WWOOFing: Farm Life in the South of France
There are times in life when you just need to get your hands dirty. And that’s why one fine September evening found me on a plane, descending into a picturesque scene of cotton candy clouds and a sky colored shades of pastel by the setting sun over a glassy winding river and expansive green fields near Biarritz airport.
I was on my way to literally get up close and personal with some good old-fashioned dirt. I wanted to learn how to grow things: delicious, beautiful, organic fruits and vegetables. So I headed to the south of France to spend three weeks working on an organic farm - because if you’re going to learn how to grow food, what better place is there than the south of France?
This was possible thanks to WWOOF, and if you haven’t heard of them before … what you’re about to read may rock your world. WWOOF is the World Wide Organization of Organic Farms. It’s essentially the Airbnb of organic farms, minus any exchange of money and with some manual labor and delicious food thrown into the mix.
Each country has their own separate WWOOF organization. In the case of WWOOF France, you pay 25 euros to become a member. This gives you access to their website, where you can peruse the listings of the 1800 organic farms (“hosts”) who belong to the program. Each listing includes photos of the farm, a description, reviews from previous WWOOFers, and the dates and lengths of time they accept WWOOFers. When you choose one, you message them to let them know when and why you’d like to come work there and they write back and say yes or no.
The only problem is that it’s hard to pick one because they all look amazing. After several hours browsing and hearting every listing I saw, I settled on one of the first: a small family-run farm close to the Spanish border in French Basque Country that grows fruits, vegetables and edible flowers. (It was the edible flowers that got me.) I wrote them that I have no farm-related skills or knowledge whatsoever but I hope I could be useful somehow, and crossed my fingers.
They wrote back right away. Sure, you’re welcome! There is always work to be done here. Just let us know your exact dates closer to the time.
Well, that was easy.
So a couple months later, there I was landing in Biarritz. Dominique - farmer and farm master - came to pick me up at the airport. He was a laid back, salt-of-the-earth kind of man in his early sixties. He thought I might be hungry so he brought me a bag of apples, peaches and a nectarine (from the farm, of course) and a bag of stroopwafels. Very thoughtful.
The sky darkened progressively during the peaceful 45 minute drive to the farm. By the time we arrrived, a thick blanket of stars was glowing vibrantly overhead.
Dominique runs the farm along with his wife Evelyn and their daughter Laetitia and son in law Joe. Evelyn was asleep when I arrived but I was introduced to Laetitia and Joe. They showed me to my accommodation, a spacious one room cabin about 50 yards from the main house. It was fitted with a double bed, a single mattress, a couch and coffee table and a couple chests of drawers and a coffee maker. Nothing fancy, but spacious and comfortable.
They can host up to 4 wwoofers at a time, but for the time being I was the only one there, which was perfect for me. It was simple and peaceful.
A glimpse of the view cycling along the nearby Adour River.
Dominique explained the schedule. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays I would work 8am to 1pm. I could prepare my own breakfast. Evelyn would prepare lunch and dinner. Dominique and Evelyn eat lunch at 1pm and dinner around 8. I was welcome to eat with them or on my own, as I preferred. The afternoons and evenings I was free, and there were bicycles I could borrow. Thursdays and Sundays were market days. I was welcome to come along to the market if I wanted (yes, I wanted.) Dominique and Evelyn would wake up at 3am to load the van with produce. I could wake up at 4 or 4:30 as long as I was ready to leave before 5am.
We would be back by mid afternoon, unload the van, eat and then most likely go to sleep. Fridays and Mondays, the days after market days, were my days off.
I was amazed by all the free time. (Because I didn’t read the WWOOF fine print, which explains the hours one can expect.) I don’t need so much free time, I told Dominique. I’m here to work and learn as much as possible. Also I eat a lot so it’s only fair that I work a lot too.
A small part of the selection in the chambre froid
It’s up to you, he said. (They themselves work much longer hours and never take a day off.)
Evelyn showed me the most wonderful thing at the farm: le chambre froid, the cold room. It’s a square room about 10 ft by 10 ft with a freezer door, chilled to 50 degrees. Inside are crates filled with produce from the farm, beautiful lettuces and eggplants and green beans and carrots and zucchini and apples and peaches and figs and fresh herbs and much, much more. And in another room, there are eggs from their chickens and shelves full of jams. “You can have anything you want as long as it doesn’t say reserved on it,” she informed me.
