Mistake 1: Arriving at this farm on the Fourth of July.
The hosts of Moon Valley had thrown together an Independence Day celebration and I’m telling you that a sure fire way to make arriving at a farm 10 times more awkward is showing up to a party that you weren’t explicitly invited to. On a holiday.
Mistake 2: Not adequately preparing myself for the Seattle freeze.
Yes it is a real thing according to natives, even if you’re not an awkward person. And internally, I am pretty awkward. I don’t think that Seattleites are intending to be cold by avoiding you, it’s just a learned behavioral trait, kind of like how southerners are aggressively nice.
I arrived later in the day, which was mainly spent embarrassing myself in front of people I didn’t know and getting my bearings, setting up my bed, and (attempting?) conversing with the hosts’ guests during this party.
Ironically, there was actually this one guy I was immersed in conversation with about his fully carnivore diet and the benefits of keto. I think I just sat there stunned while he tore into a pile – yes a pile – of barbequed meat. But hey, someone was talking to me so I was happy.
I watched fireworks with people I had just met and froze my butt off. Day one completed.
So a little bit about the place itself: I went to a sustainable herb and flower farm called Moon Valley Organics in a small rural town outside of Bellingham that specialized in hair and skin care products. They also support pollinators. The hosts used WWOOF to recruit volunteers to help with the maintenance of their adjacent farm, which grew a lot of the healing herbs for their balms and soaps, and in return, WWOOFers were able to learn about agricultural practices and the amount of work that goes into farming (spoiler, it is a lot) as well as stay and eat for free.
As for the physical description of the farm, on one end, closer to the fields, was the WWOOFer campsite, with three separate living quarters arranged in a circle. A teardrop-shaped camper car attachment complete with storage cabinets and a full size bed, a retro RV with a psychedelic exterior design featuring a cool wasp nest with active wasps, and an open canvas tent with several bunk beds. Since there was no one else at the farm, I decided to go with the camper attachment.
This was after many hours of deliberation, might I add, and after I unpacked, decided to switch to the wasp RV, then decided to switch back because that’s when I discovered the wasps…
Adjacent to the WWOOFer campsite, there was an outdoor kitchen with an overhang, stocked with cookware, a refrigerator, and pantry, which the hosts thankfully filled with foods that I liked and that adhered to my diet. Shoutout to Moon Valley for never allowing me to starve and for funding my 12 am dinners.
In the middle of all of this was the barn, the main attraction. This was a production farm (so different from the last one, which was a homestead) where the hosts had a business selling organic body products (soaps, bar shampoos, lotion bars, and lip balms). The farm itself was used to grow herbs for the products they sold and to maintain a small vegetable garden for the hosts and their employees. The first level of the barn boasted the incredible aromas of soap making, while a quick flight of stairs to the second floor held racks upon racks of drying flowers and bags of herbal plants. Opening the loft doors on the second floor also made for some artsy home-on-the-prairie-vibe pictures and the chance of a lifetime to fall off the ledge and break your neck.
The week days were very long. While many WWOOF sites ask for part time work (typically 3-5 hours per day for maybe 20-25 hours per week), this one was like having a full time job – basically, you became an appendage of the farm manager. Not like I’m complaining about that. Our farm manager was an incredible farmer and person, and I learned so much from her. Luckily, there was always work to do and it was always agriculturally based (unlike last time when I was an unpaid housekeeper essentially).
So without further ado, here are all of the tasks I did as a WWOOFER at Moon Valley Organics, ranked.
10. Handpicking Calendula
When I first saw the calendula fields, I thought they were breathtaking – the bright orange flower bulbs resting on tall green stems, a milky blue sky detailed with mountain peaks, it seemed to be a glimpse of heaven. It wasn’t difficult to see the unmatched beauty in Moon Valley. Come to the calendula fields at sunset and it’s breathtaking. I don’t know if there are many things in my memory of national parks and summits from hiking trails that could top it.
Picking calendula, now that’s a different story.
Calendula has anti-inflammatory and wound healing properties as well as aiding in the treatment of many other ailments, which is why it was the superstar of Moon Valley’s products and therefore, why it was grown in such a large quantity. The flower could be pretty easily snapped off, but the base had an adhesive, glue-like property, leaving a residue on your fingers that was not easily wiped off without soap. My first day of work was spent all day in the calendula fields, which after a while, practically stuck my fingers together as if I had dipped them in gorilla glue. I had a nightmare that night about my fingers being permanently stuck together.
9. Machine harvesting calendula and chamomile
Once the flowers were tall enough, they were eligible for machine harvesting, which essentially, is using farm equipment instead of your bare hands to pick the flowers. Although it sounds better than picking by hand, it really isn’t that much better when you consider how heavy this tool is when you’re holding it with both arms perpendicular to your body. Since chamomile flowers were much smaller and fragile, we could use a chamomile rake for those, which was pretty painless.
But back to the chamomile harvest machine.
This tool works by connecting a power drill to a square shaped metal frame with a motorized rod. Strips of rope attached to the rod rotate and shuffle flowers into the canvas bag secured to the metal frame when the power drill is turned on. Extending it far away from your body is imperative to preventing the metal from cutting into your leg.
I recommend not wearing your favorite pants when you do this because there is the possibility that they will get into a fight with the machine harvester. The farm manager had to cut my pants from the metal and then they were made into the most jaggedy DIY shorts I’ve ever seen.
Machine harvesting was definitely more entertaining than hand harvesting, but came at the price of my leg almost turning into an episode of Happy Tree Friends.
