First Time Farming- #shitkarensays

A big part of my farm life experience was definitely the people. There weren’t too many interesting farming things to do as you can probably imagine. Before going I didn’t expect for people to be this diverse, and mind-blowingly crazy at times. Hearing people’s stories and their views of the world was pretty much my daily dose entertainment.

So to give you all a background. I stayed with a farmer, his wife and their cat. The farm also had 8-10 volunteers coming and going through out the summer. Initially, I was going to share short paragraphs on specific individuals. But now that I’ve written about the famous Karen. Let’s just make the whole of this post about her. Because she truly deserves one. I will continue to banter about the rest of the group later in my next posts.

Noticed how I referenced Karen as ‘his wife’ in the previous paragraph and didn’t identify her as a farmer too? Well, that’s because she’s not really a farmer. We never saw her working in the fields- she was often in her office on the computer or just out talking about how she used to be a portrait sculptor/botanist /astrologist/ etc.

Not Karen. But a random portrait sculptor

She was a lovely woman from New York with Russian heritage. Had long silky white/gray hair and relatively short but skinny legs. She believes that part of her is Asian because her father came from a part of Russia that was close to China. I saw a black and white picture of an Asian man on her desk once. Thought it was him. But it wasn't- it was her guru. Oops, guess we'll never know what her father looks like to judge. She would always asks me if I digested milk well because apparently asians aren't good with a dairy diet. I said I loved milk so much I still drink it every day as an adult and I never had a problem with it. That disappointed her a little because SHE couldn't digest milk well.

I genuinely believe that she thinks she's related to me on a subconscious level. Because I was asian, and she was 'part asian' too. On top of that, we shared the same horoscope sign, a virgo. We were logical, motherly and loved the earth. She was also born in the year of dog which is apparently good friends and gets along well with monkeys (myself). All of this research she did was prior my arrival. When she asked me exactly what my birthdate was. Kind of creepy when you think about it... But if she knew this much about the asian culture. Then I think she's allowed to call herself asian. Just maybe don't stereotype us so much.

Chinese Zodiac Compatibility Chart

What's even more surprising that her knowing so much about us by our birth signs, was her ability to see connections in the most illogical manner ever. Us volunteers actually made a hashtag for her because her quotes are so fucking worthy of one.

Here are some of the notable #shitkarensays and stories behind it to give you more context to what this lady is like

• "I was 16 and didn’t understand what we (she’s american by birth) were doing in Vietnam. So I escaped to Sweden to seek some peace because I couldn’t stand that hippie movement either." #truehipster
• She was living in New York. Not Vietnam- don’t understand why she feels like the need to run. Maybe it’s a similar feeling of Americans wanting to leave America and live in Canada instead if Trump was going to be president.
• "I wish that my house was cleaner. But I never have time to clean so I don’t. I’m not going to be regretting in my deathbed that I didn’t clean that window or sweep the floors." - good tip karen. 
• She would a occasionally bring up her messy house with the group with that justification. Which okay, sure made sense. Until this one time a fellow volunteer (Hi Claire, hope you are reading this) got tricked into cleaning her kitchen (literally a nightmare) instead of joining the varsity weeder practice for the day, she was asked to help clean Karen’s kitchen. We later found out that a friend of Karen’s was coming over the day after- so she had an excuse to clean for others. Not just for us. Plus she had to ask a farmer volunteer to ‘help’ her.
• "We’re quite careful about accepting boys on to the farm. Because boys eat a lot of meat. And in red meat there are certain hormones that makes people selfish." - I was enthralled with the logic of this one.  
• We bitched to her about Bruce (a homeless Tasmanian college drop out who you will get to know later) and how he was eating all of our food). She said that she was skeptical about letting him stay on the farm initially but thought that it was a nice thing to do for a guy who didn’t have a place to stay
• "I think I know why that girl had back problems. She looked kind of uptight all the time. But I’m assuming that that’s a thing with the English."
• The English girl had a backache once and I don’t think she’s uptight
• "I will miss you Nicha. But I’m not allowed to. So I won’t." -This one was a highlight for me. It was said during one of my last days at the farm. How about you don’t say the latter part. Or how about, not say anything at all?

Despite shit that she says she still is a pretty sweet person. She thought that my lame and somewhat stereotyping jokes were funny. I really thought that she liked me as a person (even though she wasn’t allowed to miss me). She even left me a very nice review on the wwoof site, saying that I was wise, kind and very helpful. She taught me a lot of things I didn’t know about (like how milk makes mucus, or how her hair is so nice because she hasn’t used shampoo in 20 years (it’s a thing I swear, google it, it's called ‘no-pooing’). She even pushed me to go out of my comfort zone to cut rhubarb and made delicious jam out of it.

A friendly looking rhubarb plant

I would say that her and her husband are very audacious in opening their farm to strangers. The farm wasn’t profitable (even with 10 free volunteers helping on the farm). They were basically living off of their pensions. They didn’t do it to make money and survive, but they do it to share their lifestyle of working and living with nature to the younger generation. Hoping that the volunteers would become farmers and living life the basic way. Wonder how that’s going? We shall see when I talk about the volunteers in the next post!

Cheers,