La Serre pt. 5 -- Andy and Sara

The Universe is a good place. It realized our relative stir-craziness that was happening, and it delivered to us two wonderful Americans within walking distance. Just when things were getting bleak at La Serre, we were given Andy and Sara, a married couple from Florida. They are living in Lyon at the moment while Andy is working on some math thing, and they decided to wwoof on their vacation time to learn about permaculture. Anyway, we could not have asked for more wonderful neighbors. They are so intelligent and funny and entertaining. We've been over to their house (or their wwoofing farm) like 6 times and spent the night twice. Their hosts go out of town a lot, so we have really taken advantage of that. So these pictures kind of chronicle the food we've eaten together.

This is the kitchen at their farm. The night before I first saw it, I dreamed that I used a bunch of Christmas popcorn tins in my own kitchen. Weird!

More of their kitchen

One of the things we have learned from them is which weeds are edible and which ones aren't. This is some lovely nettle juice that we drank for its wonderful vitamin content and lovely grassy flavor.

At dinner party #1, we ate a raw lentil salad. It inspired me to want to participate in Raw Food Wednesdays when I get back. Raw lentils are good and filling!

Because Derek and I didn't have anything to bring to the dinner, we picked a million wild blackberries on the way to their house, which I promptly turned into a cobbler. It was good, but a little seedy.

The next day, we dined with them again. Here is the plate of assorted organic tomatoes along with the dippers for the raw hummous.

This is raw hummous. It is made from germinated chick peas. It was much fluffier than regular hummous, and I think I enjoyed it more!

Another day without anything to bring, so we picked more blackberries, plums, and elderberries. I made this pie. I made an olive-oil based crust "au pif" which means without really knowing what I was doing, and it was so good! I will always make that over a butter crust now.

The next morning, Sara made us pancakes using some pears I brought from our tree.

Someone get me this cookbook! I must have it!

Later that same day, we ate a great salad of lettuce, weeds, and edible flowers.

I forget what this weed is called, but it reminds me of the horticulture teacher in Harry Potter. Ughh what is it?? Well, no matter. The leaves taste like fish! We fried the leaves in a Corn Flake batter and ate it with sesame sauce. It was really delicious!

Andy fryin' up the leaves.

So anyway, bless the Universe for bringing these people to our lives. Derek and Andy have bonded over trading enlightening books and have very good discussions about them. We've had an amazing time knowing them! We are sad that they're leaving on Sunday, but we're leaving no later than Wednesday, so that'll be okay.

Yeah, we are trying to go back to Paris for a few days before going to London. We are straight up tired of farming, and this woman is about to drive us out of our skins! We'll see if it's worth the extra money to change our train tickets, but we think it just might be.

La Serre pt. 4 -- Work

Wwoofing used to mean "willing workers on organic farms" but they had to take the word "work" out of the acronym so that the tax people couldn't get involved. That doesn't mean that there is no work in wwoofing anymore, though! We work a lot, and we do a lot of brunt work. We weed for hours. We stand up and put microscopic seeds in holes for hours. We harvest, we plant, we clean. We only work an average of 5 hours a day, so it isn't terrible. I just wanted to account for some of the work we've done here.

These are the hundreds of shallots I harvested one morning.

We seeded all of these baby lettuces. These are about 2 weeks old.

For about 3 days, all we did was pull up baby leeks from the outdoor nursery and prep them to be planted.

One of the coolest jobs we've gotten was ketchup making! We learned a lot and had a good time doing this. Dominique stressed us out incessantly, but it was neat to see how to do this.

Tita and Loute on the ketchup making day. We were all inside and depressed because the weather was miserable. I drank 6 cups of tea that day.

Derek set up the camera to catch us making ketchup. That's all!

La Serre pt. 3- the tour

There is so much to this place, so let's hope I got enough pictures to try to paint a picture for my reader (s?).