I’m sure my face looked like the emoji with hearts for eyes. As if that wasn’t enough, besides the chambre froid they also have a normal fridge, filled with all kinds of cheeses and leftovers and other goodies.
My first work day included picking figs and beautifying onions. First, the figs: this was absolutely marvelous. I’m a big fan of dried figs but I’ve never seen fresh figs growing on trees. There were 6 fig trees in the yard near the house, producing 5 different varieties, and lucky for me, it was fig season.
Figs galore
Armed with plastic buckets and rubber boots for the dew-soaked grass, we started collecting figs immediately after breakfast. It’s incredible how many a single tree produces. I lost count of how many buckets we filled.
Seeing my excited reaction to the plethora of these delicious fruits, Dominique told me “Eat as many as you want.” For the sake of quality control, I tasted a representative sample of each level of ripeness. Interestingly, even equally ripe figs from the same tree sometimes had a different flavor. My favorites were the slightly overripe ones; they were the sweetest and juiciest.
When the buckets were full, we emptied them into paper-lined wooden crates. Dominique would later go through them to remove any unsellable figs and get the rest market-ready.
We harvested figs almost every day, and yet every day a fresh new abundant supply would be hanging in wait for us. These six trees alone produced more figs than the market demanded. Evelyn makes jams with the surplus: fig jam, fig and black pepper jam, fig and walnut jam. I tasted the last one and it was fantastic, especially on top of Basque tart or an extravagant French toast or paired with fromage de brebis - sheep cheese. (Like so many things, it sounds nicer in French.)
Strawberry fig basil French toast with fig walnut compote
“How do you grow fig trees from scratch?” I asked Dominique. “From the seeds?” If so I would be bringing a collection back home with me.
“From cuttings,” he replied. “It would be very difficult to grow them from seeds.”
Darn. Oh well. I’m not sure Cambodia has the right climate for fig trees anyway.
Once we finished with the figs that first morning, Dominique brought me to one of the greenhouses for Task #2: the onions. A stack of 16 crates of recently harvested onions sat in one corner and they needed to be made more presentable for the market. Dominique demonstrated the process: remove the rough outer layers of skin and use a small knife to trim the tail on one end and the tuft of hair on the other. And if you find a rotten one, toss it in the wheelbarrow destined for compost, because one rotten onion will ruin the whole crate.
I listened alternatively to music and many podcasts while trimming the onions. The task was simple but creating the transformation was satisfying. But, I was surprised to discover that more than half of the onions were rotten. I reported this to Dominique when he came to check on me a couple hours later.
“I know, there are many, many bad ones this year,” he grumbled. “I don’t know why. It’s a big problem.” He’s been farming for 30+ years and he knows a lot, as I would discover later, but no one knows everything.
Before I go on about all the farm chores, let’s take a break to talk about Food.
Dominique feels the same way about desserts as I do.
I don’t remember what we ate for lunch that first day, only that it was delicious, because every meal was delicious. Everything was always prepared by Evelyn, and with so much variety that in my 3 weeks here we never had the same meal twice. There was lamb, chicken, pork, beef, always cooked in mouthwatering savory sauces, mashed potatoes, pizza, pasta, paella, a phenomenal ratatouille, avocados and tomatoes drizzled with olive oil, pork roti and more dishes that I’ve forgotten. There were always baguettes with a selection of cheeses - my favorites were the Camembert and the sheep cheese. And the desserts (some home made, some from the bakery): Paris Brest, clafoutis aux pommes (it’s like an apple pudding), Basque pie and so many more. I got some cooking lessons from Evelyn from time to time. She shared her go-to recipe for a simple yet sensational salad dressing: Dijon mustard, apple cider vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. (There are no measurements; you just let your intuition and taste buds guide you.). She explained to me the different ways to prepare celeriac (her top recommendation, a celeriac-potato mash), and she taught me to make red kuri squash fries in the deep fryer (these are fantastic).
