They mostly subsist on their sheep, but they also have cows, in case the price of sheep fluctuates down and the price of cows goes up. Most farmers here have some cows just in case. In one of the paddocks near the sheep, closer to the house (and sometimes in the same paddocks as the sheep, and sometimes in the road, and sometimes wherever the hell they feel like being, because they’re great with getting through fences) they also have a small herd of goats. One of the goats thinks she’s a sheep, so that one generally always stays near a mob of sheep, although not the same mob—she’ll hop from one mob to the next mob pretty consistently. Ron explained this behavior to me while we were riding a four wheeler, so I didn’t quite catch the whole story, but I think this particular goat was an orphan that was raised with sheep, which would make sense. Anyway, the goats pretty much do what they want.
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| Here are three of them. |
Right around the house there are two emus, two llamas, two giant pigs (Harold and Nigella, who get all the kitchen scraps), two cats, one dog, several chickens that lay eggs anywhere they please (so we have to search under every decorative bush) and generally have the run of the place (the black one is “cheeky” and will casually stroll in the front door if you leave it open, which we generally do), two white swans, several ducks and other water birds, and thirteen peacocks. There’s also a Tui that sits in the pine tree just outside the driveway and calls out in a series of chirps, whistles, clucks and trills at pretty much every hour of the day. I haven’t gotten a picture of him yet.
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| you can see the netted aviary (in front of the pine trees) in the back,and the garden on the right. |
Ron also has an Aviary, which is a circular, netted enclosure where he breeds and keeps rare water birds. I haven’t been in there yet, so I’ll have a whole post about that when I do go in there. He’s promised to take me, one of these days, when time permits.
Gay has also has a small garden, which I’ll talk about later.
So I go to bed anywhere from 10PM to 12PM, and then I get up anywhere from 7AM to 8:30/9:00AM, naturally. Generally I wake up either because I’ve slept all I can sleep or because I hear Ron and Gay’s alarm clock going off in the next room, and I can hear people moving about.
Breakfast is porridge (oatmeal) with raisins, but Ron has several thousand jars of canned apricots in the pantry (that he cans himself, every year, with apricots he picks by hand, or with the help of a volunteer), so we spoon giant heaping spoonfuls of preserved apricots on porridge, and if you want it there’s this chocolate protein powder stuff, or milk, or bananas. Sometimes for breakfast there is Wheaties instead of porridge. I should mention here that the milk in the fridge is full cream milk.
Then there’s also toast. My god, is there toast. Toast with butter/margarine, toast with marmalade, toast with jam, toast with creamed honey. There is toast every day of every night of every hour of every day. Which is fine, I am ok with toast, and it helps fill you up if whatever you had for dinner just wasn’t quite enough (because if you’ve just been moving three ton logs, and then dinner is a normal sized dinner, you might need a little extra).
Simon, the other volunteer here, is an 18 year old boy and has been working on the farm for six weeks, so he’s not only still growing, but he’s been expending an enormous amount of energy for a month and a half now. He eats several million slices of toast.
So breakfast is porridge. That lasts maybe an hour or so. Sometimes we watch a morning talk show while we eat, which is how I found out about Newtown. There’s also a tropical storm going through the Pacific. It passed Samoa and is headed straight for Fiji, so there’s been a lot of coverage of Rescue and Recovery and/or battening down the hatches.
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| some of the pet lambs, raised by bottle because they're orphaned. |
Then there’s a morning of work, which goes until about twelve. If the work is hard and hot, and/or if Ron is having back trouble, we’ll stop for “Morning Tea,” which means we go up to the house and have tea, toast, maybe “baking” (whatever muffins or cake or whatever is lying around), and chat for a half hour or so.
At twelve or one is lunch. Gay usually prepares lunch, and it’s generally sandwiches or leftovers of some sort. Again, Toast.
Then we work for the afternoon, doing various projects. Sometimes it’s one project, sometimes it’s a couple projects smushed together. Sometimes I’m with both Ron and Gay, sometimes just one of them, sometimes they send Simon and I off together to do something they trust us not to screw up too badly on our own (that was a joke, because as I will discuss later, on a farm perfection is impossible to achieve and so general competence is all that’s required. Simon and I are more than capable of that).
If the work is too intense we’ll stop for “afternoon tea,” which means a hot/cold drink in the kitchen, more toast, more baking, and anywhere from a half hour to a two hour break.
