Life on the farm

On a hilltop somewhere between Castiglion Fiorentino and Cortona lies a little medieval hamlet by the name of Ristonchia of about twenty stone houses surrounded by forests and olive groves.

As is common in all communities big and small in Europe, at the centre of the village sits a small church. Village history has it that King Charles, while passing through, wanted to build a church for the people. And since his saint was St Martin, the patron saint of this humble church became Holy Martin. It was built some time in the 1100′s, burnt down and was rebuilt some time in the 1400′s. The church is currently under the care of Lucca who, though not a man of the cloth, has tended the grounds and the maintained the humble chapel for over half a century.

Down the lane from the crest of the village lives a carpenter. His workshop is located under his home, and he sells his craft at the towns and villages in the region during weekends. At the edge of a village is a neat stone cottage that belongs to an American family who lives there for six months of a year.

Nearby is a retired lady in a house with neat lace curtains and a small but blossoming garden. She lives by herself, unless you count the five cats that live with her, and the ten or so more feral cats that come in from the forests for food.

Next to that cottage is a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse. Through the years, rooms have been added to its original foundation, resulting in a rather haphazard layout. There are three rooms within the farmhouse, another one with a separate entrance under it, and the farmer’s quarters is the loft, which is also accessed from outside the house. Still, the kitchen and sitting-dining area is the heart of all activity and everything gravitates there.

This was home for me for two weeks.

When I first decided to WWOOF, I specifically wanted to work on an olive harvest. I don’t know why I never thought about the grape harvest, or if I did, it was very much fleetingly. My mind just decided “olives”, and never considered anything else as a possible option. Olive harvest is mostly in October, and apparently last year was a bad year for olives in some regions; there wasn’t enough precipitation or it came at the wrong time. Anyway, I found a farm that would do its harvest in early to mid-November. Because it was atop a hill, the temperatures were lower, causing the olives to ripen a little later than elsewhere. The farmer replied my emails and we agreed on the dates.

Then I got really nervous. What if I didn’t like the farm? What if I couldn’t handle the work they gave me? What if the people were a bunch of earthy-crunchy types because I’m all for environmentally friendliness but I don’t know how much earthy-crunchiness I can take before it freaks me out. What if… What if… What if…

But, like I said before, everyone I met who had WWOOFed before had happy stories. Only later did Ellie say she WWOOFed on a farm in San Luis Obispo where the farmer was a little crazy but that didn’t bother me. It was San Luis Obispo, that’s in California, and we know what they say about… (heehee).

I arrived early at the Castiglion Fiorentino train station coz I managed to catch an earlier train from Florence. With an hour or so to spare in the afternoon, I sat nervously at the very small station — it was more a stop reallly, there wasn’t even an open counter or a toilet. After a minute or so, the waiting got to me, I had to do something. So I did what Italians do in the afternoons — enjoy a cup of espresso. I don’t know if caffeine would help my state of mind any, but the espressos are so good in Italy and they are only €1…

The farmer later picked me up from the train station in his rustic little Japanese hatchback and we stopped by his gardener’s place on the way back. By gardener, I mean a lady who owns a big garden and sells her vegetables to a small group of clients out of her shed. We were going to have vegetable stew for dinner that night. How fresh is that!

The farmhouse is so cosy. We enter by the kitchen, move into the sitting-dining area, or go up the steps in the kitchen to the rooms. (The bathroom’s kind of outside the kitchen, outside the living quarters but still within the main door. Which meant you leave the warmth of the house to step into the toilet. But there was good hot water and a seat with a view, so that made up for it.)

My room had two beds. Another volunteer would share my room, but she wouldn’t arrive until the next day so I had the room all to myself. Which meant I got to pick which bed I wanted. Whee.

Quick scan of the room — clean. No cobwebs in the corners, which meant no spiders. Settled my backpack into my corner and organised my zone. It’s a small but lovely room with a view of the Tuscan valley out one window, and a glimpse of the village out the other window.

I loved my bed and my two layers of blankets. Softer than what I was used to at home, but so warm and cosy. It was near a window and the radiator. The radiator isn’t on all the time as it cools down some time at night after the last logs downstairs in the furnace have burned out, but generally, it’s convenient for drying stuff.

I could really go on and wax lyrical about how much I loved that room, but I’ll just say that honestly, I was really in want of nothing.

I remember debating internally what time I ought to ask the farmer and his No.2 start their day. 5am? 6am?(Didn’t want to sound too much like a spoilt city slicker.)

Turns out that since he doesn’t rely solely on his crop for income, he’s quite a relaxed farmer and they wake up at 7am. (That’s about the same time I wake up at home to go to work.) I vaguely recall them joking something about European working hours. Anyway, that’s the time the No.2 and us volunteers wake up. The farmer himself wakes up earlier to do his other chores, like feed the goats and chickens and turkeys in his backyard. In the end I wake up a little earlier to beat the others to the bathroom, also because it takes me a little longer to get ready also. I’m not used to all this cold weather, there’s so many layers to sort out…

Breakfast begins at 7.30am and we leave for the olive groves around 8. Breakfast is a simple affair. Bread — both homemade and store-bought — and spreads like jam, marmalade, peanut butter, Nutella and honey. The No.2 would make espresso over the stove using a moka pot. And fruit. And cereal too at the request of some of the volunteers. I love the rosemary bread the farmer baked, thick and heavy like German bread. There were also loaves of focaccia, wholemeal and multigrain.

On a side note, being a city dweller, I found it totally absolutely amazing that the farmer would return from a walk in the woods on his property with rosemary that he plucked along the way. It wasn’t like some herb garden in his backyard, but from the woods. Wild. He’ll just give them a wash and throw some in the tea pot as he made some tea (it’s good for treating arthritis) and keep the rest for baking.