Back to the work part of this experience. Over the following weeks my tasks included cleaning dried, dead plants out of the greenhouse (the dirt and dead plants went to the compost pile and the plastic containers were saved for next season’s use) while Laetitia planted trays of new seeds, more fig harvesting and onion prepping, gathering fallen apples from the ground beneath the apple trees, collecting eggs from the chicken coop, picking tomatoes and weeding strawberry fields. And, best of all - if this can be called a task - the market. More about that phenomenal experience in a bit.
Collecting fallen apples was my least favorite chore. The apples had spent too much time on the ground and many of them had already reached an advanced stage of rottenness. The rotten ones were given to the donkeys, and the salvageable ones would be sold as apples for compote. “We waited too long to collect them,” Dominique said. It wasn’t hard to figure out how this could happen. They had a lot of work to take care of constantly, and not enough hands to do everything at the perfect time.
Picking tomatoes, on the other hand, was such a pleasure. They’re grown in a greenhouse off site, a short drive away from the house. There are three long, tall rows of them and it took Dominique, Evelyn and I about two hours to collect a truck full. It was raining gently outside but we were under cover and dry and people in the greenhouse next door were playing great music. Most of the tomatoes were green, but there were some red ones. It was like a treasure hunt. You would find lots of small and medium sized green tomatoes, and then every once in a while, boom, you’d discover a big beautiful red or green one. Because the vines were so tall, the work was comfortable; no back ache involved. But the tomatoes’ skins are covered with a film that turned our hands black. It took over a week before mine completely returned to their original color, even after scrubbing them a few times with a special soap.
After the tomatoes,
we moved on to the neighboring crop of zucchini and eggplant, slicing their stems with a knife to harvest them. There were some massive ones that you’d swear were on steroids, but being that this was an organic farm, that couldn’t be.
Collecting eggs from the chicken coop was another first for me. Although the chickens roam freely outdoors, they come inside the coop to lay their eggs. According to Dominique, the eggs have to be collected about every 2 hours, otherwise the chickens will break some of them. On average, they get about 60 eggs a day from their 100 chickens. There was something fascinating about the constant effortless supply. The eggs were big and light brown.
Weeding strawberries was my final project at the farm. It was the tail end of strawberry season - a few juicy red berries still hung on the plants, but not enough to be worth harvesting. The four rows of strawberries had been thickly overgrown by weeds and the weeds needed to be removed in preparation for next season. Because they had grown so big this was a much bigger project than if they had been removed in their infancy, but once again there was something satisfying about clipping away the weeds to reveal the strawberry plants hidden below. This project took 4 days, which gave me a lot of time for more podcasts. (I was in a TED Radio Hour phase - the diversity of topics you can learn about on there is amazing.) As for the weed clipping, the task is pleasant but hard on your low back; impossible to go too long before taking a break. By the third day the sensation of holding clippers and snipping rubbery weeds floated in mind as I drifted off to sleep at night.
Strawberry fields
I asked if strawberries could be grown from seeds. It would be very difficult, Dominique told me. Usually they’re grown by transplanting the little runners.
Once again, darn.
The market was my favorite thing.
Every Thursday and Sunday morning; Marché d’Anglet. It was a lot of work: loading of the van, departing before 5am, a 45 minute drive to the market, an hour to set up the tents and tables, unload and arrange all the goods and put up signage with names and prices. There was so much produce: the basics like lettuce (4 different kinds), potatoes, beets, carrots, red and white onions (those beautiful onions), several varieties of tomatoes, carrots, green, red and orange peppers, long beans, artsy red and green spotted bingo beans, zucchini, cucumbers, celery, apples, pears, figs, lemons, fragrant herbs, and some items I’ve never seen before: celeriac (although I prefer the literal translation from French: celery balls!) and red kuri squash (potimarron). It was a feast for the eyes. They also sell eggs (free range and organic, from their chickens), and canned goods including different types of honey (produced by their neighbors) and jams and various sauces made by Evelyn.
When the setup is complete, we get coffee and almond croissants from the wonderful cafe at the end of the street.
Once the market opens, the fun begins. Around 6:30am the earliest shoppers arrive. Many of them have been buying from Dominique & Evelyn for decades and they’re old friends now. Some have placed orders in advance that have been set aside for easy collection. By 7am, there’s a steady flow of customers - from then until 1pm, there’s almost always a constant line. Everyone is in a good mood - bright and friendly and cheerful. Greetings and jokes flow back and forth, and if anyone has a question about anything, Dominique is ready with a wealth of advice on how it should be prepared. I love the ambience and the behind-the-scenes exposure to what it took to get this all ready. Supermarkets are amazing and convenient, but they can’t compare to this delightful experience of buying out in fresh air, straight from the farmer who’s coaxed all of this food into maturity from the very beginning.
