The Farm Where We Reached Total Hippie Status

After exploring Maine a little, we went to our first farm as WWOOFers. WWOOFing stands for Word Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Basically it works like this: people come to a farm to work on things for while, whether it's carpentry, harvesting, you name it, in exchange for a place to sleep and some fresh food. The whole thing is set up through the internet, they've got a whole website and everything. We found out about it through our friends, and it sounded perfect for our trip. 

So after a couple months of searching for farms, we found this little family farm somewhere in central Maine, a couple hours from the coast. I had no idea what to expect. I was keeping an open mind about it, but living at a random person's house for a month sounded, well, a little crazy? But my family was excited about it and it started to rub off on me a little. I loved the idea of being closer to the earth for a while. Helping animals, picking vegetables, and spending hours just doing nothing under the Maine trees and the warm August sun. 

I did get to do all of these things. They had a lot of rabbits (for meat, sadly), goats, ducks, and 1 chicken named Peeps. It was the cutest little chicken you've ever seen. But anyway, they also had two gardens with carrots, broccoli, green beans, kale, onions, garlic, a lot of beautiful wildflowers, ect. We'd help out everyday or so with the gardens, harvesting the random little plants they needed help with that day. 

Mostly, though, we picked blackberries. a TON of blackberries. A thick, menacing, bush the size of a house was just chocked full of sweet berries that'd leave you with purple lips and fingers. We picked for hours until we couldn't fill our buckets any more. Then, the next day, we'd come back and there were just as many as there were before. I swear that bush was enchanted or something, a never ending berry bush. 

Also, every day Ella and I would go to the garden, pull out a couple carrots with their long leafy stems, and go the (very spidery) barn, where they kept the bunnies. At first the bunnies were pretty afraid of us, they would hide and jump away when we came in, and only creep out when we were still. Then when we went enough consecutive times, they got used to us, and it was awesome. They were hardly afraid anymore, just excited when we came with our yummy, dirt covered carrots. We'd sit in there for a while just letting them crawl on us, and chew on their food.

As fun as some jobs were, I cannot ignore the fact that there is a brief, slightly unsettling list of other things we experienced at the farm. Here it is:

• The farm had no shower. And when I say no shower, I mean NO shower. No bath, no little faucets we could wash our hair under, nothing. So mostly, we just went down to the Lake and used some biodegradable soap whenever we got really stinky.
• Their plumbing was broken, so there was no sewage dump for our bus. And we couldn't let our tank overfull, so we couldn't put much into it. Can you see where this is going? Long story short, we all peed in Taco Bell cups for one month straight. 
• We ended up getting sick, and I hate to even think about it, but mom said it was probably a parasite. No barfing, but it wasn't the most pleasant. There are a couple possible causes for this: Due to the plumbing fiasco, there was some fecal matter on an area of the farmland, there was duck crap everywhere, and we didn't really know where our water was coming from. Dad's theory is that it wasn't a parasite, our bodies were just rejecting the water which is totally possible. I like that theory a lot better, so lets just say that. Anyway, we all got better when we left. 

Overall, I don't regret going to the farm, though. I think it was a good experience, and a part of our path. And hey, it's where we reached total hippie status.