Almost a week at Poplar Glen

---

During her trip, Ro is spending a week at each farm she visits, and about a month in each province. We figured that we could just about fit 2 provinces and 3 farms into my trip, Poplar Glen being the first farm, in Manitoba (Ontario will be next). I guess I was a little apprehensive about this whole WWOOFing thing - you turn up at a lonely bus stop, are picked up by a total stranger and taken to their farm, whereupon you live in their house and eat their food for a week. But I have to say, it’s amazing how quickly you settle into their daily lives!

Each day, regardless of the weather, the chores need to be done - in the morning feed and water the kittens and cats in the barn, feed, water and clean out the chickens in the barn and move the cows into a new patch of pasture, then collect eggs at lunchtime and last thing at night. Some days Ro and I were entrusted with this routine on our own, and sometimes Kate or Doug were there to lend a hand. The chickens were easy to deal with; the cow moving was a sight more tricky than Kate made it look on our first day! The first time we attempted this ourselves we managed to cause a minor stampede (and narrowly avoided being crushed in it), got the electric fence wire caught around the cows legs, bushwhacked through the tall grass and spiky shrubs only to find that we’d actually given the cows about 3 days worth of grazing (wrong fencepost) so had to re-do it all... We must have taken three times as long as Kate on that occasion but we did get better later in the week 😊

This is the time of year that the last of the root vegetables at Poplar Glen need to be dug up and stored for winter. On Wednesday morning we tackled beets (beetroot to us English) - first pulling them up and taking off the leaves (to be fed to the chickens later on), then spending hours chopping them, cooking them, and bottling some, pickling some and eating some in the form of borscht for lunch! A very messy afternoon (my fingers have only just returned to their normal colour), but a good time to get to know Kate a bit better - turns out she is the outgoing National Chair of the Green Party in Canada so Ro had lots to discuss with her about all things organic and farming and related politics. I just chopped quietly, listening and learning...

With snow forecast on Friday we decided to finish the vegetable digging on Thursday. We got through all the potatoes and carrots, plus the remaining corn (about 3 cobs) before giving the stalks to the cows... they were most appreciative, practically fighting each other to be first in line! The potatoes were sorted into “use now” (those with natural or manmade damage) and “storage”, whilst the bigger carrots were packed into sand for storing in the barn. The corn and some of the damaged potatoes went into the excellent Cullen skink we had for lunch! Prolonged digging gave us an opportunity to play one of Ro’s favourite games - true or false. The idea is to get to know people better without bragging or asking thousands of questions - one person makes a statement and the others decide if it’s true or false. Simple. Kate apparently lived in Dachau as a child - how else would we have found that out?! Ro and I managed to get most of the statements about each other correct, although there was quite a lot of guesswork going on, given we’ve lived on separate continents for the last 8 years or so...

Having WWOOFers on the farm often gives the farmer a chance to get projects done that they would otherwise not have time for. At Poplar Glen there wasn’t much of this as they’ve been set up for many years, so it was mostly big annual jobs that needed doing. One of these was cleaning out the brooder house - the place where the day-old chicks are raised. It had been empty for some time so thankfully not stinking! An hour or so of shovelling and wheelbarrowing on Thursday morning saw us finished in record time and a traditional victory dance performed.

Music plays a big part of life at Poplar Glen. Kate is music director of the local church choir, so dragged us along to practice on Wednesday night to make up the numbers (Ro and I increased the size of the choir by a third!). We managed to hold a tune and didn’t let ourselves down too badly, so were allowed to go along to Celtic band practice on Thursday night... A 20 minute drive into the local town of Dauphin (pronounced something like Dolphin) to meet a man with a truck in the WalMart car park... Ken, the mandolin/guitar player in the band, and his friend Kelly, the new drummer, then drove the three of us over to the practice venue - a farm about an hour away from Dauphin, reached through Riding Mountain National Park. Now, remember that we’re in the Prairies here... a mountain is a relative thing! We’d been scoffing at the size of the mountain but were silenced somewhat as we drove through and discovered about a foot of snow...!!

Band practice was more for the musicians than me - I’d gone along primarily as a spectator. Shona played the most ornate accordion I’ve ever seen, Ro sight-read like a demon and kept up with all but the most complicated jigs, Ken played everything by ear... my bodhran playing goes blissfully unrecorded. The ride back through the park was increasingly snowy but sadly lacking in bears, wolves and cougars - just the north end of a south bound elk and a few jumpers 😞 This time, back at Prairie level the snow wasn’t letting up and it was rather like Star Trek out of the windscreen. We arrived back at the farm to frozen gloves and snow covered yard...

