First of all: what the Wwoofing? Literally speaking,

Day off in this beautiful Sunday, July 8. It is winter, frost covers each parcel of land and the least we can say of néozélandaises houses is that they are far from being at the top level insulation. Brrrrrrrr, vividly the coming of the sun on our windows! But where did I hear you say? Well Harmony Farm in the organic farm Ron, near Otaki (just over an hour's drive north of Wellington, by the coast, facing Kapiti Island) and one week for a month right now. It is therefore high time to give you an overview of what is happening.
First of all: what the Wwoofing? Literally speaking, "World Wide Opportunities in Organic Farms", ie, it is for this organization present in many countries around the world to connect (with fee) and WWOOF host WWOOFers. The first need arms for their organic farms, their square vegetable garden, ripe olives their environmental project (replant native trees, create a vegetable garden, renovate a home in a way ecofriendly example) with the desire to share their knowledge. The latter are looking for places to return to land, take the time to live while traveling, discovering new cultures, new knowledge, for example in the field of organic farming, permaculture, biodynamic (BD set the winemaker Etienne Davaudeau in The Ignorant speaks very good) or simply spend a "holiday" all expenses paid without any attempt to understand it all. Generous sharing in the best of cases, this may however ripe olives turn to exploitation or profiteurisme (both sides) in the worst of situations. So a lot of confidence, because usually the first contact is made through the respective profiles of hosts and WWOOFers on the website of the National wwoofing and email. In addition, Ron told me that no, actually, host control by wwoofing organization (or their organic principles or anything), the exchange is therefore based on good faith of everyone. Nevertheless, the wwoofer network is efficient enough to report abuses, and several addresses are "blacklisted". Similarly, we recommend our respective ripe olives places. For my part, I found Harmony Farm through the announcement of Ron wwoofing New Zealand on the site when I was still in France. It was complete, well-written and it gave off a positive dynamic. In addition, Ron's profile was full of positive comments from former wwoofers, photos of projects and life in Harmony Farm. So I contacted by email and two months later I landed here.
Harmony Farm is a large agricultural property, where the way organic ripe olives grown mainly feijoas (more info on this in the next post). At least that is what brought the sub in the box, because other cultures are not profitable. Indeed, these trees require a lot of work and investment (laying nets to protect birds fruits, verification of regular nets, irrigation, harvesting, manufacturing oil, bottling, tree pruning) for a extremely low yield (two days of full-time work with a team of some fifteen people working without machine produces about twenty liters of oil, I look like gold now).
This culture operates on non-organic farms immense scale and I ask myself the question of the viability ripe olives of biological pattern in this case. Harmony Farm is also fig and pear trees, which serve more to the inner workings of the farm.
The result of this production preserves, jams, chutneys for the whole year, which are sometimes exchanged against other commodities by Ron (cheese, honey ... with other organic farms, and it also works with oil olive). This return to barter a good IMHO ... In lesser amounts, is here the passion fruit, vines, citrus trees, a tree persimmon, orange, a banana, tamarillo of an apricot, avocado ripe olives , macadamia nuts a tree, a hazelnut tree and so on.
The seasons we find there: silverbeet (chard) green and oranges, artichokes, potatoes, of iams, squash of all kinds, of chokos, beets, spring onions, leeks, spinach, ripe olives cauliflower, broccoli, salad, a kind of red chilli, colorful beans, various edible flowers, rhubarb, corn. He is sorely lacking carrots, but the soil is sandy go for it. This allows Harmony Farm and its occupants to live in relative ripe olives autonomy over the seasons. Basically, the only products purchased on a daily basis are oats (mu