It’s an Uphill Climb…

Day Eight, or A Three Hour Tour [*thunder cracks*], A Three Hour Tour:

It was Thursday, tour day, and I was allowed to spend the morning away from tedious gardening and on the farmeress’ herb garden tour…in the hopes that I might learn something about herbs, thereby developing a greater appreciation for them of course. What was supposed to be a two hour tour, though, became a 3½ hour tour as the watchless farmeress explained herb upon herb. I took notes, but in the back of my mind I knew that I would never remember what these particular herbs looked like, or how they are called in English, and so this information was already obsolete for me. Though she was quite knowledgeable (did I mention before that she’s written two books on herbs and has had several TV appearances on Austrian national television?), her knowledge was sadly lost on me.

However, I was admittedly distracted during the tour by one ever-strengthening thought that had begun to creep in: I want to go home. I was lonely, and I missed my friends and my family. I’d only been on the farm for one week, but it had seemed like an entire summer. I missed people and I missed indoor plumbing and I missed email and I missed church and I missed beds I didn’t have to check for spiders and I missed the general connectedness I felt while in Graz. And it’s not like I was having a bad experience—it had stretched me, but I didn’t regret coming for one moment. But the biggest shocker for me was the realization that, for the first time in my life, I was suffering from “real” homesickness—the I-want-to-go-home brand of homesickness. In the past 8 or so years, I’ve traveled a lot and I’ve started over in many new places, and people everywhere will ask if I am ever homesick. And I’ve always replied, “Not really.” Not really, because given the chance to settle in or make new friends I was fine. For the first time in my life, I found myself longing for home.

Though my homesickness was both strong and personally alarming, I had two main reasons why going home was out of the question:

1. I committed myself to the farm for a month. Although I was technically free to leave at any time, if I left after only one week, they family would be out 3 weeks’ help. This is their livelihood I’d be messing with.
2. I had no money. It’s not the most upright of reasons, but the truth of the matter was that I was neither earning nor spending money on the farm, so the longer I stuck it out, the longer I could have absolutely no expenses.

Day Nine, or Alms for the Poor:

One of the reasons this particular farm had stood out to me in the booklet was because the blurb mentioned that helpers would be assigned to the milking of the cows. But there were no cows on the farm when I arrived—rather, the cows stayed for the summer months on the Alm, or the alpine pasture. From May to September, the cows live on a mountainside and graze out in the fresh green mountain pastures. They are cared for by the Sennerin, which is literally translated as “dairymaid” but entails much more than that. These are two terms that will come up a lot in the coming weeks, so let’s review:

• Alm: Alpine pasture. In Tyrol, the family had a low Alm and a high Alm about a half an hour from the farm. Picture a mountain range. Now picture a particular mountain in this range. Imagine driving a ways up this mountain and finding a nice alpine hut with Milka-looking cows (though not purple in color) grazing all around: this is the low Alm. The high Alm was similar, but with a smaller hut, a steeper mountainside, and just below the treeline.
• Sennerin: The Sennerin (or Senner, if male) is the dairyhand out on the Alm. The job description sounds rustically romantic: driving the cows from the farm to the Alm in late May (think cattle drive—no trucks involved!) and remaining with them on the Alm until September. The Sennerin lives alone in an alpine hut (sometimes without electricity or running water), caring for the cows—this includes milking, making butter, and making cheese. Once a week the farmer would come with provisions—for both the Sennerin and the cows!

So when the farmer was ready to make a trip up to the Alm to bring more hay to the Sennerin, I jumped at the opportunity to go! I really wanted to see the cows, the Alm sounded intriguing, and it would be a good distraction from my homesickness.

By the time we reached the low Alm, it really did feel like we were in the middle of nowhere. I had no cell phone reception, and the roads had long since ceased to be paved. The sun was already about to dip behind the mountains, and it gave a lovely Heidi-esque enchantment to the place. I was nearly giddy to be up in the Tyrolean mountains for the first time since my arrival, and I romped around taking pictures of cows and mountain sunsets. The Sennerin was an amazingly congenial person who patiently answered my barrage of questions such as “So how does one become a Sennerin? Do you get lonely? What time do you have to wake up to milk the cows?” (Incidentally, she’s a children’s nurse who gets to take unpaid vacation every year to be a Sennerin in the summers, she doesn’t get lonely because there’s enough work to keep her busy and people are always stopping by, and the cows can wait as late as 7 am unless the milk truck is coming or the butter needs to be made.)

