Our most recent visiting volunteers left just over a week ago and the next one isn’t scheduled to arrive for another two weeks. While it is nice to have a break and enjoy the house to ourselves for a spell, to be honest, it’s a little eerie, all this quiet.

(As I typed that, our three year old sent a stack of blocks cascading onto the floor next to me. Quiet, like so many things, is relative.)

Since our membership as WWOOF hosts started in January of this year we have had something like 25 weeks of help between all our visitors.

We’ve had two people from Korea, two from Japan, two from the US and one from England. Our next guest will be from the US.

For my part, I’m taking some of this down time to reflect on how we’ve done as hosts so far. There is a responsibility to create an enjoyable environment for people who are volunteering on your farm, after all.

How could we improve the accommodations, the work environment?  How well have we managed the energy of our home where the pressures of farming, working full time, parenting and relationships can cause tension?

How well have we balanced getting all the farm work done with showing our visitors what a great part of the country we live in?  Because, that is a big part of why a lot of people join the WWOOF program in the first place.  It is a great way to travel without a lot of expense.

So, with thanks for all the help and company we’ve had; and with appreciation for getting to travel vicariously to the places our guests have been, I am reveling in the quiet and knowing I’ll be happy when it’s back to a crowed mealtime.  And making notes about what worked so I can do more of it.

That’s right, we signed up for the WWOOFing program for the first time this year and are about to pick up our third WWOOFer at the bus stop.  Wondering WWHAT the heck I’m referring to when I say WWOOFer?

WWELL, let me tell you.  (Me thinks, I could keep this up for a long time.    But I won’t.  Just for you.)

WWOOF stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.  It’s a program that matches up farms with travelers who want to volunteer on farms.  Yes, people travel around working on farms in trade for room and board. Sounds like a fantasy, doesn’t it?  (Anyone who has ever worked with volunteers knows that the fantasy rarely matches the reality, though, don’t we?)

Having said that, we had our first two WWOOFers, as they are known, a couple of weeks ago and, boy, did they set the bar high.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have fantasized a better WWOOFing experience.  When we dropped Rok, super intelligent, personable and driven Korean-Canadian in his mid twenties, off at the bus, John and I lamented that our next visitors would have awfully big shoes to fill.

I hope no potential WWOOFers get scared off by the Legacy of Rok. 

In any case, for our customers, you can look forward to a sea of changing faces here at the farm this year.

For any farmers who could use some help, enjoy visitors and have $45 to spare (that’s the program registration fee) and extra room at the inn, I heartily suggest checking out the WWOOF Canada site.  Or Google WWOOF to see the branches of this organization around the world.

Travelers, check out the abundance of crazy ag-tourism experiences you could have!  Man!

And, please, come here so I can virtually go where you’ve come from.  So far, I’ve been to Korea and I’ve experienced the Korean area of Toronto instead of simply passing through without knowing where to go for delicious Walnut Cakes.  Next, I’m heading to Vermont and Japan.

Yeah, virtual travel and a truly helpful ag-tourism program!

(Picks to follow, though the landscape where I’ve traveled so far all looks suspiciously like our sugar bush. )

Normally, that type of thought might bring more ‘missing luxury’ if you believe The Secret. But I must have thought it in a more positive light. Here’s a pictorial of my reasoning:

This is a beautiful vest that my sister sent me from Vancouver. Thanks Sis!

Here we have my Christmas present from DH and DS. That’s a number 8 jar!! And original, or so we’re told. I await my buckets of milk with baited breath.

Not so much a picture of the actual luxury in question but of the location of said beacon of quasi-modern technology. This was the joy of chores this morning… Wait for it… We, here at J. & C. Nyman Farms, now have… running water IN the BARN!!

And I said I don’t have a luxurious life. Ha…

Here’s hoping that everyone has a little bit of whatever they consider luxury this holiday season.

Cheers!

Note the capsized wheelbarrow.  That is about halfway down the garden.  The wheelbarrow is mired in leafy, green, food-free plants.  Native plants, as my sister insist.  Weeds.

In the forefront, though, we have Detroit red beets, basil, a few late planted carrots, the spot where the onions were, the corner of a tripod for the peas (now drying for seed collection), yellow beets, parsley and some dried poppies which blew over from the flower bed.  I didn’t have the heart to treat them as weeds and they were quite a lovely addition to the garden.

Past the wheel barrow, you can see the dying squash and zucchini vines.  We have a gazillion squash.  If you’re a member of our CSA or live near here, contact me about squash.  Make me an offer.  I’m dealing acorns and butternut.

(Notice the unmowed lawn?  Come on.  We do have priorities.)

