here and really well. The 5 hrs of work definitely does not balance out the copious amount of food I consume.
Sandra's family is so kind and we really feel lucky for this to have been our first Wwoof experience. They also have three really nice dogs which are fun to have around. One dog Bill was kicked in the head by a horse as a puppy and is a bit retarded now, Charlie his brother is really friendly and wants everyone to love him because he doesn't have a family member to be attached to, and Zach was really not too friendly to Lindsay and I in the beginning but he has warmed up and now walks us down to our cottage every night. We love being around a family, but it makes us both really miss our own families.

We are here for 4 for more days, and then we meet Lauren Cooper (a friend from home) in the Gold Coast which will be a blast. I'm sure we will have more adventures to write about before we leave.

Cheers,
Laura
P.S The second morning we were here there was a kangaroo about ten feet from our cottage. It was an exciting way to start the day.