Just before we left to go back to the farm, the Sennerin extended an invitation to me: Next week they’re driving the cows from the low Alm to the high Alm, and would I like to help? Cow herding?! Are you kidding?! I tried to play off my excitement as calmly as possible, but, really, I think she saw right through me.

Day Ten, or The Hills are Alive…With the Sound of a Tyrolean Marching Band?:

It took me 10 days, but I finally stopped calling the hay harvest (Heuernte) the “hay duck” (Heuente)! (As you can see, the word for duck, Ente, is dangerously close to the word for harvest, Ernte. Although I’ve known both of these words for quite awhile, when suddenly faced with both ducks and harvests in the same place and context, I’d started to say things like, “Did you see the harvests playing in the water this morning before we went out for the hay duck?” It was problematic…)

A couple from around Vienna was staying in the guest apartment, and we’d seen each other in passing for the past several days. Over the course of our short interactions, we’d started to become friends, and they offered to take me into the village for a music festival that evening. All I knew was that Brandenberg was having a music festival with what I assumed would be local folk music. We found the festival tent and sat outside with some drinks, waiting for the festival to begin. Scores of people were milling around or heading to and fro in the traditional Tyrolean dress; and I must say that even after all this time in Austria, I still find it hard not to openly stare at Lederhosen and Dirndls! There’s something about having a nation so small and relatively homogenous that a national traditional dress can exist that fascinates me. In the I-want-to-stare-at-you-shamelessly kind of way. (Coming from a culture where I have no traditional dress to wear to weddings and such, it has the appeal of both local pride and getting to dress in “costume”—what’s not to love?)

I asked if my companions would be embarrassed if I took photos, and thankfully they were tourist-minded themselves! The festival began with a small parade down the street—small as in two blocks long—by a throng of traditionally dressed musicians playing…marching band music? Seriously? The first song hit my ears with a bit of disappointment. This certainly wasn’t the kind of music from the last festival! The next couple songs revealed a musical trend, and my new friends weren’t all that thrilled with it either: we decided to opt for ice cream sundaes rather than another all-night party with a marching band!

One Week Down…And How Many to Go?

Day Five, or The Burden of Free Time:

After my Tyrolean farmer breakfast, I was assigned to the weeding of the herb garden. Three hours later I was so over herbs and stray grasses, and I was actually missing the drama and activity of the hay harvest! I’d also made the unfortunate choice of a waist-length shirt that slid up my back when I bent over, and I had a wide red swatch of sunburn across my lower back that was starting to irritate me.

After lunch, I was told that I’d have the rest of the afternoon free. This was my first real chunk of free time since I arrived…what to do? I decided to get all that I could out of the guest apartment, as I’d be moving back into the sleeping stable the next day. So first I did some reading and had some God time. Then I felt a little sleepy, so I took a nap. Then I stumbled into the living room and turned on the TV. Then I did some German grammar exercises. Then I finally called a friend.

With all of my free time, it was finally starting to sink in that I was alone up there on the mountain…and a month suddenly seemed longer than I’d originally thought! It seemed like I’d been gone for ages already, and even the all-night party seemed weeks past. Instead of time passing faster in the mountains, it had slowed dramatically. And as soon as I had time to start thinking, I couldn’t help but think about how little contact I had with people and how lonely I now felt. When I arrived back from Australia in January, I felt so overloaded that I longed to become a hermit; now that I finally had my chance to enjoy a hermitical existence, I found myself feeling lonely and homesick. Part of me wondered: Could I last the month? I mean, I can. But I didn’t have to—technically I was free to leave at any time. And if the family can do this for a lifetime, surely I can do this for a mere month! I wanted to tough it out and I wanted to enjoy my time on the farm, but it just seemed that it would be a lot easier if time would just speed up a little.

Battle Scars: I was responsible enough to apply sunscreen to my face, neck, and arms; but apparently I was not responsible enough to protect my unwittingly exposed back! My sunburn was getting worse—tall, wide, red, and…wait a minute, what’s that?…sun blisters?!
The blisters on my hands from the hay harvest were peeling and healing, but the one on my thumb stubbornly refused to heal.
I’d acquired bruises and bites and scratches along the way, but I tried so very hard to simply accept them as the normal everyday appearance of a real farmer.