I make myself useful for a while refilling depleted cartons of produce and piles of lettuce from the van when needed, and when my presence isn’t required, I set off to explore the rest of the market. It’s an intoxicating delight for the senses. There are fish and meat stands, more produce stands, breads and sensational pastries, several paella stands (we’re close to the Spanish border), quiches and grilled octopus, a couple Moroccan stands, a spice stand, a flavored sea salt stand, several stands of sheep and goat cheese, and one visually stunning cheese stand with the most jaw dropping display of cheeses I’ve ever seen.
On my first tour, I pause near a small stand with “samousas” - they look like Indian samosas. Some great dance music emanates from their speakers and the man behind the counter is dancing by himself. I laugh and sway my shoulders to the rhythm.
“Oh, you want to dance?” The man comes out from behind the counter and we dance to the rest of the song. (It’s 8am.) He’s from Mauritius, it turns out. Island people, they’re the same everywhere I think - festive and fun loving. He gives me a samousa to try afterwards; it’s delicious.
I continue my tour, discovering a bbq’d chicken stand, another cheese stand, some non-edible items like purses, handbags and some clothing. I pause next at a table of locally produced white wine. I chat with the vendor and he gives me a glass to taste. (It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.) It’s very sweet, similar to Canadian ice wine. I like it but one glass is enough.
I make my way back to Dominique and Evelyn. By the 2nd market day, they show me how to operate the cash register and weigh the produce. They have the prices of everything memorized. I don’t, obviously, so I make myself a cheat sheet. It’s been 15 years since I had to do anything involving a cash register but this is a lot of fun. It’s also great mental stimulation since the register doesn’t calculate change.
Some shoppers ask who I am. Dominique explains that I’m a wwoofer. A couple people are very interested by the idea of WWOOFing. One woman gets into a long discussion about the details and asks if she can come with her daughter. Dominique tells her sure and to apply via the website.
Evelyn’s standard response is that I’m a petite jeune fille here helping them. At age 39, I find it hilarious to be described as a “young little girl.” But I’ve been called worse.
At 1pm, the market closes. We consolidate the remaining produce and load it back into the van. A lot sold, but a lot still remains - I’m a little displeased that people haven’t bought more of those picture perfect onions. But it was a good day for lettuce and tomatoes. Later, Evelyn explains that what people buy depends on the weather. Today, it was warm, so they want light food for salads. When it’s cold or rainy, they’ll buy lots of squash and potatoes and onions for soups and stews.
It was supposed to be rainy season, but we were so lucky with the weather these 3 weeks. It only rained twice during the day, and once during the night while we were all sleeping. It was unseasonably warm too, to my great joy.
I was never bored. I loved the time to feel unhurried, to read books, write, run, practice yoga, call friends. On one of my days off while I was there and went bike riding to sight see along the Adour river. It was green and pretty and peaceful, with lots of roses and beautiful French country houses.
I had a lot of time to think. I thought about how Nature can be raw and savage and terrible sometimes but also so incredibly nourishing and life giving. I suppose she has to be, or we wouldn’t exist here as a species. Yet it’s still too much to take for granted.
Even in just 3 weeks I saw glimpses of all parts of the cycle of plant life. Young fruits not yet ripe, ripe ones being harvested, overripe ones, dead plants, new seeds being planted. A vivid reminder of the circle of life and of how fast everything changes. I saw the amount of time and work involved in producing food. I saw that so much of that work is about producing the right conditions, planting and picking. That each individual plant does its own thing effortlessly and beautifully as long as it has what it needs. And that plants even thrive in less than perfect conditions. The rows of strawberry plants that I unburied from a dense cover of overgrown weeds were still producing juicy red strawberries.
I thought about how a kiwi plant is only ever going to produce kiwis, no matter how much we might wish them to transform into oranges or strawberries or anything else. All we can do is give the plant what it needs and let it do its own thing. It’s the same with people - we can only be what we are, but in the right conditions we can flourish into the best version of what we’re meant to be.
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