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Published: January 26th 2008
Nothing less than idyllic
The church at Raukokore, on the way to the East Cape.The day starts with a wholesome bowl of Jim's homemade muesli - fuel for the morning of digging, grubbing, picking, weeding, raking and pruning we have ahead of us. We're usually ready by eight, although one advantage of WWOOFing in this particular household is that timekeeping isn't excessively draconian, which is lovely when you're as allergic to alarm-clocks as I am.
Jim and Julie spend much of their morning - at least at this time of year, in early summer - picking green beans in the hothouse. It's not as easy a job as it sounds, requiring a knack for judging whether each bean is ready to be picked, still too small or past its best. As mentioned previously the beans are the business' principal "cash crop" and as such is far too precious to be entrusted to a rag-tag bunch of enthusiastic but essentially untrained such as our WWOOFing selves. The hothouse is planted with five or six rows, each twenty metres or so long, of seven-foot tall bean plants trained up wires. The plants produce beans throughout early summer, and - as anybody who has ever eaten a somewhat "mature" runner bean will know - the beans need
Houdinis of the sheep world
Shame they're not cows - they could have been Moodinis. Crash bang. to be picked before they get too big. Our very first job at Te Aranga shows us just how precarious growing organic vegetables for a living can be: we are tasked with carefully inspecting the bean plants and removing the fallen flowers that collect on and stick to the plants' leaves. In this warm, sticky weather, the flowers quickly begin to rot - this encourages the growth of
Botrytis, a fungus which can cause the plants to rot. Infected parts of plants need to be removed before the mould spreads. If a close eye is not kept on the fungus and it spread through the hothouse, bean production can take a big hit - and so Jim and Julie's pockets. Te Aranga's organic certification, which is in the final stages of completion, of course means that there is very little to be done other than careful monitoring and pruning of diseased plants.
One British tradition that has been well and truly preserved in New Zealand is - much to our relief - the
tea break. This is when we get to enjoy the delicious baked treats that Julie churns out at an astonishing but not altogether unwelcome rate. Pruning
If only you knew...
What Jim has in store for you. It involves a very very tiny rubber band and you won't like it. bean plants is thirstier work than you'd expect, I assure you. The caramel slices were a particular favourite, their deliciousness easily offsetting the feelings of guilt brought on by eating five in one sitting. I'm sure it says somewhere that calories consumed on holiday don't count.
The main hothouse with the beans is pretty much fully planted with all sorts of other crops: cherry tomatoes, courgettes, apple cucumbers (spherical cucumbers with pale green skin), beans of course, long cucumbers and watermelons. A lot of these plants need to be trained up supporting wires, and this is another ongoing task assigned to the eager WWOOFers. The principal duty for Alex and for me during these four weeks, however, is to convert one of the several other hothouses - which have barely been touched since Jim and Julie took over the plot and are heavily overgrown - to a usable state. Armed with a formidable array of hoes, grubbers and forks, we set about digging up the veritable jungle of weeds that occupies the hothouse. Some of the weeds are pretty well established and it take a lot more elbow grease than we have expected to get them out. Jim and
Back into the fold
Herding the wayward sheep back to their field from the neighbour's plot. Julie's plot of land conveniently backs on to somebody's back garden occupied by half a dozen sheep, who make short work of the weeds and seem reasonably grateful for the snacks - hopefully I'm not feeding them highly toxic plants that will make them have one-eyed lambs or some such.
Speaking of sheep, Jim and Julie's flock of eight or ten was perhaps the most...
entertaining feature of our stint in Opotiki. Afflicted (or blessed, depending on how you see things) with a severe case of ovine wanderlust, these beasties caused poor Jim no end of trouble. The grass obviously always being greener on the other side of the fence, the sheep devoted much of their energies to evading their field, which looked perfectly comfortable and tasty to me. By the time Jim was alerted to their escape, said sheep were either munching on somebody else's field over the hill, or, on one memorable occasion before our arrival, strolling into town on the main road. The repeated breakouts were perhaps not so much due to the sheep's ingenuity as to the rather flimsy construction of their enclosure. The Story of the Sheep is not as fatuous as you might think
Loading up tangelos
After spending half the day up ladders picking tangelos, time to take them back to the house for packing. it - it is a marvellous illustration of the Kiwi mentality with regards to DIY. Indeed, if there is anything New Zealanders - and specifically New Zealand men - pride themselves on, it is their ability to fix, or at least attempt to fix, any and every problem with various bits of junk pulled out of their garages, the local dump or from behind their sofas. A favourite Kiwi phrase, "Number Eight Wire", is a poetic and accurate reflection of this endearing national pride - any problem, big or small, blocked drain to dodgy gearbox to escaping sheep, can be solved with a suitable length of #8 fencing wire (and, for especially complex problems, a old pair of tights). Such was the approach to the construction of the fence confining our troublesome creatures. In spite of Jim's best intentions, #8 fencing wire is not match for a sheep's sheer stubbornness, not to mention thick skull. Somehow, somehow, they
always managed to get themselves out of their field - without ever, mysteriously, leaving a trace of how they had done so. Cloven-hoofed Houdinis, indeed.