Day Six, or The Fear of the Unknown:

Again assigned to work in the herb garden, I thought to myself how ironic it was that I should choose an herbal farm since I’m not so big on gardening. In fact, I consider myself to have a black thumb…just ask my roommate who asked me to watch her plants while she was away for a week! Once more I realized that despite the heat, the sweat, the long hours, the steep mountain slopes, and the stressful time crunch of the hay harvest…I like the constant movement and the exertion and seeing immediate results!

After lunch I went back up to the herb garden with the farmeress to weed. When I got up there I realized that I’d forgotten my work gloves, but not wanting to appear weak in her eyes, I resigned myself to pulling weeds her way—with my bare hands. My major hesitation wasn’t the dirt…rather, it was the fear of the unknown: the unknown number of bugs and spiders I could blindly be reaching for. It really disturbed me, and I had to make a deliberate effort not to think about it. Especially when I saw 5 different kinds of spiders. (Later I discovered a bite mark on my arm with two entry points—fangs. What else has fangs? It must have been one of those dang garden spiders!)

I was astonished when I heard the farmeress ask, “Don’t you enjoy pulling weeds?” I looked up to find her expectant features completely serious and in rapt anticipation of my answer. Until this moment it had not even entered my frame of reference that someone could enjoy this sort of work—it was simply the tedious task that had to be done. I answered truthfully—honestly, I enjoy the hay harvest better. She was surprised and amused at this ignorant city girl who couldn’t recognize life’s little pleasures like this if they, like that spider, came up and bit her. She commented that I’d change my mind once I took her tour of the herb garden and learned a bit more about the plants, but I wasn’t so sure.

Day Seven, or Minor Inconveniences:

Often when there’s any sort of inconvenience, nuisance, or difficulty, it’s easy to blow it out of proportion and feel more burdened than we should. The inconveniences that arose on the farm were probably no big deal when separated from the big picture, but with a week into my stay on the farm, they only served to nurture my developing homesickness. So—deal breaker or whiny overreaction? You decide…

Minor (Stinkin’) Inconvenience #1:
Since I was back in the sleeping stable, this meant no indoor plumbing. This meant that I more or less had to time my biological needs around the family’s schedule…how late can I take my final bathroom break before the family goes to bed? If I wake up in the middle of the night and need to use the bathroom, do I attempt to hold it until daybreak or do I wander out in the dark to the outhouse down the hill that’s surrounded my massive spider webs with proportionally massive spiders?

Minor (Annoying) Inconvenience #2:
A farmer’s life is certainly a hard one—and a busy one. I finally realized that the way my free time is arranged is quite inconvenient. I only got one day a week free: Sundays…the day everything in Austria is closed. (And this, assuming that the time-sensitive hay harvest isn’t stealing my Sunday away from me! As the farmeress put it: If God didn’t want us to work on Sundays, he should have sent better weather during the rest of the week!) I got little breaks during the day, but not enough time to really start anything or go anywhere…it was more like being on call. As I was restricted to the premises for random chunks of time during the day, I never really had a chance to get out and explore the area. (On foot, of course.)

Minor (Distracting) Inconvenience #3:
The sunburn from weeding in the garden quickly became quite painful. It kept me from sleeping at night and prevented me from sitting back in any sort of chair. It was swollen and blistered and even my loose t-shirts brushing up against it made me cringe with pain. It was so bad that it totally freaked me out and I would have seen a doctor immediately had I been near civilization; instead I settled for smearing it with the Austrian equivalent of cream cheese for the cooling effect, hoping I wouldn’t become that random person you read about in the “Oddly Enough” newspaper section who died from a freak sunburn infection.

Ready to Hit the Hay...

Day Three, or A Hard Day’s Night:

After my first killer day of the hay harvest, we went right back at it. After all, there are 8 hectares of hay-bearing hills just waiting for us and our wooden rakes!

I could tell that the hay harvesting was already getting better. The fields weren’t quite as steep this time, and again there was a cool breeze to counteract the effect of the sun. Despite the improvement, I was still dead tired by the afternoon and took a much-needed afternoon nap, for which I collapsed like a fallen log on the sofa and didn’t stir again until I heard my name being called out with an Austrian accent.