Tita in the courgette patch. Harvesting zucchinis is a tough job! You get all scratched up, and if you miss one in the morning, it is enormous by the evening.

Big ol' Daddy pig

Itty Bitty baby pigs (don't think they are too cute because they'll be slaughtered in the next few weeks.)

Maybe I'm stupid, but I never knew that real sheep have tails! Most of the sheep I've ever seen have had their tails docked, but wow! Sheep have tails. Huh.

The flowers around this house are magnificent! Some lady who was visiting made this bouquet from the wild flowers. It is a couple of days old here, but it shows how lovely they are.

Coolest kitchen ever!

It really makes me want open cabinets in my house, wherever that may end up being.

This house is really beautiful and inspiring. I want to find a house in Nashville that I can make into my own space. I want an old place with character. No carpet. A porch. A huge backyard garden. Open cabinets. A basement. Collections. I'm such a cancer.

La serre pt. 2

Day 16 at La Serre du Bois. We've been doing quite a lot! Being busy seems to suit us, though, so it is all good.

Last weekend we rode bikes to a lake about 15 km from our farm. The ride was terribly difficult for both of us because French bikes never seem to be tall enough for our long legs, so although our seats were up as high as they could go, we still had to work really hard to get the bikes up some really mild hills. We finally got to the lake and were feeling a bit cranky from the tough ride, and we felt even crankier when we had to sit in really bug-infested grass near the muddy bank. The water was too cold to swim, and we just weren't really feeling the lake. After less than an hour, we got up to leave, but we were accosted by a very enthusiastic labrador retriever. As we were greeting the dog, his owners strolled up. We were delighted to hear a jolly English lilt to their voices, and quickly established one of those friendships that is solely based on the fact that a native language is shared between people. The couple-The Steers-are in their early 50's, and after having lived in England and Scotland for most of their lives, they moved to the South of France. They were such nice people and invited us to hear them sing some traditional Irish songs at a bar in a nearby village later that week. We were so drunk on English that we couldn't think of much else all week.

Which gets me to my next point. Although our language skills are definitely improving here, it is definitely at the expense of our morale. The personalities of our hosts are becoming much more clear, and sometimes I find myself with a terrible lack of enthusiasm when it comes to speaking French, and as a result, I find myself really not desiring to do much work here. The problem stems from the fact that Dominique is a very abrasive, fast-paced individual, and Derek and I are much more laid-back and slow-moving. That doesn't mean that we are lazy, but we just don't natually move about at break-neck speed. She stresses us out on a very natural basis with her quickness and vigor. She isn't really a gentle person, and she isn't too worried about hurting one's body or one's feelings. She almost threw me into a tractor when I was helping her roll a decorative wagon out of the way yesterday, and when she saw how irritated I was about that, she replied (in French of course) "Don't worry! You didn't get run over!" I wasn't actually worried that I had been run over. I was worried that I was going to take a swing at her head with a sledge hammer. She speaks incredibly quickly, and with a thick Toulousian accent, and it isn't a rare occasion that we don't understand. It is a very frequent occasion that I do understand, but I just don't have the energy to respond. I feel that my intellect is very misrepresented by my discouraged, apathetic attempts at French conversation with her. She thinks I'm quite a numbskull, and it really just eats away at me. She has almost made me cry at two dinners by just being too abrasive with me when I can't fully express/defend myself in her language. She is rough with Derek too, but he is less sensitive than I am, and he also understands less of her words when she's being difficult, so he has dealt better. Cyril, though, has been an absolute saint about our language gap. He will spend all day rephrasing things so we can really understand him, and he is very generous and open in our conversations. He speaks very slowly and with great hand gestures so that we can understand him better. He smiles at our mistakes and doesn't expect too much. I'm very glad that he is here.

