WWOOF France
In her blog Curated Adventure, Texas native Adelle writes about some appetizing topics: travel, food, wine, and self-discovery. It’s during her stay at WWOOF farm Grand La Grange de Bouys in the South of France where she decompresses from her former work life and gets her hands dirty all while finding some « peace of mind ».
Cheesemaking, permaculture, raising animals—members of the WWOOFing community express their love for learning and sharing. A need to reconnect with how to make and do the everyday things in life.
Right from her host’s farm, Marissia takes us on a farm-to-table culinary experience. With views of the mill and forest, we see how polenta is ground using a traditional stone mill and prepared with wild picked mushrooms in a cozy farm-house kitchen. The soothing montage transports us to slow-food life, a bucolic feast for the belly as well as the eyes.
Here is the down n’ dirty (no pun intended) on how to make your kitchen scraps a work of sustainable art—that gives back to the community one banana peel at a time.
Wholesome communication is not so unlike tending to your organic garden. It requires good intentions, a few handy tools, and a bit of work. Here, WWOOFers and hosts come together to give their best practices around how to effectively communicate in hopes that your experiences on the farm may flourish.
Packing my bag to head to Haute-Savoie, I donned a pair of working boots and left my expectations in the city. With a curious and eager spirit, I opened up to an alternative way of engaging with my environment and share those impressions of living and working on an organic farm in France.
Anouk, nick named Oogie, is a Hamburg native who tries out WWOOFing on a French farm where she shares the techniques she learned from cheese making to bread baking. Through her detailed entries, we experience a day in the life on the farm with an appétit as big as the local French gourmands.
Urban shepherds, Julie and Guillaume raise a flock of sheep in the heart of La Courneuve, in Seine-Saint-Denis. Co-founders of the associative farm Clinamen, they campaign for agriculture in the city. Their sheep are sometimes the only link between living things and concrete. For them, WWOOFing is a popular way to experience what you don’t learn at school.
Having uprooted from the mother country and settling in a new land, foreign hosts retell their stories of how they came to be in France, started organic farming, and welcomed WWOOFers from back home as well internationally.
Michel and Catherine are organic beekeepers who are a part of the WWOOF France network. For a year, they have been welcoming WWOOFers and they explain why.