8. Flower drying
Luckily a far less painful process, and the flower drying room smelled lovely. The whole aesthetic of the drying room resembled a stock photo. It was a little cumbersome lifting the trays into place and none of the flowers could touch the ground, lest they would become unusable for the product, so that raised the stakes a bit. Overall, very pretty.
7. Fixing the barn doors
Honestly, I had little to nothing to do with this project, but it was really fun to watch. The farm manager standing on the forklift and drilling nails into place was a power move. I happily watched from the ground level and snapped some photos. I was on motivation squad duty for this one.
6. Picking lavender
Instead of fields of these flowers, we had maybe 15 – 20 viable plants surviving in plastic pots after a heat wave occurred the week prior. It was very cottage core-esque, I highly recommend.
There were these massive bumble bees, however, and a handful of hibernating wasps guarding the plants and you know how I feel about wasps. #idaho.
5. Repairing irrigation tubing
(Is irrigation tubing even a real phrase?)
I really love repairing broken things. It makes me feel like the real life Tinker Bell, minus working in a minidress shaped out of a leaf.
Also, there’s something really satisfying about learning skills that are typically considered to be in the male domain. My step dad taught me how to retrofit ceiling LED lights tonight and my inner Tinker Bell energy came to life.
Essentially, we were looking to repair the leaks in the irrigation, where there had been a breach in the tubing. Once you identify the leak, it was grounds for cutting the malleable tubing at that point and mending the break with a PVC connector (although don’t quote me on this, I’m hardly an expert when it comes to irrigation).
4. Processing tea leaves
Aside from calendula and chamomile in the drying room, we dried mint and stinging nettle leaves, which turned into tea leaves after processing.
The funniest part about this was that we were required to dress in white lab coats and gloves, with our hair tied up and wrapped in a hairnet. I wouldn’t exactly call this manual labor, so it was a nice break from picking calendula flowers. My fingers were grateful.
Processing the tea leaves mainly required just picking out the larger sticks and anything that looked dead.
3. Thinning and planting seed sprouts.
I learned so much about agriculture from this WWOOFing trip, far more than any of the other ones I’ve been on to date (so, four now as I’m writing this). The farm manager was so knowledgeable and pretty much a walking biology textbook.
When it comes to planting seed sprouts, it’s really important that you thin them first. While many will drop a few seeds into each hole to make sure that at least one of them sprouts, when they get larger and are ready to be placed into the ground, if they’re not thinned first the other seedlings will compete for resources – water, sunlight, carbon dioxide, etc. – and they will kill each other in the process. Survival of the fittest.
Secondly, the seedlings need to be planted correctly for maximum chance of survival. For each seedling, we created a hole in the soil nearly twice the size of the plant and doused it several times with water to ensure that the ground was supple. The seedling was then planted firmly into the soil, eliminating any air pockets that might cause the plant to dehydrate.
2. Harvesting basil and making pesto
This was probably one of the best days I had on the farm. Partially because it included using a cool knife.
Leading up to week two, I was struggling a bit with getting adjusted to being alone so often. The 7-8 hour workdays were exhausting and afterwards when everyone went home, I was pretty much by myself from then until midnight when I would go to bed (correction, I would shower and fall asleep for a few hours on my bed and then wake up again for midnight dinners).
To kick off the start of week two, Monday consisted of harvesting the basil plants and preserving them in the form of pesto. We used essentially what looked like a scythe to cut the plants from the base. I was in my Children of the Corn element. (Lots of horror show references today apparently).
Anyways, this was one of the first days that I actually worked with the hosts on a project (and some of their neighbors, who were so fun). They even encouraged me to make a jar of dairy free pesto!
1. Bee Keeping
This was quite frankly one of the main reasons that I went to Moon Valley in the first place. That, and I also planned this trip about a week in advance because that’s apparently a trend with me and trip planning.
One of Moon Valley’s missions, which I really admire, is to help support and protect pollinators by giving them a place to call home. The farm refusing to use pesticides and the seasonal planting of the large wildflower field expected to bloom in August was proof of that.
While Moon Valley didn’t widely produce and sell honey aside from bottling a few jars here and there, their handful of beehives provided a place for several colonies of bees to call home without fear of toxic exposure.
Our job was to check and collect honey from the super, which is the superstructure box placed at the top of the beehive. This is where the bees store the honey in periods of growth. We checked frames in the supers for a white waxy covering over the cells of the honeycomb, which indicated that the frame was ready to be harvested.
This was an experience I would highly recommend everyone to try at least once in their lives. While the idea of stepping into a swarm of bees might not sound particularly appealing, that initial moment of fear disappears after you realize that the bee suit is going to protect you and then it’s pretty much smooth sailing from there.
Once the suit is on, the humming sounds rhythmic and even therapeutic as you’re existing in the middle of hundreds of bees working and communicating together – it’s truly beautiful. As children we’re taught to be scared of bees because of the possibility of getting stung, but it pales in comparison to what bees can do for us and the ecosystem. Not to mention, the bees were just doing their own thing while I was messing around in their hive, and still they managed to avoid me.
Except for that one bee that um… stung my leg.
Other than the tasks I had as a WWOOFer, I explored the area in my own way despite being car-less, from berry picking in the Sehome Hill Arboretum to road biking around town and cutting my leg on the train tracks. Not having a car and being the sole WWOOFer at this site was a challenge, but it was far from a trip wasted. I learned how to better entertain myself and find comfort and peace in being alone. Not to mention, my rock painting game by the end of this trip was on fire.