We aren't learning very much on this farm. We learned a ton at La Petite Mane, but this one has been mostly full of busy work that we aren't sure about. We don't understand the function of much of our labor, like why we are stripping ferns of their leaves and putting the leaves under the cabbage plants. It isn't very hard work, and it isn't bad, but we just want to know why we are spending our hours doing that. One time, Dominique thought that I wasn't being quick enough in stripping the ferns, so she literally pulled the glove off of my hand, put it on her own hand, and showed me a faster way to do it. I was so appalled that the glove had been ripped off of my fingers that I said, "Oh, d'accord," and went right back to what I had been doing. I am really passive sometimes, but I'm a stubborn one, too.

I don't want to act like everything is terrible here. It really isn't. We're still having a good time and eating so well that I can't even see straight. I'm experiencing a very funny occurrance here before meals. We eat lunch between 1-2, and we eat dinner between 9-10. About 20 minutes to half an hour before the meal, I'll usually lay down on my bed and close my eyes to rest. I don't usually fall asleep, but I'll be in that weird in-between state. Well, I get really hungry here. I mean, I'm like shaking starving by the time I get to the table. So when I lay down, something primal switches in my brain and I can't think about anything but food. You know how sometimes you'll be almost asleep and then you fall in a hole and jump awake? Well, I will be lying there imagining that I'm about to put a fork full of food to my mouth, but then it falls in my lap, and I jump awake. Usually I've drooled all over my pillow. Sometimes I am still mostly awake, and I catch myself taking bites of air. It always makes me laugh, but I'm so hungry that I don't want to do anything but think about food.

When Thursday rolled around, Derek and I were pretty desperate to get away from the farm for a little while and we called our new British friends to see if they could pick us up before their concert. They could, and we went. They were both wonderful singers, and such great people to be around. We had a great time. Here is a picture of them performing, although neither of their heads are very visible.


As I mentioned in my last post, the 14th was a huge party at the farm. Everyone has been super stressed to get everything together and planned for it, and the phone has been ringing off the hook. There were 104 people at the party. Derek and I slept in a tent last night because guests needed our room, and I didn't fall asleep until the music died down around 5 AM. Then the rooster and various animals woke us both up every 20 minutes or so until we finally gave up on sleep around 10. At the party, they roasted a whole pig and a whole sheep on sticks. Here are the headless corpses spinning over the coals without a shred of dignity. Yum?

Here is a picture that was supposed to show the Crimmas lights, but it really didn't capture the ambiance. The house looked very nice!

Anyway, today we were back in our room, practicing music, when an American girl knocked on our door. Her name is Brenny, and she is from Oregon. She is wwoofing about an hour away, and for some reason or other, her host stopped to talk to Dominique and Cyril. She was going to make Elderberry syrup not far from our place, and her host invited us to go with them. We jumped at the chance to leave the farm, so we went. The other farm was having an open day for people to learn how to make the syrup and help them make it. Here are a lot of people separating the elderberries from the stems.


This farm is about 3 km from ours. To our absolute delight, we met the resident wwoofers, who are a couple of Floridians! Their farm is a permaculture farm, which is a concept I am learning to understand. They work very hard to acheive a balance between the plants so that they protect and nourish each other, and there isn't so much work involved for the farmers. Andy showed us a crazy variety of edible weeds and flowers. Here are some pictures of us at that farm.



Finally, and another cause of our lack of sleep lately, is Tita. She is our new puppy! She has blue eyes, but she was too busy sleeping to look up for a picture. I actually named her. Dominique wanted to call her Tic-Tac, but Cyril didn't like it (and neither did I). I suggested Tita because it sounded similar and it was the name of a main character in a magic realism book I recently read, and they liked it! It isn't my best naming work, but it is better than Tic-Tac.

La serre du bois

Today is our tenth day at La Serre du Bois, our final farm in France. Here we have found the best of both worlds as far as the other farms are concerned. At La Petite Mane, we were farming, doing work, and eating wonderfully. They were a little unorganized, but they had only had the farm for 2 years, so it really made sense. At the other stupid place, we were not farming, but we were at least living a semi-hygenic, somewhat organized exsitence. This left us feeling too sterile, and we hoped to revert back to more of the Mane's trademark grunginess. Upon arriving at La Serre, we were thrilled to be introduced to the 200-year old farm house. This place as the character and the work that we loved at La Petite Mane, along with the amenities of the other (ie internet access, flushing toilets, and less mice.)