The last leg of the day’s hay harvest was another 4-hour stretch harvesting the hay we’d turned before lunch; it was already arranged in rows across the field, so all I had to do was rake up the loose hay behind the harvesting truck. Since it was just me and the farmer this time, it took a long, long time for me to rake that entire field by myself. It wasn’t too bad—it was active work, but I was getting faster and faster and was now able to settle into a rhythm. I had to remind myself to look up and out at the mountains every once in a while, as it was easy to become intensely focused and get tunnel vision.

It was long, hard work, and I was glad when we were done. I was tired, sweaty, and starting to understand those African children you see on TV who don’t bother to wipe the flies from their faces. Perhaps it’s the sweat that the flies are drawn to, but I had a swarm of them about my head and it just got to the point where I had to ignore them…unless one of them flew into my ear, in which case I did indeed lift my hand from the rake to swat it! As I went in for soup, I was looking forward to a nice, quiet evening with a book…

When I got in for dinner, there was talk of a music festival going on in the next village over. The farmeress suggested the son take me as well—after all, I could see some authentic folk music from the region, and all of the young available Tyrolean farmer boys would be there! It was only my third day on the farm, but she was already quite intent on finding me a Tyrolean farmer husband before I left. The invitation to go along was extended to me along with the warning that the son may stay out rather late, so there’s no telling when I’d make it home.

The last thing I wanted to do was go out. All I really wanted was to take a long hot bath (impossible—alas, no bath tub) and read a book and go to bed early (possible). But then I realized that this was a chance to get out and possibly meet people. I’d be in Tyrol for a month, without friends, without transportation to get out and see things…due to my hermitical existence, the possibly of making some friends or at least socializing with other people was tantalizing. So I agreed to go.

As we approached the festival tent, it was clear that all the young people from the surrounding villages had come together for this festival. We entered the tent and saw that to the side were beer and food stands, in the middle were rows and rows of tables, and all the way on the other end was a stage with a local folk music band. To my surprise, there was also a dancing area packed with young people dancing the polka to the music of the band:



In that great big tent full of people I immediately felt lonely. I missed my friends and was suddenly confronted with the fact that I am not the kind of person who can go into a place like that and make 100 new friends—I really on my friends to make new friends! So I hovered around the people I came with, not talking much; when I did, the Tyrolean dialect was exacerbated by the loud music, and this made communication next to impossible anyway. Finally, when I met the occasional new acquaintance, I was forced to say, “I’m sorry…I understand only Styrian dialect or High German. Take your pick!” One guy said he didn’t like either of those choices. One guy said he’d rather speak English instead!

By 11 pm I was ready to hit the hay. (I KNOW!! I’ve been saving this one…:) ) But it wasn’t until 3:30 am that the farmer and farmeress showed up—they’d been at a party themselves and wondered if they should come and rescue me from the festival. Naturally, one of the first questions asked of me was if I’d met any nice young Tyroleans. No, I told her, not yet. She looked a little disappointed and indicated to the bar around us. This would be the perfect place to do it, she said. I smiled…if you can’t find love with an oompah band playing, where can you find love?!

Pretty soon they got swept up in the festivities themselves, and it wasn’t until 5 am that we found ourselves leaving the tent. After a hard day’s hay harvest and then an all-night party, I was beyond exhausted. I finally collapsed into bed at 5:30 am, only to have an 11 am wake-up call and another hay harvest awaiting me.


Day Four, or The Farmer’s Cure for a Hangover:

Getting up at 11 am was a trial. But at least it was a trial for everyone. I was feeling weak and zapped of energy still, since I hadn’t really recovered from the previous day’s harvest, and I was wary of working in the fields with so little sleep and physical energy. However, I was surprised as I started to work how I quickly became energized and started to feel normal again. And from what I observed in the fields, this work seemed to be a farmer’s cure for a hangover.

The field work was getting much better. I felt like I was getting the hang of it and getting much faster. The blisters on my hands continued to form and pop, but I kept working through it all. (At last count, I had 9 blisters…I haven’t had that many since gymnastics in middle school!) We worked on and off with breaks until 8:30 pm. As we neared the end of the evening and were again raking behind the hay collecting truck, the farmeress urged me on to rake faster, saying I just had to make the effort. But it didn’t seem quite that simple. And I didn’t want to make the effort—it was the end of the day—the hottest day of the year in Tyrol thus far—and I was starting to fade. But I forced myself to make the effort and I was able to almost keep up with the farmeress herself!