Ron and Gay are used to working all day—their metabolisms burn energy like it’s going out of style. Often Ron will have dinner and then he’ll have cereal (wheaties) directly afterwards. I think I’m not using the food I intake as well as Ron and Gay do—I’m not hungry every time we come in for toast. In fact, sometimes they say, “Let’s have afternoon tea,” and I’m like, “Are you kidding? We just ate a ginormous lunch and haven’t done anything.” I am thirsty though, I drink gallons of water. When I first got here I was tired all the time, but I find now that I’m more energetic throughout the day.
So afternoon tea is whenever we’re tired and need a break; then we’ll work for a couple more hours. Sometimes Simon and I get off around four or five, when we head inside and shower/nap/chill out until dinner, but sometimes we work until seven o’clock—it depends on the job. A more taxing job is likely to end sooner, whereas a time sensitive job, like herding sheep in preparation for herding more sheep, so we can herd these other sheep, is likely to take us to seven or eight o’clock.
In any case, “Tea” is served at 8’oclock, or there abouts. Regular “Tea” is code word in New Zealander for Dinner, and yes, that is very confusing, so I’ll just say “dinner” and save everyone a headache. Sometimes Ron is still working straight through dinner and doesn’t come in until later.
After dinner work is over and we’re free to go our separate ways. The internet really only extends to the top floor of the house, not the bedrooms, so generally Simon and I stay upstairs to go online. Sometimes I read. Sometimes after dinner there are smaller projects they need help on, but those are not strenuous—they may be something like, “oh, I forgot, there’s spinach for the pigs over in the yard, would you go give it to them?” etc. But after dinner it’s maybe 8/9 o’clock, and I’m pretty tired, so there’s not much time or energy for much.
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| the House |
I admit that I like it when we have the same schedule, or the same projects, day after day after day. It’s nice to get into a rhythm, to have your place and to do something you know you can do, and to do that before lunch and after lunch just the same. I wouldn’t think that I like having that much routine—when I worked in the office I really despised routine. Maybe if I were here year in and year out I would hate so much routine. But for now it’s really comforting. For a couple days in a row we were dagging—i.e. shaving the sheep’s butts—and I had to herd the sheep a certain way. It was exhausting, and dusty, but the more I did it the less exhausting it became, the more rhythmic it became. I will have a whole post about it (there are pictures, don’t worry). But it was nice to just have one thing to do for several days.
Now we’re not dagging any more, we’re finished with dagging, and I miss it. I feel off kilter. Partly it’s because I am a schedule oriented person, and Ron and Gay tend to devise the schedule as they go along. They think, “what projects need to be done today?” and then that’s what we do. Or they think, “What should we do this hour?” and then that’s what we do. There’s a certain amount of planning, but those plans get waylaid often. For instance, tomorrow, Friday, we were going to have a crazy intense day of shearing sheep. I have been trained to work in the sheering shed and everything (not to actually shear, as I will explain in a whole post devoted to that very topic). I was pumped! But the shearer called, and explained that one of them cut his knuckle and has to wait a week for it to heal before he can shear. So we will shear next week, not this week. And now my schedule is all upset. No shearing tomorrow—the one constant thing I had, poof! Gone. Those of you who have lived or traveled with me will know that sometimes I can be a little neurotic about my schedules. My schedules allow me to be in control of a situation—sometimes too much in control—and here I have no control at all. Ron and Gay have full responsibility. It is nice to zone out when they are talking about where the sheep should go because it ends up sounding like this: “I think they should go to Blue.”
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| A Black Swan from the wetland area. |
“Blue? I don’t think. Maybe Coddles.”
“No, there’s the ditch—”
“but didn’t James come in—”
“Nah, he got a bump in his knee.”
“Ah, poor man.”
“Right, Coddles is a wee bit far.”
“Just up the road.”
“Still, Kelly’s no help at all.”
“We’ve got the Jalopy, and the vollies.”
“Might be the stump paddock.”
Anyway, they’re just going to give us directions as they go anyway, so I tune out all the back and forth.
It’s nice to not have to be responsible, to just DO, to just be a doer, for once, rather than a thinker, and I have enough to think about with the blog and the books I’m reading so that I don’t go crazy, but the lack of a schedule, when I’m so used to having a schedule, is a little bizarre. Add to that the fact that I’m never quite sure what day it is, what with America being a day behind New Zealand, and it’s hard to keep up.
