First Time Farming: First Day

Caution before proceeding:

Please note that it's been two months since it all happened, so my memories might not be 100% accurate. But Nicha’s overdramatization of her situations are, like always, to be expected. The characters mentioned in this post are all real but are using fictionalised names to anonymise their identity.

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I arrived at the farm with my small backpack, a medium sized luggage (with 20 kg- worth of farming clothes inside (was worried I wouldn’t be able to wash my clothes while at the farm cus we were expected to save water, so i packed a little extra) total overkill btw, you only need like 3 t-shirts.), plus three sets of mango sticky rice for the farm host.

I searched the farm looking for signs of life. I heard a tractor. I waved at it and yelled “hello!”. But I didn’t get the attention I deserved from the person that was inside the truck.

So I don’t know if you know, but I didn’t know before going- that a farm has many buildings. Like the silos, the greenhouse, the bakery, the barn, the stable, the tool/storage house (pretty sure that there’s a name dedicated to that type of building, but my farm vocabulary extends very tight), and many more. It was difficult for a city girl like me to find out what each building was and where the hell is everybody?

What the farm always look like in the summer

After having looked around for 15 minutes. A tall, but slim man with a man bun in a red flannel shirt came out of no where and approached me. 

“Hi, Andrew- the farmer”- he introduced himself. Pretty sure those were the only four words he’d spoken to me that day.

He seemed shy but that was a Swedish thing. He was THE farmer like he said, and was in his 70’s. Not some hot 20 yr old farmer son. He would totally be kygo but fast forward 50 years. (sorry to disappoint but my blog isn’t 50 shades of farmland).  

He took me to introduce me to his wife, Karen whom I’ve exchanged emails with before coming.

This woman deserve to have a post entirely dedicated to her. But as an intro, she’s a new yorker who moved to Sweden in the 70’s because she didn’t agree with the Vietnam war, who taught portrait sculpture at a university, studied (traditional?) medicine, and is from a Russian heritage who thinks she’s part asian because her short legs. That’s not even 1/10th of her story. Us farmer kids even made a hashtag for her #shitkarensays to honor her. She’s a lovely woman, don’t get me wrong but I’ll tell you more about this OG hipster lady later.

Fast forward to her showing me around. The volunteers had a separate house to ourselves, she said the house was well over 100 years old which was cool in a way. She first showed me my room which apparently Andrew’s brother used to stay in. (I wondered, but did not ask where he went because of DUH, obvious reasons.) It was a very small room (a little bigger than harry potter's room under the stairs in the first book) with a small window the size of a postcard. Clearly, Karen stereotyped my size as being typical asian, no where expecting a 173cm tall girl to fit into what many people may call ‘the attic’. All that didn’t bother me but what did was there was NO BED in the room.

What the farm looks like after light rainfall

So we went out to find a bed and a mattress from other buildings on the farm (I believe the word is rummage?). We were walking through weeds, and oh boy do scandanavian weeds grow as tall as it’s people. That day I learnt what raspberry plants looked like, what a son of a bitch stingy nettles were and how unfit I was compared to this 60+ year old woman.

In the end we did manage to find a bed that worked fairly well- just upstairs of the other building at the farm. Tall Tommy (a 28 year old german guy who annually volunteer at farms for a couple of weeks in the summer. Arrived at the farm few days before I did. Then left mysteriously the next day because he said he missed his gf) helped us carry it back to my attic. He also went to get a rag to wipe down the dust for me too, what a sweet guy.

After that I spent some time meeting and getting to know the other WWOOFers (volunteers on the farm). At the very beginning there was Tall Tommy, and 4 other girls, all of which had short hair, 3 of which had piercings on their faces, and 2 of which had nose rings. I didn’t know what to think of the group at that point, but was sure gonna be hell of fun getting to know each and everyone of them.

I slept fairly well that night. The constant sunlight didn’t affect me too much (thanks to my small window). There was this one moment though, where I switched from lying on my back to my side which broke a chain of the bed (not sure if I was too fat or was the bed made for a child). I quickly returned to my original position and did not move for the rest of the night and continued to repeat the same position the following nights to be exact. Wondered to myself whether the host made us sleep on beds like these to prevent people from doing ‘it’ at night or just couldn’t be bothered to fix it up. I’m guessing it’s 99.99% because of the latter.