A week on Helmut's farm

OK, I'm starting to see a pattern. I have a thing for farms. It started in Italy with a visit to an agriturismo last May. Then in July I spent two nights sleeping in a barn in the Alps. Two weeks ago I shipped myself off to an organic farm on the Swiss side of Lake Constance, where I spent five days picking apples, shoveling grass, and squeegying cow poop out of the stalls. And I liked it!


Most of the people I know think I'm slightly crazy to do this stuff. I told a friend about my upcoming trip to Helmut's farm, the latest of these adventures, and the conversation went something like this:

me: i just talked to my farmer!
friend: cool!
me: i'm all signed up
friend: and they're going to let you work for free? (note mock astonishment)

Sassy beetch, you know who you are! Anyway, the question is, what's the big attraction for me? I suppose, in part, it's my inner hippy, which I cultivated in my youth on camping trips with my aunt and uncle and during four years of college in Eugene, Oregon.


But it also has something to do with my idea of the farming life. It seems to me there's a certain purity and wholesomeness in that lifestyle. There's a rootedness about it too. I'm such a wanderer, changing cities and traveling every chance I get. So it's fascinating to me - the idea of staying on one piece of land for most of your life and caring for it like a child - more like 10 or 15 children actually. In Helmut's case, the farm has been in his family for four generations. He lives there with his 80-something parents, his girlfriend, and his two teenage sons, who all pitch in around the farm.

A typical day on the farm went something like this. Helmut woke up at 5:00 a.m. to milk the cows (except for the morning he got up at 3:00 to deal with the arrival of a milk truck). Helmut's son Louis and I got up just before 7:00 for a quick breakfast of coffee and bread. At 7:30 we all helped take the cows out to pasture and then cleaned out the stalls.

At around 8:00 Helmut would mow a patch in one of his fields, and the rest of us would rake and shovel grass into big piles, which Helmut would move to the barn with his tractor. This really got the blood pumping as these were no ordinary rakes but big industrial-size, 50-lbs rakes.

After a short break, Helmut, Louis, Opa and I went out to the orchards to collect apples off the ground. We spent a couple hours at this with Opa and I at the trailer picking out bad fruit and debris and Helmut and Louis operating the apple-picker-upper machine. We returned to the house at about 11:00 to bring the cows back into the barn. At noon was lunch and at 1:00 we returned to the orchard and stayed til about 3 or 4. At 5:00 Helmut milked the cows again and dinner was around 8:00. The routine varied from day to day, but that was the basic schedule. The exception was Friday, when instead of picking fruit we made apple juice.

I was pretty grubby by the end of the week. I had dirt under my finger nails, my hands turned brown from handling pears (a strange thing about pears), I had bug bites and bruises all over and I smelled like a barn. Christoph was somewhat taken aback when he came to pick me up.

The farm was full of characters. Helmut is really upbeat and funny. I think he welcomes volunteers more for the company than anything else. He told me stories all week and told Christoph when he came to pick me up that I was welcome back anytime just for my smile. Opa, Helmut's 82-year-old father, does an incredible amount of work on the farm for his age. He could be a bit of a curmudgeon at times, but he had the sweetest smile and rosiest cheeks. Oma, a.k.a. "the general," was also a tough cookie. She favored the seemingly futile task of swatting flies in the barn to any other activity. I can't imagine she made much of a dent in the fly population, but she was never deterred.

They were all really hospitable and kind to me, but I did feel like an outsider at times. I suppose that's just a natural part of being a stranger in someone else's home. I finally got into the swing of things on my last day there, so I suppose I'll just have to return sometime to apply my new apple-harvesting, cow-milking, barn-hygiene skills. In the meantime, I'll let these pictures tell the rest of the story.