A Note on Standards: I learned that, on the farm, I either have to lower my standards or assimilate. My parents (and childhood friends) can tell you that I did not grow up in an orderly or sterile environment. Our house was often in various stages of chaos, and I know that my parents felt bad that the house wasn’t always looking presentable. But farm folk have different priorities than city slickers, and I could see that immediately. The kitchen was a difficult place to be, since things like the hay harvest took priority over cleaning up. And because it’s a farm, there are flies everywhere—on old food, new food, the people eating the food…
Likewise, my standards had to change when I was out in the field. Out there I saw all kinds of bugs and insects and flying things, and again, I had to ignore them. For the family, they’re a part of life. They don’t even notice the creepy crawlies, whereas my reaction has always been to jump, scream, swat, flee, or a combination thereof. But I can’t do that here. On the farm, they outnumber me. On the farm, I have to work side by side with them. I can’t let the five mosquitoes on my jeans bother me, even though I’ve learned that a “protective layer of clothing” doesn’t really exist. I must barely take notice when a neon green spider crawls up my leg. The flies will swarm and land where they will, and there will always be a flying beetle in my face. That’s how it works.

Jump Start

Day One on the Farm:

The last couple hours of my train ride, I couldn’t help but simply stare out at the beautiful scenery of Tyrol—the beautiful mountains and the farm-filled valleys kept me in awe of this creation and so thankful that my dream was coming true. And I still can’t believe that I live in this country!

The farmeress (as she will henceforth be known) and her daughter picked me up at the train station and drove me back to the village through a steep mountain pass. In the car, she mentioned how other helpers on the farm are always surprised at what hard work it is on the farm. As she emphasized this a couple of times, I took the hint about the hard work ahead, and I assured her as I had on the phone: I’m honestly looking forward to manual labor! Then she said something that really stood out to me: Some people, she said, go out and climb mountains or mountain bike or so some otherwise outdoorsy activity just to get the same feeling that she gets by working on her farm. And what’s more—that feeling doesn’t even come close to the enjoyment and satisfaction of a good day’s work on your own farm.

A Goat called Ziege: Ziege [German for goat] thinks she’s a dog. As I stepped out of the farmhouse, the first thing I noticed was a goat seated on the steps of the neighboring building. [This was highly amusing to me, but later I would find Ziege in various funny places around the farm, like standing on the bench outside the front door or, say, trying to get into my room in the sleeping stable.] After unloading the car, we stood around front talking and Ziege came over. First she approached the farmeress, who petted her. I’d never touched a goat, but petting one seemed reasonable enough. Next, Ziege approached me. Like a dog—JUST like a dog—she rested her head up against my leg…So I pet her and scratched her behind the ears like a dog. She nuzzled me some more. So I pet her some more. When I stopped giving her attention, she pressed her head up against my leg. If that yielded no results, she dug her horns into my thigh until I was forced to move—then she thought the game was on. She’d playfully approach as if to butt, but she never actually made contact. This was Ziege’s form of play: acting big and tough as if to come up and butt you, but in the end you find yourself just wrestling her like a dog. And the best part: her stump of a tail starts to wag when she thinks she gets to play! It was endearing at first—this dog in a goat’s body—but then she didn’t really know when to quit. And the horns tended to get in the way. They poked. They prodded. They hurt. I was finally tipped off that Ziege is afraid of water, and for the remainder of my stay there, all I had to do if she got too needy or rambunctious was to put a water bottle in my hand; the mere sight of a water bottle would put a safe 20 feet between us and allow my thighs to recover from the horn punctures. She really thought she was a house goat, and she simply couldn’t understand why they never let her in the house.

It was soon obvious that Ziege took an extraordinary liking to me. Even the family said she’d taken to no other guest like she’d taken to me. She was my first sight when I came down in the morning and my last sight before going to bed at night. Ziege would follow me around, even coming down the drive if I were to try and take a walk at night.

Perhaps I missed my calling. Perhaps I should have been a goat herder.



The Bugs: The lowest form of farm life. Not that I’ve been to many farms, but how could I forget about the flies? And the mosquitoes! Why didn’t I think to being bug spray?! And the ticks! Why, oh why, didn’t I get that tick vaccination?!