We speak French here. The couple, Dominique and Cyril, do not speak English. We had hoped to have practiced our French more along the way, but with the unexpected presence of so many Anglophones up until this point, we more or less abandoned French and stuck with our native language. (Which, as always happens to me in France, has become so dear to my heart that I can't even stand it. I always become disillusioned with English when I'm surrounded by such misuse of it all the time, but once I'm away from it, I become obsessed. The ease at which I can navigate it, manipulate it, make fun of it, and convey my most complex thoughts with others really just makes me fall in love with English over and over.)

At La Serre, we are eating the best food we've ever seen. Each meal is a spectacle. We eat fresh, organic vegetables from 300 meters away, picked daily, and prepared by skillful hands. Cyril and Dominique used to have a pizzeria, and they have not forgotten how to cook! We have a dessert and coffee after lunch and dinner everyday. The meals are simple but every one of them delicious. We talk and listen, and discuss such complex topics as music and travel. Derek outshone himself with his conversation about musicians in his second language. I was proud of him! He is doing very well in French. I sometimes do a quick translation to catch him up if a conversation has gotten a little far off topic, but his comprehension is, for the most part, very thorough.

Pictures of La Serre will follow. First, I will digress to explain the pictures of our beach vacation to Gruissan.

We found ourselves in a small delimma- we had purposefully given ourselves 3 days without wwoofing so that we might explore the region a bit as tourists. However, (and somewhat luckily) our second host needed us to leave earlier than expected so that his parents could come visit. We were wanting to go to Barcelona, but now with a minimum of 5 nights in a hotel, things were looking too expensive. Our host offered to let us come back at the end of our trip for a night, but we really really didn't want to ever see him again. So I called Dominique and Cyril and they generously allowed us to come two days early to stay with them. We spent the other 4 nights at the beach nearby, which turned out to be a very welcome and happy vaction.

Me in the Mediterranean! It was cold!

At the beach at sunset.

This one is out of order. It is a little squirrel that jumped down to eat our crumbs after a picnic on our hike. He was so cute!

The view from the hotel at night. Lovely!

Because neither of us are beach rats, we decided to take two long day hikes instead of going to the beach everyday. On this one hike, we saw what seemed to be the French twins of the Humbug Spires in Montana. The hike was really nice and smelled like fresh pine.

Derek on the hike.

This is the countryside surrounding La Serre en Bois.

This is the view out of the bedroom window. That is Cyril sitting at the table with Marjorie, a wwoofer on her last day.

It is unseasonably cold here in Southern France for August, so Dominique lent me a sweater. I wear it with my jogging shorts, and I feel stupid. I'm wearing the sweater right now, though, and I'm very glad to have it. PS, I'm so tan.

I love Pissou.

Their freakishly awesome study/library.

I think that is real.

La Loute! We love Loute. She accompanys me on many walks. She is so smart and very protective. She only speaks French, though. If you say the word in French for "bird of prey" she will look at the sky and freak out. She is trained to chase them off so they don't eat a chick.

Cyril with a wheelbarrow.

Derek and Dominique at the market on Saturday. Look at all of those vegetables! ALL ORGANIC!

I never want to buy non-organic vegetables ever again after realizing how much work goes into the production of organic. I've spent almost 5 hours today weeding a row of carrots. It's a hard life for an organic farmer, but the pride they have for their crop is really something. I'm so happy to have this experience. We're here for another 3 weeks, and I'm ready to learn as much as I can.

Next weekend, we're having a huge party to celebrate Cyril's 50th. It isn't until next month, but the party is this month. There are dozens of people coming, and Derek and I are going to perform some music. I can't wait!