This pic shows that I was panicing during bean planting time.  ‘Will I have enough time before I go away in late May to get all the beans in that I want to plant?!  Plant them all RIGHT NOW, just in case!!‘

As a result, I spent a few weeks harvesting my body weight in beans everyday.  Sure hope we want to eat frozen, pickled and canned beans come winter.  (In this pic, I have already gone through and pulled a bunch of bean plants to feed the pigs.  Pigs love beans.)

To the rigth of the beans are a few random basil plants and the parsley etc from the previous pic.  There is also a little stone wall full of weeds.  As I mentioned, this is a new garden plot.  You never can tell how many rocks there will be until you turn the soil.  Here, there are a lot.  To the left of the beans there is a whole large square of a rare crop known as foxtail.  Very useful for… looking a bit like a fox’s tail and… tickling toddlers’ necks… umm… covering up A LOT of rocks that didn’t get picked.  In fact, I was afraid there would be a huge hole in the Earth if I picked all those rocks.  I will tackle that spot next year.

Finally, behind the beans/foxtail we have 7 messy tomato plants that are doing wonderfully despite my hatred for the removal of tomato horn worms.  I did most of the extermination with much squirming and ‘Oh Gross!’ comments.  Once I caved and begged Johnny to do it for me.  And he did.  What are husbands for?

(Just a note:  I’m ordinarily not a wimp.  Maggots and tomato horn worms do it to me.  And, I am able to handle them.  Or rather deal with them.  But to see me do it, you’d think they were actually in my underwear.  What a thought!)

For the last picture, you get a better shot of the foxtail along with a shot of the carrots (front right) that I planted where ever there was sand from the hydro trench.  On the very left, there is a lot of rhubarb (that I think I planted too close together), followed by invisible asparagus and sunflowers.  (There are turnips hiding under the sunflowers.  They did remarkably well for being smothered.)

The reason I included this picture is because the sunflowers deserve special mention.  When I told our three year old sun that he could help plant them and then enter one in the fall fair, I could not have guessed that they’d grow large enough to swallow him whole.  I felt a little silly saying that he was entering these giants in the grains category of the Picton Fall Fair when he couldn’t even carry one!

And, of course, he won.  Does that make me kind of like the mom who does her kid’s science project?  Oh, please.  Not that.  For next year, is there such thing as a miniature sunflower?

I get a lot of people landing on our blog because they’re interested in starting a farm. While I think this is wonderful – mostly because it means that we’re not the only crazy people on the planet! – I wonder how much these would-be farmers actually know about farming.

There is still (perhaps more now than in the past?) a glamorization of farming that is totally false. More people hop on the ‘eat local/save the environment/chemicals are bad’ bandwagon everyday and, at first blush, farming can look like an idyllic way of getting in on it all.

Don’t get me wrong. We’re on that bandwagon too. It’s a good place to be for the physical and mental healthy of our family and for the environment. I just think that there is a misconception about the life of a farmer that needs to be cleared up.

More people getting into farming is good for everyone. I want those who choose to farm to succeed. Starting a business you’re not prepared for is a sure-fire way of not doing that. Hence this series of posts about The Real Farm Life. So, here we go:

The Real Farm Life Fact #1: Farming Let’s You Get In Touch With Nature

You thought I was going to start by trying to scare you off farming, didn’t you? I might yet. But I want people to get into farming because it adds to the greater good and is a great way of life for you and your family. If it really is for you, that is.

Take getting in touch with nature as an example. What do you think of when you read that? Are you thinking sunny walks through tree lined pastures while you check your hay crops?

Yep. That’s farming.

How about the sun setting over the roof of your barn with the sounds of your laying hens settling onto their roost for the night?

That’s farming too.

And feeling your muscles burn just enough to know that you and your kids are not couch potatoes.

Farming does that.

Okay, how about raccoons taking down half an acre of sweet corn just before harvest to the tune of $250 of heirloom seed and countless (and penniless) hours of labour?

You got it. Farming.

Worse yet. Getting up 3 times through the night to feed a tube down the throat of a newborn lamb in minus 30 Celsius weather trying in the hope of getting it warm and nourished enough to survive only to find it cold and still come morning?

Farming.

These things are just as much a part of farming. Don’t get me wrong, often enough, you find a revived, tail-wagging bundle of energy come morning to reward your sleepless night. If not, it wouldn’t be worth doing, would it?

And it is worth doing. Again: If it’s for you.

Everyone likes the idea of farm life. But if you’re going to take it on, you’d better like actually doing it. And you need to be able to handle the parts you don’t like.

Getting in touch with nature through farming means nurturing life, coaxing it and coddling it with your own dirty hands but it also means holding death in those same hands. You have to be able to watch death, to touch it, run the shovel and go back to the coddling and coaxing with vigor. Can you do it?

