The First WWOOF

Photo by a fellow hiker

Arriving in Ticino

After Marianne and Ewald wished us farewell, we hopped on the train and set off towards our first WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) farm. Not knowing quite what we’d be doing on the farm, or precisely where the farm was, we were nevertheless excited to jump into a new adventure on the southern side of the Alps.

When our train emerged from the neverending darkness of the 57-km long Gotthard tunnel, we were greeted with a new landscape. With its lush deciduous forests, Italian-style buildings, and a smattering of palm trees, the canton of Ticino felt very different from what we had seen of Switzerland so far. Ticino’s proximity to Italy has influenced its language, architecture, and culture over the centuries. It’s also a relatively small region -- out of Switzerland’s 8,000,000 people, only about 300,000 live in the Italian-speaking Ticino.

For the final leg of our journey, we climbed onto a big yellow Postbus and hung on as it wound its way up into the mountains speckled with tightly clustered villages. We were seriously impressed by the bus driver’s skills - winding up hairpin turns, navigating single-lane roads with blind curves, squeezing down the narrow streets with buildings no more than a foot or two away on either side. There was one village that the bus had to make a two-point turn to get through.

After unsuccessfully searching for the farm in what we hoped was the correct vicinity, we found a neighbor who was happy to direct us right to the house. Our hosts Catrin and Lorenzo greeted us warmly and welcomed us into their home. As we began getting to know each other over a sunset dinner outside, it felt like we had stepped into a vision of beauty. Our eyes traveled through the garden awash in golden sunlight, across the dark green forested valley to Italy, and up the snowy face of 15,000-foot Monte Rosa in the distance. We sipped red wine and enjoyed a fresh salad from the garden, the customary Swiss platter of cheeses, and a soup that Catrin made from a local legume sort of halfway between a chickpea and a lentil. Sitting together as the sun set behind the mountains, we got to know a little more about our hosts and their farm.

Catrin has lots of experience and passion for agriculture and the natural world. As a young woman, she spent a year and a half living without electricity in the mountains, tending a herd of goats with several friends. After meeting Lorenzo, their shared dream of raising a family in close connection with plants and animals led them to the lifestyle of a small organic farm. Lorenzo is an architect and Catrin heads up the farm. Currently, this is made up of 17 sheep, 6 cows, 2 donkeys, chickens, rabbits, about 10 scattered plots of pasture and hay fields, a vineyard, and a big garden that produces an abundance of vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs for their use. With many of their animals, they are helping to preserve heritage breeds in danger of being lost.

Our hosts are deeply connected to this place - they raised their four sons here and have lived here for more than 30 years. Their house was built in the 1850s, and typical of Switzerland it was originally connected to a barn. With a newer addition, it is now divided into living spaces for several different neighbors, including our hosts’ son Pipo. He lives with his wife Michaela and their month-old son Romeo in one of the upper floors.

On the Farm

It was satisfying to dig into the work of the farm, starting with bundling kindling for their wood stove and working in the vineyard. Colby did a stellar job wrangling the weed whacker on the vineyard’s steep slopes. In the garden, we got our hands dirty and our brows sweaty as we helped with weeding, preparing beds and paths, planting beans, hilling potatoes, liberating an ivy-choked tree, and harvesting peas and gooseberries. Another project required us to put on dust masks and balance on ladders as we cleaned the barn to be ready for the new hay.

Our hosts have about 10 small plots of land scattered near their home, from which they produce all the hay needed for their animals. Finally, it was time to do the task we were expecting to be doing a lot in Switzerland, raking the hay. Pipo’s job was to use the old tractors and ours was to do all the hand labor of raking where the tractor could not go. This particular field is steep as usual, but with Pipo’s impressive tractor driving we didn’t have all that much to rake. Once the hay was collected and hauled back to the barn, Colby and Lorenzo forked it into a big blower that fans it up into the hay loft. Fortunately, no limbs were lost. After this sweaty work, our hosts took us out for their post-haying tradition of panaché, a refreshing Swiss beer-lemonade.

Some of our most memorable experiences were moving the animals between pastures. We accompanied the cows and donkeys on a walk winding through the streets of Beride and up the hill. (Later in the summer, they make a longer journey to their grazing grounds in the Alps using a trailer). While Pipo and Catrin kept the cows moving in the right direction, we followed behind leading the docile donkeys. It was fun to be part of this procession of animals, passing by neighbors who greeted us with a “Ciao” like this was totally normal.

Near the end of our stay, it was also time to move the sheep to a fresh pasture where we had previously set up an electric fence. This was a longer distance to walk than before, and the sheep moved along at quite a clip! Winding down the valley through the villages, the herd of 17 sheep monopolized the main road. But the cars knew who was boss, hitting the brakes and pulling aside to let the bobbing cluster of sheep pass. Pipo led at the front with a bucket of bread, and we followed at the rear with Catrin to reign in any wayward lambs.

The most tender moment with the animals was watching the birth of a calf. Pipo had to help by correcting the unborn calf’s leg position, but then the calf was ready to be out. As the newborn calf was taking its first look at the world, mother and sister leaned in to say hello. It was amazing how only a few hours later, the young calf was exploring on its own four legs, and looked just as big as the other calf born a week earlier.

With so many different tasks and experiences on the farm, it was fun to get a taste of everything.

