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Can You WWOOF?

| Lifestyle

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WWOOFing is a vacation, of sorts.  If your idea of vacationing is kicking back all day with your feet up on the balcony rail, sipping margaritas, eating flaming desserts, watching the latest video and falling into bed after finishing three or four cocktails, WWOOFing isn’t for you.

WWOOF stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.  We’ve been thinking about the possibility of doing more than just thinking about the possibilities for four or five years, maybe longer.  This year we decided that we needed to get serious. Celinda searched for WWOOF on the Internet and we signed up.  Signing up amounts to paying a registration fee, receiving a book with names and descriptions of WWOOF opportunities, and you take it from there.  Hosts have the farms, which can be a backyard or thousands of acres.  Volunteers are those who do exactly that…volunteer. 

WWOOF was started in the UK during the 1970s and has spread over the globe.  You choose the country you want to visit and purchase the WWOOF book for that country.  The hosts describe their farms and what they expect in return for room and board. You need to do your homework, because room and board can mean anything from a tent and some food, to your own house and all the food you can eat.  Hours are another place you need to look at closely.  Some want three or four hours a day, four to five days a week, others think that slave labor is legal.  We spent evenings going over the book with a fine toothed comb, then Celinda drafted a letter and sent it to twenty or thirty that fit our passions.  We got six or seven good replies and a couple that wanted to know “What’s in it for me?” 

Being newbies at WWOOFing, we wanted to get our feet wet reasonably close to home, in case we decided it wasn’t what we thought it would be.  We contacted some in New Mexico and decided that Ruidoso was our best bet.  With the thermometer reaching new undiscovered territory a couple of times in the desert where we live, going to the mountains had a lot of appeal. 

We left later than we’d planned, which is normal for us.  It seems we can go to bed with nothing on our agenda for the next day and wake up with a full schedule.  Stuff breeds during the overnight hours. 

By the time we made a couple of stops, found our destination after wandering around for awhile, met the host and settled in, it was too late to cook, or at least that was an excuse acceptable to both of us.  Our host recommended the “Disco Taco.”  The name came from Mexico where they cooked their tortillas on old discs that are used in farming to turn the earth.  Our host told us to disregard the outside appearance because, according to him, there was lots of food, it was authentic Mexican and it was excellent.  I have photos to prove the first two and I wouldn’t lie about the third.

After dinner we went back to our private room, had a good night’s sleep and were ready to begin weeding, mulching and watering the next morning.  I took a lot of before and after pictures and we were all proud and happy with the first day’s results. 

That evening we had dinner with our hosts, their three dogs and Leon the cat.  Their five month old son was asleep in his room by dinner time.  It was a sumptuous meal with stimulating conversation, swapping of ideas and experiences about living light on the earth, and organic farming.  They have about eight acres, which doesn’t seem like much until you begin practicing hi-intensity organic gardening/farming.  They want to reach a place of self-sustainability and we were glad we could be of assistance.  Day two and three were more of the same, three or four hours in the garden and the rest of the day off to explore. 

I probably took a hundred or more pictures of bees and hummingbirds collecting pollen from the Red Hot Pokers that grow around the house.  There were lots of photo opportunities and I had lots of time to learn some of the things my new camera will do.  I’m barely beyond point and shoot with the new camera, but I’ll have opportunities this summer to learn more. 

We’ll be visiting other organic farms off and on this summer, and have a website www.smalltownswest.com that will chronicle our experiences in small towns and on organic farms.  There will be lots of pictures and text from both his and her points of view. 

Filed under: Lifestyle
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About Larry Miller