Day Two, or The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back:

One of the most unique experiences of every day on the farm was our Tyrolean Farmer Breakfast. It was a Müsli that the farmeress had invented—a healthy and hearty breakfast to give you all the vitamins and minerals you’d need for a jump start to your day. Our daily breakfast was a sort of carrot and fruit “muesli” if you will: grated carrots with a tablespoon full of linseed oil (as it is apparently common knowledge here that your body can’t absorb the vitamins in carrots without the fat in oil…have you guys ever heard of this?!), a grated apple, a sliced up banana, a sliced melon, a few raisins thrown into the mix, and a handful of fresh herbs from the garden to top it all off. Mix and eat. It was a strange thing to eat at first…and later too, I suppose…but despite the strange combination of fruits and veggies and oil for breakfast, you did get the sense that at least you were eating something very healthy that day…

After breakfast I was taken up to the herb garden and shown what needed to be harvested. I’ve never spent much time in gardens and I know absolutely nothing about herbs. So after demonstrating the proper picking and cutting techniques for the herbs I was to gather, I was left with several baskets and a pair of scissors and expected to bring in the herbs. I spent the next couple of hours out in the herb garden; sometimes it felt like a scavenger hunt to try and find a patch of the next herb. But, sadly, the most eye-opening thing about the experience was how many shapes, sizes, and colors of new hearty mountain bugs I saw.

After lunch I was sent to go help with the hay harvest. I was warned that it was the most strenuous part of the job and was told to put on my grippiest-soled shoes.

With a flat, short-toothed wooden rake in hand, I went out to the field on the mountainside where the grasses had been cut. The first thing I learned about the hay harvest is that hay is nothing in particular—it’s no particular grass, no particular mix of flora…simply the grasses growing in the field which are then cut, dried, and later fed to livestock. Most of the fields are mowed with a machine, but in the steepest areas they are mowed by hand. On the field where we were harvesting, the grasses had already been mowed and allowed some time to dry; our task was to turn the hay with the rakes so that the undersides were exposed to the sun and also allowed to dry.

Proper hay-turning technique was explained to me several times, and I set to work. It was surprisingly awkward to take the rake and grab a bunch of grass and flip it up into the air, tossing like a pancake in a frying pan. I needed constant tips on the most efficient raking and turning methods, and although it seemed to make sense in my head, somehow the neurons firing up there couldn’t get the information to really synchronize with my motor skills. It was such a simple task, but it was surprisingly difficult to get the hang of!

Parts if the harvest were on such steep grades of the mountainside that it hurt simply to stand there, let alone move around. The turning of the hay seemed to take forever, but that was only the first step. Next, if the incline is gentle enough, the machine can sort the loose grasses into rows of hay that can then be harvested; our job was to come along and rake the hay the machine had missed back into those rows. This was tedious work, and although the take was simply to rake a field, I discovered that I had difficulty even doing this efficiently.

Finally, after they hay had been dried, turned, and raked into rows, the machine would come back for the final step and collect the hay. The machine used for this task looked like a large truck, and it would drive over the rows of hay and scoop it into the truck bed area in the back; our final task was to rake behind the machine and collect the extra hay that the machine had missed, rake it into piles, and then put into the truck by hand. This was perhaps the most fast-paced and stressful task of all, since it seemed impossible for me to keep up with the machine.

After 4 hours of the harvest, I had to take a break. I’d started strong and not taken any breaks, but after 4 hours my feet were killing me and I was trying to avoid irritating the one (only one!) blister from raking, and I was longing to stand on level ground. I now realized how much hard work it was—it’s not complicated work, but you’re constantly battling gravity on steep hillsides, constantly using your arms and your legs (even while standing still on those steep grades!), and working in the sun…this combination would make anyone tired! Well, any non-mountain-farmer. I realized for the first time that farm work simply never ends; no matter how quickly you work, as soon as you finish a task, there’s always something else to be done, sunup to sundown. And for the meager amount of money that a farm brings in, it can only be a true love of the work and the land that keeps you going.

The Basics

Before I begin by taking you through the life of a novice alpine farmer, allow me to explain some of the “givens” in my description of the farm and farm life:

• My uniform: I brought ratty farm clothes, knowing they would most likely have no second life after I got back. I found that the best outfit I could wear for any sort of farm work was jeans, a baggy t-shirt, and a baseball cap. Although it got rather hot working outside all day (thankfully minus the humidity of the US East Coast!), jeans were really the best bottom layer because they protected my sensitive city legs from things that bite, sting, burn, or itch…both plant and animal. I also found that a baggy t-shirt was the best top layer—much cooler than anything remotely form-fitting, and I quickly learned that the sleeves offer a useful extra bit of protection as well. Hence the farmer’s tan. I was given a baseball cap and ordered to wear it to protect against the sun; without it, I was warned, I would quickly become tired and develop a headache from working in the sun all day. So I faithfully wore my baseball cap every day, and I was extremely grateful for it!

