Where my hoes at?

Mark:

Between Bamberg and Koblenz street performing festivals, Marya and I had a two week window of free time. We decided that it would be nice to work on an organic farm somewhere in Europe. Before our trip, we searched around on Workaway.com, a site where you can volunteer to help with someone's project in exchange for room and board. There are a lot of small family farms on the site, but also house construction projects, hostels, daycares and all kinds of jobs. We found a couple promising organic farms and finally settled on a farm in Belgium, run by a 26 year old guy named Wouter. His farm supplies produce for his own CSA which has 120 members, they make Belgian fries and pizza once a week, and he reminded me of my brother, David. Boom.

So, post Bamberg, still aglow with our success, we made the 6 hour drive to Sint Katelijne Waver and started our new life as farmhands.

The typical day of a volunteer worker on this small organic farm in the Belgian suburbs starts at 5:30. You roll out of your bed, make coffee, eat a bowl of muesli, pull on your rain boots and rain coat and head out to the field. For the next 6 hours, you harvest produce (butter beans, potatoes, tiny carrots) or you hoe. It may or may not be raining. At noon, or sometimes at one, depending on the day, you put your hoes down and troop into the farm house. On your way in, you choose some fresh vegetables from the garage to eat for lunch. You then prepare lunch for 10 or 12 people, serve it, eat it and clean up. By 2 pm, your work is done, but by then you are generally too exhausted to do anything but lie on the floor until it's time to make dinner. After dinner with the whole gang, you drink a delicious Belgian beer, play a game of whist, and crawl into bed.

Harvesting carrots, I think.

Marking dinner. The guy on the right is NOT Mark's brother, just his Belgian twin.

Mark loves taking pictures of food.

Marya:

Needless to say, the glow of our success faded pretty quickly. But it wasn't all dirt and toil (well, not entirely). There were 2 other people around our age also doing workaways on the farm. Jenny, a 19 year old from England making her first solo journey and Xander, a 21 year old from Scotland who was biking around Europe. You can get pretty close to someone pretty quickly when the only thing you have to do for 6 hours is hoe, and the only thing that makes hoeing bearable is talking.

Jenny kept us entertained for hours with stories from her recently completed first year of university – stories that I cannot repeat here, but you definitely wish you knew. The one about zombie Snow White was one of my favorites. She was also the slowest hoer in the entire history of human agriculture, so Mark and I used to secretly hoe some of her row too, just so she could keep up with us. How else could we find out what happened after David (who she's secretly in love with even though he seemed like kind of a jerk to us) confessed his love to her for a girl in his lazertag club, and she fell tearfully into the consoling arms of Jeremy (David's best friend, and just a good friend to her too she said, even though he seemed like the perfect guy and once even took off her shoes and brushed her hair before putting her to bed when she was sick)? See, thrilling!

Xander was a unique spirit. He's the kind of person who sets off for an international bike trip with one backpack, one pair of pants, one shirt, one sweater, and absolutely no money. When we harvested, he saved all the rejected tiny vegetables in his pocket, and once he tried to convince everyone that the wax part of cheese was completely edible. When we discarded it anyway during our dinner prep, he rescued it, chopped it into tiny pieces, mixed it with raw chopped garlic, and served it as a side. He was the only one who ate it. 

There were other characters at the farm, too: an older surly Scottish man (is there any other kind?) who would sneak off into the shade for hours when Wouter wasn't around, and another older Belgian man who was a friend of Wouter's and lived in a van out back. He had long curly hair and many lady loves and meandering stories and I think he was also totally insane. Ask Mark – they talked for hours sitting on the front porch. Kindred spirits, perhaps? And of course there were others – workers, visitors, friends – who dropped by, baked some bread, picked potatoes, ate dinner, and left, generally before it was time to do the dishes.

Mark and I also found some time for travel. One weekend, we drove up to Amsterdam, pitched our tent, and explored the city. We rode bicycles with hordes of clueless tourists and angry locals, toured Rembrandt's house (beautiful) and Anne Frank's secret annex (sad and strange), and did not learn how to speak Dutch. We also spent an afternoon in Ghent, a town in Belgium. It was one of the largest and most powerful European cities during the Middle Ages because of it's cloth industry. Now, it has beautiful architecture, a cool student population, and more vegetarian restaurants per person than any city in Europe. We gazed at the Van Eycks' famous Adoration of the Lamb altar, toured a castle, and ate a mountain of Belgian fries with vegetarian gravy. Perfect. (Mark: "Boom.")

Our lunch spot in Amsterdam.

Biking along the canals.

One sunny afternoon, Mark, Xander, Jenny and I picked up some Belgian beer and chocolate and biked to a moat around an old fort to go swimming. There weren't enough bikes, so Mark took a cargo tricycle and chauffeured me around in it.

Lounging by the moat.

Mark surrounded by Gent architecture.

Before

After

 At the end of our two week stint as farmhands, we put away our tent (that's right, the mosquitoes were so bad at night that we slept in our tent on a mattress in our room), packed up our car, attempted to clean two weeks of dirt out from under our fingernails, and said our goodbyes. I was sad to leave the people and place we had become so comfortable with, but I was looking forward to days of 9am wake-ups and never picking up a hoe again (insert juvenile joke here).

I pick my last weed.

Once again, the sun sets behind our car (this time an old wooden jalopy, with a mattress for Gran strapped to the back). A ragtime soundtrack soars as the wheels kick up dust onto our faded overalls, and we wonder: how will Marco and Moxy Mae fare in that big German city, Koblenz?

Tune in next week, folks, ya hear?