my 3kg sweet potato find

After an exciting lift to the Fraser Island busstop with the hostel worker Genevieve (she forgot to close the boot and Nik's bagtook a brief flying lesson in the driveway), we caught the bus to Cooroy, to be picked up by our new wwoof hosts, from a permaculture property in KinKin. We spent the five hours between the bus arrival and being picked-up in... guess where! A park!

When our host Zaia arrived, driving a kombi-van complete with scrap-yard salvaged bits inside, and curtains, our first surprise was that she was combining the trip to Cooroy to fetch us with picking up her son. It turned out that she had two kids, aged 10 and 15, which was a surprise and a little disconcerting as we were trying to avoid wwoof hosts with children, for various reasons.

After driving (the style best described as kamikaze... we nearly veered off the road at one point!) the half an hour or so from Cooroy, we arrived at the property located down an unselaed road, just outside the village of Kin Kin, in a secluded and beautiful valley. Our accomodation was a caravan close to the house, containing bed, table, chest of drawers and HUGE hairy tarantula-type spider, described by our host as a 'visitor'. Thankfully Nik encouoraged it out of the door using his uke or I think I'd have attempted to sleepin the kombivan instead!

We met Zaia's partner Tom, a permaculture teacher, when we went into the house for dinner (soup-with-meat-in-it for Nik and the others, and, in a comedy vegetarian-cliche moment, a pile of salad leaves from the garden for me), and found out some more about how wwoofing at the property worked. Due to both the couple's desire to live as self-sufficiently as possible, and for income-reasons, Wwoofers were expected to feed themselves entirely from the garden for their dinner and lunch, as far as was possible, with use of spices, butter etc from the kitchen. This was a) another surprise, as nothing had been mentioned in the wwoof book or our email communications and b) a concern, as neither one of us are great cooks! We ended up eating a lot of root veggies (sweet potato, yakon, taro), chokos and an absolute ton of various 'greens' from the garden. While it was pretty ace to be able to go out to the garden and gather the means to make a meal, food/meals became a bit of an issue, particularly in our first week, as the lack of carbs and iron/protein took their toll slightly.

The garden was great: the word 'abundance' comes up a lot in discussion of permaculture(which is 'permanent agriculture'; everything interlinked and multipurpose - from the chooks scratchign at weeds, providing manure and supplying eggs, to cuttings and weeds being placed round plants as mulch in a method called 'chop and drop' - with nothing wasted or leaving the property. Plants are grown in intermixed beds, with lettuce alongside strawberries alongside herbs. The garden grew everything from lettuces to basil to choko vines, dandelion plants (the leaves of which they ate), medicinal herbs, taro, sweet potatos, strawberries, turnips, radishes, brocolli and mint, with fruit trees interspersed between - mandarines, bananas, mangos, and Tom was trying out new plants all the time. There were three chook pens, with two sets of chooks running free in the paddocks everyday; three goats, two cows (one of their cows would be killed for meat each year) and one market-bought calf (and a 'surprise' calf that was born unexpectedly during our stay), and three dogs. The toilet was an outdoor composting one, situated in a little moveable shed, to be re-located when the pit below it came too full. However we were encouraged to do #1's anywhere in the garden that we felt comfortable! The shower too was outdoors, inside a rather raggedy tent, and solar-heated, with controls that had to be operated by another person outside, as Tom was trying to construct a stone-built bathroom/laundry building but kept being distracted by his seemingly endless amount of tasks and projects. One day they hope to get bees, and to milk their cows and goats to make cheese.

the compost loo!

Our day began at 6.45-7am with a 'Coo-ee' call from the house to breakfast; a cooked meal with eggs and normally some kind of greens or potato-dish. It was pretty hard to stomach such a heavy meal some mornings, but we sort of got used it towards the end of our time there. Then one of us would wash up, and work would begin. In our first week we built a corrugated-tin fence around on of the four chook-pens, whick took a ridiculously long time. As well as this we weeded up many clumps of invasive nut-grass. We also spent a period of time most mornings harvesting from the garden; filling up the salad bowl with the variety of leaves and herbs; collecting strawberries and tomatos, and, in my case, hunting out and digging up red and purple sweet potatoes (including a giant 3kg monster!) which grew voraciously over the swales (water-retaining ditches constructed on contours to collect and distribute rainwater). Then lunch, which we either cooked or helped out with preparing, was at around 1pm, with washing-up afterwards. Work was done and the day was free after lunch.

to be cont'd :-)

written by  LizIsHere on August 28, 2010 from Cooroy, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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I don't the neighbours will be too happy if you start relieving yourself in the garden when you come home !
Sounds an amazing lifestyle there tho'.

written by  julia on September 16, 2010

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