(For the record, I spill more tears at lambing time than I would otherwise cry in a whole year).

Today, we celebrate our 2000 hit to this website. Launched January 25, 2008, it’s been up and running for 102 days.

So, our celebrations might not rival New Years 1999, in fact, they won’t really happen until tomorrow night when I make strawberry meringues for dessert, but it is significant to us. It means that people are supporting what we’re doing.

Thanks to everyone for being interested in better food!

So, I’m sure many farmers would laugh to hear me say that there are only three essential things to lasting through the sometimes permanent start up phase. But, in my humble opinion, you’re wasting your time if you even think about those other important details before being very clear on the first three. And they’re basic. You’ve heard them before but if I need a reminder now and then, I figure you might be due for one sometime too.

Without further ado, here they are:

Essential Task 1: Witness Your Days

Focus on the very minute you’re experiencing as much as possible. If you spend your energy focusing on the future that you hope for, fear will never come or can’t pay for you will miss stuff. Big stuff. And, you won’t get nearly as much done on the farm.

What is the reason almost EVERYONE sites for wanting to farm? Lifestyle. Also described as a good environment in which to raise kids. Or peace and serenity.

If you spend too much time living in the future (or the past) you will miss the very purpose of farming and you won’t get that much farming done due to scattered attention.

What a waste. If you must be wasteful, do it in other areas. Don’t waste your children’s childhoods, your relationship’s honeymoon years or the work time before breakfast. Hell, leave the fridge door open instead.

Essential Task 2: Know What YOU Love Doing

As well as knowing what you love to do, do it. As young people, we don’t often really know what we want to do. We get into things only to find out years later that we don’t enjoy what we’ve created. I think that we often create these ‘How did I get this life?’ scenarios and think we’re doomed to live them out until the end of our days.

Don’t get stuck. Review your life and if you don’t like what you spend your time at, change it. Having said that we rarely know what we want when we’re young, we’re also rarely totally off base. If you thought (or think) you want to farm at age 20, when you reach 30 or 40 you probably still have that in you. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. But do review and change what needs changing.

It’s amazing how many farmers are their own bosses and still feel they are trapped by their farm. (Hint: Don’t get too far in debt to farm. Much harder to change things then.)

I put that in brackets but it could almost be the fourth essential task. The more debt you take on, the less you can change when you find you’re spending your time doing something that doesn’t make you whistle while you work.

Channel the dwarfs. Make sure you’re doing whistle-worthy work.

Essential Task 3: Stop Working and Hang Out

This may sound counter productive. I am talking about the start up phase, after all. Aren’t we supposed to put our nose to the grindstone and get this business up and running before coming up for air?

NO. Take a lesson from Leo at ZenHabits and Reward Yourself. Often. Your spirits will sag when one or more family members are working full time jobs doing something they may not much enjoy only to come home to another full time job that entails manual labour. Even when it’s raining.

You’re spirits will sag at some point. That is unavoidable unless your a member of the Brady Bunch.

What you can avoid is resentment from family members. If you don’t take a break to be with and focus on your loved ones, their resentment will be well deserved. Notice the emphasis. You’re not taking a break to stick your head in the latest farm paper here.

As Leo points out, it is good to reward yourself. If the budget is really tight, sitting down to a play-dough cake made by your two year old and a hot coffee will feel like a feast. Have the occasional feast.

Feast on your family’s attention and let them feast on yours. Hang out. Dude.

___

There they are. The thunderous threesome of ‘must-do’s’ as I see it. And, yes, they are pretty fluffy, not business-minded at all. They’re possibly even spiritual on some levels. And sure, you could rhyme off more than three essential business practices that seem to blow me out of the water.

Here’s the thing. We’re talking about farming. And, again, let me take you back to the reason people choose farming. There are very few basic motivations for starting a business. It fills your pocket is definitely one. It strokes your ego is not uncommon either. Or, it allows you to do what soothes your soul.

Farming falls into the third category. Pocket lining and ego stroking are not farming’s forte. So, my 3 Essential Tasks are Soul Tasks. If you let these slip, your going to erode what you set out to accomplish.

If you aren’t witnessing the passing of your days, if you’re not doing Whistle-Worthy Work, if you aren’t stopping to reward yourself and your family with your attention, you’re going to miss out on the Soul-Paycheck. That lifestyle, the kid-friendly environment and definitely the peace and serenity will pass you by.

Don’t let it happen. That would just be working one ‘because I have to’ type of job to pay for a second. Don’t work two full time Soul-Drainers. If you’re going to run a Start Up Farm, at least make it a Soul Farm.