[my uniform:]

• My schedule: Subject to minor adjustments depending on the day and the harvest, we had breakfast every morning at the slothful hour of 8:30. You may find this surprisingly late for a farm, but since the cows are up grazing on the alpine pasture for the summer, they can afford to get a later start on the main farm. (That being said, the farmer was usually working literally from sunup to sundown.) Lunch (the big, warm meal of the day) was at noon, and then we’d work some more until an afternoon coffee and snack break at about 4 pm. A normal day could end anywhere between 4 pm and 6 pm, giving me an average of 6-8 hours of work per day. Oh, and I worked 6 days a week. And because of the way the hay harvest panned out, I actually only had 2 totally free days the whole time I was there!

[my farm:]


• My accommodation: Part of the appeal of WWOOFing is that you provide free manual labor in exchange for room and board. My board was no problem—the mother was used to cooking for a family of 8 anyway—and my room was alternately a converted stable with a bed or the guest apartment, depending on who was staying at the farm. In the stable I had a bed, but I had to go down to the outhouse or the main house if I needed to use the facilities. The guest apartment was a nice treat in comparison, as it even had a TV! I spent about half of my time in each, but I must say that despite its rustic appeal, the dark, damp, spider-ridden stable was the more difficult accommodation; I think it was the allure of knowing that indoor plumbing was available elsewhere that made me feel much more out-of-place in the stable room.

[my sleeping stable:]

• My farm: I’d unwittingly chosen to go work on the farm of THE herb lady in Tyrol. When I got there I realized that the main attraction on the farm was the herb garden. The farmeress (alas, the English language lacks any distinction between male and female farmers!) gave tours of the herb garden every week, as well as seminars and other such special events, and produced and sold various herbal products. She’s written two books, has been featured national Austrian television, and is considered THE go-to person for herbs in that province. It’s an organic farm, so everything is grown and harvested using the most natural and backbreaking of methods. In addition to the herb garden, there are 8 hectares of land with harvestable hay (on the steep mountainside that constitutes all the farmland), about 30 chickens (and two very chauvinistic roosters), a goat (who honestly thinks it’s a dog), 10 cats (who are expected to earn their keep catching field mice), a couple of guinea pigs (as the daughter’s pets), a couple of rabbits (and the jury’s still out on whether they’re pets or just being fattened up for…well…you know…), a handful of ducks (the tall, skinny kind like in the movie Babe), a couple of bee boxes (which are sadly being invaded by ants), and about 15 cows and calves and 2 sheep currently up in the alpine pastures.

[rooster and goat video:]

So as my tale of farm life unfolds, please feel free to ask any questions via blog comments or email, and I’ll make sure to clarify/elaborate/embellish!

A Return to Civilization

I'm home, and I've got a bonified farmer's tan!

I made it back from the farm yesterday and am now back in Graz. I just wanted to check in and say thank you for all of your notes and encouragement (but as I had no internet access, I just now got them), and I did survive my near-month on the farm.

I've learned to work outside in the fields in the heat of the day. I've [more or less] milked a cow. I've seen spiders in every shape, size, and color, both inside and outside. And thankfully, oh so thankfully, I am not allergic to hay.

It was hard work--just as I suspected it to be. But I also learned valuable life skills like how to harvest hay on a steep mountainside or how to drive cows to the alpine pasture with a few choice words and a cattle prod or how to churn butter from the cream you've separated from the fresh cow's milk. I battled what I would consider "real" homesickness for the first time in my life, and I met some really interesting people who made the whole trip worthwhile. I learned such a great deal during my 24 days on the farm, and I am so grateful that I had this opportunity.

There is SO much to tell. But lucky you--this isn't the old days of my mass emails (some of you may still remember my [infamously] long report after my trip to Romania in 2006!)...this go around I've got a blog. I kept a journal while I was there about my experiences, impressions, and what I learned, and my plan is to give you choice exerpts every few days or so. This way you can learn about the trip and keep up at a managable pace.

And please keep your comments coming--I love to hear your reactions and feedback!