I Smell the Garden in Your Hair

Hello, readers! It's been a while since we last wrote--we suffered an overall shortage of internet/computers. But we're back on the interwebs and ready to bombard you with photos, videos, and experiential anecdotes from the past month!

Let's begin with a quick recap: we have now WWOOFed at small family farms and forests, and at a larger scale co-op. From Golden Ears in B.C.’s interior, we moved onto newer things, deciding to try our hand at urban permaculture on a homestead.

We’re not sure how much you all know about urban homesteading, so we’ll give you a quick rundown. It is a grassroots movement that is based around agriculture and sustainable living practises in a metropolitan setting, like, for example, a 1/3 acre suburban property.

Unfortunately, some twit has made an effort at monopolising and capitalising on urban homesteading by trademarking the name; however, the movement itself is widespread through urban areas in North America (and probably several other continents). Its influences are visible in other, subsidiary movements, such as rooftop gardening (here is a guide from Chicago, and here you'll find a post from one of Steff's favourite permaculture blogs), Lose Your Lawn and decentralised urban farming. There are also entire organisations like the Institute of Urban Homesteading in Oakland, CA, dedicated to the dissemination of homesteading skills and practises.

Urban homesteading typically involves gardening, raising livestock (for instance, chickens, rabbits, or goats), food preservation, beekeeping, cheesemaking, preparing one’s own cleaning products, living simply, and generally working towards a self-reliant, sustainable lifestyle. We are very much enamoured with the idea of urban homesteading, and will most likely be working on creating our own homestead when we return home to Auckland.

Building community is all in the spirit of the homesteading movement. We found this postcard in a cafe in Revelstoke, BC.

And then there’s permaculture. If you are unfamiliar with this term, but you know Steff, you should be ashamed of yourself. 


Steff: There are infininte ways to define permaculture. To me, the concepts of permaculture involve a paradigm shift and this new way of thinking can be applied to almost any area, but I really like the way that Kirsten from Milkwood Permaculture sumarises an aspect of it:


"Permaculture is a system of design principles for building and cultivating sustainable human habitats, drawing inspiration from patterns in natural systems. And in this case, ‘habitats’ means whatever you call home – apartment, farm, terrace, suburb or even houseboat. A functioning Permaculture system is a habitat that takes into consideration as many of its inputs and outputs as it possibly can, and aims to become as efficient and sustainable as possible for the sake and comfort of its inhabitants."

...So we headed to Olds, Alberta in order to practice permaculture on a homestead in a metropolitan area.

Let us first document our troublesome drive through the Rockies. It wasn’t so much that it was days and days of driving through mountains in a 30-year-old vehicle which struggles to summit small hills. It was more than we were doing this on single-laned highway, tailed by approximately 70, 000 Mack trucks and sundry other angry drivers. But on the bright side, it was beautiful. See for yourself:

Some rugged mountains!

We came upon a sign along the road that read "CAUTION: NATURAL BLOWDOWN AREA AHEAD". As neither of us knew what this was, we drove on, unsuspecting. We turned a corner, and approached what appeared to be a great, black wall ahead. Very suddenly and without warning, it began to rain torrentially. We couldn't see three feet ahead of the van. It lasted around five minutes, then (again) very suddenly and without warning, the rain stopped, and we regained full visibility on the road. There was literally a line on the road, one side of which was saturated, the other dry but for the tyre tracks from the wet side. Blog bonus points to anyone who can explain this geographical phenomenon to us.

You may notice that there's no traffic ahead of us. What you can't see is the multitude of vehicles behind.

After a full, exhausting day of driving, we pulled into the town of Field to bunker down for the night. 

Emerald Lake, just outside of Field. We did not take this photo (however, we don't know who did. Thanks, anonymous photographer).

Having endured much stress during the day, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner. We had eaten only vegetarian food for almost a month, and, seeing buffalo ribs on the menu, we leapt at the chance to eat meat. It nearly killed us. In the future, a gentle re-introduction to the carnivorous lifestyle might be more appropriate...

