Westmill Organics, April 2018 |
On Friday the 14th of April 2017, I arrived in Watchfield, Oxfordshire after an eighteen-hour bus journey from Northeast Scotland. I was tired, feeling a bit lonely, and four months into my ten-month trip abroad. I felt nervously excited about arriving at my fourth farm stay and the potential of meeting some other WWOOFers. However, all my anxieties seemed to vanish when I was met at the bus stop by the somewhat eccentric farmer of Westmill Organics, Pete Richardson.
Westmill organics is set in rolling hills of the Wiltshire/Oxfordshire border and surrounded by meadows of wildflowers, bubbling brooks, woodlands and ye old English villages, the farm is akin to the setting of a Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen novel. Westmill farm isn't just Pete's amazing horticultural operation, it's also home to the UK's first community owned wind and solar farm, organic dairy cows, natural woodland burial site, an apple tree nursery, Root and Branch therapeutic gardens and a lovely family who live over the hill in the hedge with their beehives. All this activity made the farm feel like a crazy, exciting and welcoming community, not to mention that Westmill seemed to have quite strong relationships with the surrounding farms and local villages. I couldn’t help but think what a great example this little hub of activity on the edge of Oxfordshire was of the growing local (and organic) food movement present in the UK. Pete's experience in organic and sustainable horticulture goes back 20 odd years and his passion and enthusiasm for organics is very evident. Pete’s character is one that I find hard to explain when I tell people about Westmill, and I mean that in a good way. The morning he picked me up from the bus stop he came across as a little bit mad, but that was owing to the season. As it turns out, I’d rocked up at the Easter weekend and today was the last to deliver orders, so Pete was under the pump. Subsequently there would be no work for the next four days (after four months of farming five days a week this was welcoming news). Pete briefly explained that he didn’t live on the farm, but in the next village over, so his volunteers lived in a bunch of caravans on the farm. When we arrived at the farm we headed straight to the nursery poly-tunnel to meet Melanie. “Hey Melanie can you please do me a MASSIVE favour… and have a cup of coffee with Karri?” “Yeah sure!” Tough work, right? We headed over to the barn, where a small kitchen had been built in the corner, we sat down to have a coffee and get to know each other. Melanie was 24, from Melbourne and an agricultural degree graduate. She was abroad for around 8 months, maybe more, WWOOFing on various farms learning the hands on part of what she’d studied for the last three years. We hadn’t been talking for long when another volunteer entered the kitchen. I was introduced to Simon who had been at Westmill for the last month or so; building the kitchen we were all gathered in. Pete rejoined us not long afterwards and showed me to the caravan I would be staying in, it wasn’t too shabby but I had my eye on the beautiful red Shepard’s hut next door (which I ended up moving into when Simon left a couple days later.) That afternoon the three of us went for a walk to the little creek over the hill, clambering over stiles and wandering through fields of dandelions and buttercups. At the creek we saw two otters. It was a perfect afternoon. Later on we went the local pub in Watchfield to see a band play and drink a few pints of British lager. Over the weekend two more volunteers arrived. Adam, who was a part of a young growers course with the soil association and Lorena, who was from Spain and studying in Oxford for the next three months. The Easter weekend was perfect weather and I spent a lot of time wandering in the fields, forests, walking into Shrivenham Village (mainly so I could use some internet and check in with my folks over a cup of coffee). We cooked delicious dhal, full of veggies from the poly-tunnels, ate exorbitant amounts of hot cross buns with the tastiest organic butter I’ve ever had. On the Easter Monday for Simons last night we had a barbeque dinner over the fire, roast veggies, organic sausages from a local deli and the BEST roast parsnip chips (still confused as to why parsnips are so underrated in Australia - they’re so versatile). And so as Simon left the following day our wwoof family grew smaller and I made my way into the Shepard’s hut, ready for the next three weeks at Westmill. If I were to write all of my food stories from Westmill here, you’d be reading for days but there a few recipes in particular that I would like to share from my time at the farm. Most of the recipes come from two or three meal times and boy did we eat well. Between the four of us we developed a roster for meal times with all the cooking done in the evening. Two would team up with one cooking dinner and the other cooking lunch for the following day. Owing to the season, soup seemed to be a lunch favourite, but towards the end of the week we were a little souped out. On the Thursday of the first week Melanie and I were cooking zucchini fritters and brown rice tabbouleh for dinner and decided to make a quiche for Friday’s lunch. Mel whipped up some rough puff pastry whilst I chopped up an abundance of veggies. The eggs we used were from the neighboring care farm and herbs fresh from the field. That afternoon in my spare time I had roasted some cherry tomatoes to make a chunky tomato sauce which we decided would go perfectly with the quiche. The next day when we went in for lunch there was a man from Swindon in the kitchen, James (the man behind the Shepard huts refurbishing) and Pete. As we set the table for lunch, with the leftover tabbouleh, fritters, tomato sauce and the quiche we invited them all to join us for lunch. The small kitchen was bustling, cheery and had a real farmhouse atmosphere. As we passed our plates around piling food on each other’s plates I felt so grateful for this moment, the meal and the company I was sharing it with. |