For me, the best part of breakfast had to be the honey. The farmer has some beehives in the back garden and during summer, he collects his own honey and stores the jars in his huge pantry under the house. “Goodness from the Tuscan hills” he called it. I love that honey. I can weep with joy from something as simple as butter and honey on a slice of bread.

(Pause to relish that oh-so-sweet memory…)

After breakfast, it’s off to the olive groves.

First, we line the ground around the olive trees with huge nets. Next, we’re all armed with a little garden rake thingie. And then we start work. The branches of the tree are mostly low and soft, so we can pull them down lower and just “comb” the branches with the rake.

The ripe olives will just fall off the branches onto the nets on the ground and after a tree has been plucked clean, we gather the nets to collect the olives and transfer them into crates. As for the olives in the higher branches, we can climb the trees to get to them (there are ladders but climbing is easier, faster and funner).

One of my favourite moments that I remember vividly is the pleasant sensation of olives falling on my head. I’d be combing one of the lower branches and someone else would be above me in the tree combing the higher branches, and it will just be raining little deep purple olives in dull tok-tok-tok-toktoktoktok-tok-tok… It was almost like a massage.

Around half past noon, we’d head back to the farmhouse for lunch.

Since we’re all out in the fields, lunch is simple too. Bread and hams, salamis and cheese and any leftovers from the previous night’s main course. Again, coming from a culture where pork has to be cooked or else you risk trichinosis and other very bad things, I was amazed to learn that cured meat is not cooked. It’s salt, sugar, nitrate and/or nitrite. Maybe some of them are smoked. I must have asked the No.2 if the meat was cooked in any way some three times a meal.

Anyway, he’d take out his flick knife from his back pocket to cut the meat. I don’t know what else he uses that knife for, but in a place like this, nothing works better than wiping the blade with the kitchen towel or even on your sleeve. There were lots of meats, some of them are more streaked and marbled with fat than what I’m used to (I don’t even eat bacon), and I’m not the only one because one of the other girls also found it more fat than she was used to.

What I thought was also really cool was that we didn’t use plates, but wooden blocks for the bread.

The best part of lunch was honey. Again!

This time with cheese. I will confess now that until the farm, except for the occasional craving for a Welsh rare bit, I wasn’t really a cheese person. It happens with growing up somewhat lactose intolerant. My knowledge of cheese was also pretty much limited to Kraft, Philidelphia and mozzarella. Only a few years ago did I expand it to brie and some other names I never really paid attention to, thanks to friends who studied overseas and enjoyed cheese a lot. I did try blue cheese when I was a student — my friends and I were in Paris and we were like “we have to try this at least once to see what the fuss is all about!” I think we almost threw up. But my palate has evolved over the years. And at the farm… the slabs and wheels of different cheeses on the table… the pecorino… The No.2 introduced me a very powerfully flavoured pecorino, it was too strong even for the farmer, but when he added a touch of the farm’s honey… Oh. My. God.

It was back to the olive groves after lunch, but because it’s late autumn, it gets dark by 4.30pm.

We’ll all be back in the farmhouse getting ready for dinner while the No.2 plays some Ella on the CD player. Some days we have world music too. And some days, even though we’re in rural Tuscany, we get to listen to some retro pop too.

The farmer cooks and we help with the preparation, mashing potatoes, peeling chestnuts, peeling and chopping apples, cracking walnuts and such. The farmer can really cook. He calls it peasant food, poor people food, but the meals I enjoyed there were the best I had in Italy. Simple, unfussy, and lots of homemade olive oil.

The beauty of the olive oil on the farm and in many places in Italy is that it’s pure olive oil. Colour-wise it is cloudy, unlike commercial olive oils in the supermarkets that are filtered and clear. Taste-wise, it’s grassy. Raw. But that’s what real olive oil tastes like. The land it comes from, and not some factory somewhere in a nondescript industrial park. I discovered new appreciation for olive oil.

Dinner was always something to look forward to.

One of the guests, a German couple (I thought they were adorable because they look like one another, both like retired German shot putters), brought some wild boar that their neighbour had shot and we had stew for dinner. The husband also made kraut, which I normally don’t like, but that evening, I practically licked my plate clean.

There was always table wine, lunch or dinner, on the table. It was good for table wine. And whenever the bottle was empty, the No.2 would disappear to the pantry downstairs and return with a full bottle. Dinner was always a very full affair.

After we cleared the table and cleaned the dishes, we were free. There was no TV or radio at the farm, and no newspapers too, much to No.2′s gripe because he wanted to know what was going on out there even though I heard he stays in a cottage in the middle of the forest in Arezzo. Or maybe he just had to have his soccer news.

Sometimes all of us would sit around and just chat. In the two weeks I was there, volunteers and guests came and went. We had an Ellie, a retired Dutch nurse who lives in Austria; Sabine, a translator and regular housesitter for one of the farmer’s neighbours; Kristle, a French vet working in Zurich; her friend, Dom, a Swiss student who just finished med school; an American backpacker who has been WWOOFing since May; the German shot put couple, he’s a contractor and she’s a nurse; Aki, a retired vet who works in Africa and moved to Italy because of his Italian girlfriend; J and F, an American entrepreneur and his young dot-com partner; and me.

Sometimes we’d play Uno. Sometimes I’ll just be updating my journal or writing postcards. And then by midnight, I would be snuggled upstairs in my nice, warm and comfy bed.

Life is simple, and incredibly rich. Life is beautiful.

Tags: italy, olive farm, olive harvest, travel, tuscany, wwoof