After each escape, the crack team of rounder-uppers would rush to the batmobile (a rustbucket of
At the dairy farm
Looks messy. Jessica and Alex during an early morning visit to the dairy farm where Jim and Julie's foster son Blair works. a van, imported second-hand from Japan, as are many vehicles in New Zealand, complete with original Japanese language no-smoking stickers and the like) and chug up the hill to Dip Road, whereupon - having located the errant flock, a task in itself - we would endeavour to tempt, trick or just plain chase it back to its enclosure. Sheep are skittish things, prone to panicking. I feel for all sheepdogs. You had to skirt around the stupid things like you wouldn't believe - a couple of feet too close and bang, stampede. Thankfully for us, they were also rather partial to tangelos, which could be used as bait to entice them back. A carefully-positioned team would seal all potential escape routes: you can bet your bottom dollar that if you want a sheep to run to the right...
Sharing the Dip Road plot with the escapologist sheep, as mentioned earlier, were a few cows. One of these was a young calf. A male calf. Male calves, however, need a couple of "operations" to prevent them from turning into large, angry bulls with large horns. The first is de-horning - you will have guessed the second. With Jim's recent illness
Precarious
Blair trimming hooves, under constant threat of being pooed or weed upon. Which he was, a couple of minutes later. and time off work, the lucky calf had managed to escape both. Best done when the calf is very young, both procedures become progressively more difficult as it ages. "Castrating the calf", however, was one of those things at the top of the Te Aranga to-do list that never got done, at least not while we were there. Perhaps this was for the best, since the plan had been to have us help corral the calf using old wooden pallets as crowd-control shields (#8 wire...) while Blair, Jim and Julie's foster son - a dairy farm worker - approached from behind with the rubber band stretcher. Yowzer. A lucky escape for us and for the calf.
No two days in Opotiki were the same - part of the great appeal of being there. We had discovered on Jim and Julie's WWOOF host profile that Julie was a keen cheesemaker, and this had mightily piqued our curiosity. All four of us WWOOFers (by that time, both Jessica from Wisconsin and Lea from Germany had cycled, or bussed, off into the sunset) were keen as mustard about making some cheese. So it was that one morning we got up nice and
Kitting up
For a ride by the ocean near Opotiki. early and headed to the local farm, owned by Kiwi dairy giant Fonterra, to collect some milk - straight from the udder, two 25-litre buckets of the stuff. And for the rest of the day, we merrily made cheese - and what a delight it was. Julie runs a tight ship in her house, and before we knew it we were sterilising ourselves in bleach, stirring, scalding, warming, cutting curds, pressing, salting and wrapping. It was an astonishing experience to see, from those two buckets of milk, such an amazing variety of cheese takes shape: feta, camembert, gouda and ricotta, no less. A whole arsenal of equipment is required: rennets, enzymes, bacterial cultures, thermometers aplenty, bits of drainpipe (number ei...you know the story). That day was more exhausting than any one spent digging up weeds could have been - but we had much to show for it. Frustratingly, the fruit of the cheesemaker's labours are not for immediate consumption. Apart from the ricotta, ready to eat straight away but not the most exciting of fromages, there would be days (feta), weeks (camembert) or even months (gouda) to wait before we could sample the delights. We never got to try the
Into the sunset...
Well, nearly. With nothing but the sounds of the waves. gouda, of course, but the feta was amazingly good and Julie gave us a batch of camemberts - safely wrapped up and with strict instructions not to eat them for a three weeks - for later. When the time came to open the wrappers, we were speechless - real-life camemberts, with soft cottony coats and everything. All from milk, liquidised calf stomach (that's rennet - I hope you haven't gone off cheese) and a few bacteria.
Jim and Julie being the extraordinarily hospitable couple that they were - and not the slavedrivers we had heard some other WWOOF hosts were - we were regularly taken on jaunts out and about. One memorable such visit was a trip to the East Cape, the rugged, windswept and beautiful region east of the Bay of Plenty and - you guessed it - one of the easternmost points there is. State Highway 35 runs through Opotiki to Te Araroa, where it ends and an unsurfaced takes over, for 20km all the way to the cape. The landscape here is beautiful, the sweeping expanse of ocean to one side of the road, wide sandy beaches, majestic pohutukawa trees and rolling hills to the other.
This is very definitely Maori country - a land of
marae, the traditional Maori gathering place, and of
wharenui, intricately carved meeting houses. The end of the road here is really the end of the road. We leave the van at the bottom of the hill and trudge up the two hundred steps to the East Cape lighthouse, where you can gaze out to sea in the knowledge that no land lies in your line of sight before Chile, perhaps six thousand kilometres away. Stunning.
The drive back to Opotiki, however, was perhaps the most entertaining part of all. By the time we had come down from the hill, it was getting dark: the venerable Toyota's wiring had seen better days. Indeed for the whole of the three hour journey home Jim had to hold the switch for the headlights in the on position by hand, causing the circuit to overheat and forcing us to stop by the side of the road, in the dark, every quarter of an hour or so until the switch became cool enough to touch again. To top it all off, an even more intriguing electrical fault somehow developed, such that every time the
Venerable pohutukawa
The beautifully-named pohutukawa tree is unique to New Zealand. This one in Te Araroa is reputed ly the largest in the country. steering wheel was turned to the right, the van's horn would blare - we probably woke up most of Opotiki as we limped home. "When was the next M.O.T.?", I wondered to myself.
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