I was born in Los Angeles in 1940. My father was a fighter pilot instructor during WWll and we moved from coast to coast, maybe that’s where I got the nomad in my blood. After graduating from high school in 1958 I joined the Marines. That lifestyle wasn’t for me and upon my discharge I went on with my life, and have never looked back. I worked briefly for a Caterpillar dealer in Riverside, CA before moving back to N. California where I was a welder and truck driver for a chemical company. Truck driving wasn’t my calling anymore than being in the Marines, and I went back to work for another Caterpillar dealer steam cleaning dirty tractor parts and welding. They sent me to schools, lots and lots of schools. I spent as much time going to trade schools as I did at work. I went from cleaning parts to apprentice field mechanic, to mechanic to the parts department to satellite store manager in less than two years. They wanted me to move to Sacramento and be a salesman: I moved to Oregon to learn to commune with nature. I went to work for another heavy equipment dealer and was later contacted by the World’s largest Lorraine Crane dealer and offered the position of purchasing agent and general parts manager. In 1967 I was offered a line of automotive parts and supplies and went into business for myself. My business revolved around eleven race cars that we maintained for others, driving race cars professionally and maintaining high end sports cars. I was a championship and regional champion driver. My business was the largest import parts and service, non dealer, in the state until I sold it in 1979. We went sailing in 79, first to Mexico and then Hawaii. I was an award winning Trans-Pacific sailor and sailor of the year, Hawaii, Island of Kauai. An opportunity presented itself in Hawaii during 1981 and I was back in business, importing Japanese auto body and hard parts. I also felt the pull to write and began freelancing for magazines and newspapers in 1982. My main focus in my articles is, and always has been, health, wellness and fitness. Most of us have heard the saying, “Time is all we have.” I disagree. Our health is all we have, because without our health, we have no time. I was a US Olympic team hopeful in racewalking and held all the records for the state of Hawaii. As a sponsored athlete in my forties, I finished first in nine marathons in a row in my division, qualified for the Ironman® and was the state USCF cycling champion five times in Hawaii and Oregon. Celinda and I were married in 1988 after a three year engagement. We sold our businesses and organic farm and sailed back to Oregon. After our sailboat boat was sold, we moved to Joseph, Oregon, two miles from the trailhead into the Eagle Cap Wilderness. We were caregivers for my mother the last ten years she was alive. We moved to New Mexico in 1995 because it was too cold for my mom in Oregon during the winters. Celinda designed, and I engineered and built our strawbale house. I began writing the weekly health column for a local newspaper in 1996, and still do. In 2000, I took the summer off to do a four month, 4000 mile, hike, bike and kayak odyssey. I’d been writing health, fitness and sports articles since 1982 and the journey produced a full-length, nonfiction, first person adventure book, Yol Bolsun, May There Be A Road, which can be bought from Amazon.com and others over the Internet. The summer of 2001 was spent hiking. kayaking, fishing and exploring the southwest. In 2002 Celinda and I spent the summer in Canada learning the hospitality business at a resort in preparation for doing promotion for the resort in the US. Most of 2003 was spent reestablishing the trees and landscape that had died during the stay in Canada. We had a house sitter and the house sitter had an ex-husband, and that’s a long story. In July of 2004 I did a solo kayak trip on the Snake River, taking pictures, writing articles and pencil sketching the journey. I hope to do another kayak adventure on the Snake River during the summer of 2008, on the section I missed in 2000 and 2004. In 2005, I returned to Canada to the resort where we’d spent 2002. I was supposed to be there for the month of June. I’d contacted people I’d met in 2002 and they came back to Canada to fish, hike and spend time at the resort, Echo Valley Ranch and Spa, while I was there. My one month became five and then it was off to Spain to do the El Camino de Santiago as a travel companion with one of the guests who’d returned to Canada in June. During the summer of 2006 a friend from Ireland, who I’d met in Spain the year before, came to visit in NM and we fished, hiked and explored the White Mountains of AZ. He’d never slept out in the wild in a tent before, and it was quite an experience, for both of us. My newspaper articles were put on the Internet beginning in 2002. I was asked to give public speaking engagements, photo and video presentations, on various subjects for the library in Deming, NM and continue to do so. In 2006 I videoed and produced a DVD for the Smithsonian Institute’s travel exhibit “Between Fences.” NMFILMS had a conference by invitation only, which I attended. While attending the conference, I realized that film making wasn’t what I wanted to do but I still wanted to use my sixteen years of experience and enjoyment of videoing and photography. During the winter of 2005, I discovered that no one on record had ever run from the Arizona border to the Texas border, a distance of 165 miles. During the spring and summer of 2006 I trained for the run and the run was completed in October, 2006. In late 2005, I began building and maintaining websites incorporating all the things I enjoyed about video, photography, travel and the out of doors. 2007 has been a summer of upgrading the home and property which resulted in a downgrading of my enthusiasm for being located in one place. If we don’t like what’s happening in our life, we need to change what we’re doing. Celinda and I are ready to pull up roots and move on. I guess I’ve come full circle. I’m ready to revert back to my childhood, and a nomadic lifestyle.

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