So the forecast snow had arrived, despite our scepticism and we awoke on Friday to a good few inches lying on the ground. Which meant that outdoor work was somewhat curtailed for a few days. Not to worry - we amused ourselves by divining for water in the yard using two bits of a wire coat hanger. Again, I was rather sceptical but there was definitely something going on with the rods at intervals along my traverse, which spookily corresponded to where Doug knew there was an underground stream... Ro and Kate also found the same spots, independent of one another. We decided we must be witches - anyone want to join our coven? Doug didn’t fancy it 😊

Covens may not be his thing, but we did persuade him to bring out his bagpipes that evening to entertain us... mostly by watching the dogs howling along to his playing!! All that excitement must have worn me out - I managed to fall asleep halfway through the bizarre (and awful) Canadian film about duct tape... I take partial blame for film choice - Ro wanted to educate me about Canadian films and gave me a choice of two. I picked what I thought was the lesser of two oddities. I may have been wrong.

Another thing that took me by surprise at Poplar Glen was Thanksgiving weekend! I am vaguely aware of the US Thankgiving weekend but thought that was in November so this one came right out of the blue. Turns out that Canadian Thanksgiving is earlier due to different seasonality and is much more like our Harvest Festival, rather than anything to do with Pilgrims. Saturday was still snowy so we spent the day preparing for Sunday’s festivities - I opted for hoovering (my absolute favourite...) while Ro made apple pie with some of this year’s crop.

Saturday afternoon was spent worrying about where we were going to go next. When I arrived, Ro unceremoniously gave me responsibility for finding our next farm. Big mistake. I had spent a day or so reading the WWOOF guide and finally picked a couple of likely options. I e-mailed them and found out they couldn’t take us. The “choice” was somewhat complicated by the fact that there were only 2 farms to choose from in the entire Thunder Bay area, and similar numbers in Sudbury (next stop) and North Bay (even further)... And then we looked at the buses and realised what awful timings they were and that they were going to take forever to get us anywhere! Damn. So Ro came to the rescue and organised us a couple of nights couch surfing in Thunder Bay, as well as another night with Chris in Winnipeg to break up our journey. Couch surfing. Something else that is pushing my boundaries...

Thanksgiving Sunday dawned bright and sunny - in fact, the first sunshine of the week! So I took loads of photos. To add to my other load of photos. Which you will all be entertained/bored with! Breakfast and chores as usual, a guided tour of Doug’s antique tractor that he’s renovating, then off to church to sing in the choir... Once again we were about a quarter of the entire number and probably sang louder than anyone else, particularly when O Little Town of Bethlehem came up (with Thanksgiving words of course)! For lunch we continued the religious theme with the Holy Trinity of soups - the Chowder, the Dhal and the Holy Borscht! Basically leftovers 😊

With the sun shining and the snow melting finally, we could tackle the other project that was earmarked for us - the Wood Pile. Doug manned the chainsaw, chopping the tree trunks into smaller logs suitable for furnace or kitchen wood stove. Ro and I were tasked with transporting the growing mound of logs to the wood pile and stacking them to dry. With a tractor 😊 Kate gave me a quick lesson and then I was off, bunny hopping across the field in a style reminiscent of my first driving lessons with Dad around Thamesmead. But I got the hang of it quickly enough and was soon “whizzing” around like a pro. Kate wanted to head off to tend the turkey (oven baked) so also taught us how to split the bigger logs to make end pieces for the wood pile, as well as just to fit in the stove. Easier said than done. The axe itself was heavy, the logs were full of knots and also extremely heavy. The trick is to get the axe wedged in sufficiently that you can then lift it and the log up, flip them over and whack the back of the axe head on the block, rather than the log itself. In theory that gives you a nice clean break. In practice it gave me a dead hand and an aching back.

Job done for the day we headed in for Thanksgiving supper. Kate and Doug’s son Joe turned up with his girlfriend Eve, plus Doug’s mother. Turkey, stuffing, mash, crescent buns (slightly cinnamon flavoured bread rolls in croissant shape), two sorts of cranberry concoction (one raw cranberry and orange relish, the other a jello-set mix of cranberry, walnuts and grapes which was bizarrely served with whipped and sour cream), gravy, pickles, pumpkin pie, apple pie, apple crunch, more cream.... Very very very full! All topped off with a late evening sambucca with Doug - who would have thought that was his drink of choice?!

Monday morning came and it was our last day. I can’t believe it all went so quickly - we’d been there just under a week but it seems we’ve known them for much longer. We spent the morning splitting the rest of the logs and finishing the Wood Pile. No victory dance this time - Doug’s not the dancing type... I made a couple of calls and managed to set us up with our next farm - not really according to our original plan as I’ll now only get to go to 2 farms, and the next one is only about an hour and a half away from Toronto, but still a relief to sort out! And so we found ourselves back at Grandview bus stop, hugging goodbye to the smiling lady in the car, and heading back on the open road...

---