Ready for more driving the next morning. Field, BC.

Entering Alberta

This is a wildlife corridor. If you look closely, it's a bridge designed to look like forest, for bears and other animals to cross over the highway and into more forest on the other side. I'm sure we don't have the bears fooled into thinking that cars are some sort of strange endemic species...

After two days of driving through national forests, we very abruptly popped out of the woods and into the suburbs. Hello, Calgary.

And so we arrived in Olds, Alberta. This is what we mean by urban permaculture. Barb and Hendrik, our WWOOF hosts, lost their lawn years ago. Go, them!

Steff weeds carrots in the back yard. 

This is what used to be a lawn:

The front lawn's crops, including: beans, broad beans, peas, carrots, beets, lettuce, cabbage, kale, corn, sea buckthorn berry, apples, cherries, red currants, and Saskatoon berries

Backyard crops: strawberries, raspberries, carrots,  beets, peas, asparagus, broad beans, swiss chard/silverbeet, cabbage, beans

You can find more photos of Barb and Hendrik's property on their website, here.

And, of course, the livestock. How could we pass up the opportunity to post gratuitous photos and videos of cute baby bunnies?

The baby bunnies and Mrs. Rabbit. We named them "Peter". All of them.

The baby chooks in their chicken tractor!

They had two cats (not considered livestock, of course), named Kato (who had six toes on each paw), and Bumble. Bumble had a lion's tale. Rarr.

Steff and Bumble, our midnight visitor. She'd sit outside the van and meow at us until we'd let her in for a visit and a cuddle.

Bumble began to gain weight at an astonishing speed shortly after we arrived. It took us a while to figure out just why, but we did eventually locate the source of the problem:

Bumble, with her head in a bag of noms.

At the farm, our labour was divided into harvesting, food processing, and babysitting. Here is a stack of peas, topped and tailed and ready to be blanched and frozen. It's quite the fortress, wouldn't you say?

While we worked on the garden and in the kitchen, Hendrik industriously began to put together a greenhouse. One morning, Barb gave us a new morning task: dig a trench through the middle of the greenhouse, where the path will eventually go. We did so, with great success.

Steff's tries (and fails) to suppress her pride in our most fabulous trench.

We were pleased with ourselves. When Hendrik came home, he feigned surprised pleasure at the job we had completed, but his face clearly read "What the hell did you do to my greenhouse project?!"

And then there was the babysitting. Barb and Hendrik had two beautiful, smiling children, Sol and Willow. They were a handful, but they were great fun, and we learned some valuable domestics skills in the meantime.

...Then Steff had a baby. Kidding. Steff learned to feed a baby.

The two of us and Sol, 5 years old and with enough energy to power all of North America for at least a week.

But, as we've discovered over and over again in the last six months, we can't stay anywhere forever.  The time soon came for us to move on to Calgary.


We had begun our WWOOFing experience in May. It comprised a huge part of the planning of the trip, and took up a lot of our time in Canada. We had met some incredible people, gained a good deal of farming knowledge, and learned a great many things besides. And now it was over. In a sense, we were ready for some sight-seeing and relaxation, but we were also sad to walk away from the enriching experience we had had in being WWOOFers.


We'd like to thank all of our WWOOF hosts for everything they shared with us. We appreciate your generosity. In continuing with our theme of urban homesteading, the WWOOFing component of our trip was largely experimental: we wanted to try our hand at creating and sustaining a homestead. In a way, we were taking a hesitant step into a great pool of knowledge, while allowing ourselves the opportunity to back out if it all proved disastrous. We wanted to see if it was something we liked, let alone something we were capable of doing. With your help, we have realised that it is definitely something that we're able to aspire towards, and it is our intent to lead our lives in a simpler and more sustainable way when we get back home. All of you have been a role model to us in some way. We thank you earnestly and heartily.

Next up: the WWOOFers become wanderers again!



The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.