As De Botton says, “The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.” In other words—you have to take yourself with you, when you travel, much as you might think that that’s not part of the plan. The plan is to get to a tropical island, immediately become five eleven and a hundred and forty pounds with a tan and perfectly symmetrical features, and the social graces of—I don’t know, the queen of England, Adrian Brody, President Obama and Shakira. That’s a bizarre combination. Go with it. Anyway, you expect to be that Queen-Adrian-Obama-Shakira person, but you get there and you are not that person. You land and you are still you.
I expected for the semester to end and my neurotic tendencies to come to a screeching halt. I expected my obsessive, neurotic brain to shut down, go away.
Not so.
For instance, when weeding the garden, Simon says, in his german accent and his casually tossed hair, “that is good enough, I think. We shall move on, yah?”
I look at the ground and see that several grasses are poking through, the whole bed is slightly messy, is not quite finished and I think, “Egads! It is not quite right!” and I say to him, “no, we cannot move on! Look! All these weeds! My god! We need to! Where’s that shovel! Oh my god! My god, it just needs to—Clear the way, clear the way—My god, It’s not neat, it’s not neat; see, just shovel it like this, like this—” I grab the shovel and ineffectually make a couple stabs that barely crack the thick grass covering. I push and shove and grunt. “Well, you see what I mean. Do that. It needs to. It needs to be clean.” I can feel my panic raising, and I just want to crawl into the plot and rip up all the grass one by one.
Simon takes the shovel from me and in one downward slice gets through to dirt, lifts up and easily raises a giant tangle of grass and roots. That’s much more effectual, and when I see him do this I decide that my presence is not needed because the job will be done better without me.
When he’s finished the plot he asks me if it’s good and now I can see dark earth, clean dark earth, and no weeds, so I say, “Yes, yes. That’s right. That’s just right.” My panic subsides; I can feel that happy hum, that happy whirl in my brain that you feel when the dishes are all in the drain or when you’ve just cleaned the whole bathroom or when you just reorganized your whole itunes library or when you’ve done a lot of revision and your essay/chapter/whatever is so much better.
He says, “Well, it would not matter anyway because the weeds, they will just grow back. We did not need to clear them out.”
I go back to my side of the garden, and I look back at the plot I’m working on and realize there’s more to do. More weeds. My brain is back in panic mode again. I am again on a rampage even as he finishes saying this, pulling up weeds that are clearly OUTSIDE of the garden itself, and I say, “Yes, but—but we don’t want to--” I look down, reconsider, heave and tug on a weed inside the garden this time, and out comes a potato plant. I inspect several small, new potatoes in my hand and throw them over where we’ve been throwing other potatoes we’ve mistakenly dug up. “We don’t want to give them a head start. Whoever uses this plot next will have a clean slate!”
“A what?”
“A clean slate! A slate, you know, a blank slate.”
“I know, but, but they will just grow up again, it is a bit stupid. But it does not matter, I think.” He hops down, and clears out all the weeds in the garden patch I’m working on in thirty seconds, taking out several million mint plants—that I had been working around by hand—in the process. I am horrified, and then I am relieved, and then I am horrified, and then I am nothing.
I look over at what we’ve done and think about how much we have to do left. “What about the gooseberry?” I ask him.
“The what?”
“The Gooseberry!”
“Oh, Just leave it. We were not meant to do that,” he says, turning to the outer side of the garden, where there’s a line of thick grasses along the raised bed.
“But Gay told us to weed around it!”
“When you are here a long time, like I am, you learn what you should do and what you should not do.” He raises a hoe and as I’m rooting through the earth, looking for more potatoes that I’ve missed, I can hear him hacking away.
I turn and give him a look. He is sweaty and he shrugs.
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| Simon, planting trees. This is normal gear--overalls and boots. |
“I will tell you a story. One time, Gay said to me that I should get Gooseberries for a cake. I went out and there were exactly four gooseberries. So we end up, we had all chocolate in the cake instead. So it makes no sense to take care of the gooseberry.”
“But if we took care of the Gooseberry, maybe there would be more fruit.”
“Well, you can if you want.”
I look over at him, and in the time it’s taken him to speak, he’s ripped up the entire line of grass along the edge of the garden, and in its place is a nice neat strip of open dirt. I have two small potatoes in my hand, one of which has a hole in it from the fork I was using to dislodge roots.
When we go inside, Gay looks out the window and makes many exclamations of praises for our excellent work, and many reassurances about the potatoes (we have them for dinner), and tells us the weeds will be back momentarily, especially the thistles.
Farming is not a pursuit for the perfectionist.
When you travel, you have to take yourself, too.
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