Wednesday 16 May 2012

WWOOFing at Villa Westergärd

The first WWOOFing place I worked on was Villa Westergärd on the central south coast of Finland, near a town called Tammisaari (or Ekenaas in Swedish).  It is not an organic farm but rather a  ‘Tantric retreat’ where they do (you guessed it) Tantric yoga retreats and grow some organic veggies to feed themselves, the retreaters and the wwoofers.  

While I was here there were no retreats on the program, so I still don’t know what they involve, and there was just one other wwoofer.  We spent most of our time raking, weeding, getting stones and rocks out of the vegetable garden and picking nettles.  The nettles are dried and eaten over winter or, in my case, fried on the day in olive oil with garlic and chili and eaten with rice, a bit like you would do spinach.  They turned out to be surprisingly tasty (but that could have been helped by the copious amounts of garlic I tossed in).

This is what Villa Westergärd looks like




When I first arrived on 1 May, the surrounding countryside looked like this


and less than a fortnight later, it looked like this



There are chickens, dogs, cats and a goat (who turned out to be my favourite)




There are also Icelandic horses, not ponies,


including the oldest horse in Finland (37 years)

  
She’s the mother of the brown one above on the left and the one on the right is the dad.  When they told me she was the oldest horse in Finland, my immediate thought was ‘Please don’t die while I am here’.  Can you imagine the trauma?

This is what the wwoofers do - chop fire wood and build the wood pile 





and weed the garden





And this is the location 




which, in case you were wondering, is close to


neither of which is more than a dot on the map.  Mostly it’s trees and water around here, in fact lots of trees



and lots of water






as well as some non-organic neighbours



It wasn’t just the fluro green lawn that gave them away - it was also this (unless of course they are a not so secret terrorist cell)


These are some sunset pictures taken from about 9.45 to 10pm out of my bedroom window




Pretty isn't it?

2 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  2. thanks Francesca, I'm going there for a long period from May.
    Riccardo

    ReplyDelete