The ConProBio System

We also enjoyed seeing a new window into one example of a local food system. ConProBio is a cooperative that functions a bit like a buying club. The organization was started in the 1970’s by consumers who wanted to have a more direct connection to how and where their food was grown. The ConProBio organization gathers food from organic farms in Ticino and Italy, then distributes it to customers via pick-up hubs. We learned about ConProBio because our hosts are one of these distribution hubs for their local buying group. (There are about 200 buying groups around Ticino). Since our hosts are a hub, every Wednesday the delivery truck arrives with all of that week’s food. Catrin and her family have the task of sorting each of their 8 members’ orders into crates. The members drop by throughout the day to pick up their food and fill out the following week’s order form. Our hosts mentioned that you could live entirely on food from the ConProBio. In addition to fresh produce, it provides almost everything else you might need - meat and dairy, grains and legumes, as well as processed foods such as baked goods, tofu, pasta, beverages, and oils.

 

It was cool to learn about ConProBio as one local solution to challenges being faced around the world. As is happening in the United States and many other places, lots of small and mid-sized Swiss farms are getting squeezed out every year. Also, biological food and farming are increasing but are still small compared to conventional agriculture. We got to see how the ConProBio system addresses both of these issues -- it gives customers consistent access to local organic food and serves as a market for small farms. Since people are experimenting with so many different approaches towards local food systems, it was fun to learn about a new one than we had experienced before.

Outings and Chilling

Not Bedigliora :) Photo of Novaggio

For our first outing we explored the traditional town of Bedigliora, just up the “hill” from Beride. As we entered town, we wound our way into an enticing maze of narrow cobblestone passageways. The town was first built around the 13th century, and it felt like characters from that era could be standing just around the corner.

Even in 2017, the character of the society that built Bedigliora was still so strikingly visible. The tangled labyrinth of paths through town led us by many enticing nooks and crannies. Over the centuries, new life has been layered into the old structures, but the layout of the town remains like an enduring skeletal system.

Leaving Bedigliora, we descended out of the afternoon heat and humidity into the cool, damp air of the shady river valley. We navigated our way to the circle on the map where our hosts had told us about some mill ruins from perhaps the 1300s. Amidst the constant roar of the ice-cold waterfall, we explored the moss-covered remains and imagined all the life and activity that once existed here. Lorenzo described how the workers of old would work “from stars to stars.” Life was very hard, but work was also a joyful expression of community life -- the workers would take rests together and sing together.

On our other afternoon hikes, we discovered many more remnants of human activity in varying states of disintegration. These include a restored water-powered forge, a mill that operated until World War I, a smokestack to disperse arsenic gas from a gold mine, a variety of collapsing ruins, and an abundance of low stone walls in the hillsides. Everywhere we walked there were reminders of the long-running human habitation on the land. Areas that are now forest were once hay fields, areas that are now pasture were once vineyards, and old farm buildings have crumbled into the hillsides over the centuries. Seeing the shadows of these slow transformations made us reflect on the incremental, unstoppable passage of time. It was neat to see so much history laid out right in front of us. At the same time, it was a bit melancholy to contemplate the endless waves of generations past - how the living world of their dreams, struggles, pain, and joy has been absorbed by the moss and forest into a silent memory.

On Saturday we poked our nose across the Italian border, visiting the weekly market in Ponte Tresa Lavena. It was enormous and slightly overstimulating, with endless racks of cheap clothing and shoes, home goods of all varieties (bizarrely including things like chain saw blades), huge wheels of cheese, hanging salamis, brimming bowls of olives, bottles of wine, and crates of fruit. Even though it was just across the border from Switzerland, it had a different energy - a greater touch of the wild, chaotic, unpredictable exuberance of life. In the afternoon we headed back to Switzerland for a lakeshore walk in the big city of Lugano. We joined the crowds enjoying the beautiful Saturday and the pretty park. By the end of the day, we had had our week’s fill of city and were ready to head back to the peace of the farm.

Our other big outing was the ridgetop hike from Monte Tamaro (1900 m) to Monte Lema (1600 m). What a view! And how handy that the cable cars on each end spared us some of the up and down. As we hiked from the cable car station up to the top of Monte Tamaro, we responsibly heeded the trail closures (due to snowpack) that we had seen posted in the visitor center. Hmm, but our trail still seemed awfully snowy… If ours was this bad, imagine what the closed trail must be like! Once we arrived at the top of Monte Tamaro, however, we saw people coming up a different path and realized that we had missed the correct one. Oops. It had been a very-careful-footwork adventure, but it had taken us past some thrilling scenery and through a very cool footpath tunnel in the cliff.

In our relaxation time, we played endless rounds of fetch with Tera the dog and chilled in the hammock between two olive trees. Closing our eyelids, our ears would wander over to the lilting melody of the cuckoo birds and the ringing of church bells down in the valley. It was also exciting to get a tour of Catrin’s craft room and see her creative abundance of projects in knitting, mosaics, natural dyeing, sewing, and quilting. Julia had fun beginning to hand quilt the first square of one that Catrin had originally put together 21 years ago.

A Taste of Ticino

Just as we had passed into a new climate region as we crossed the Alps, we were also greeted with a whole new style of food to explore. Throughout our stay, our hosts shared the rich culinary traditions of Ticino with us. One lunch was one of Ticino’s historical staple foods, polenta with egg on top. As a traditionally poorer region of Switzerland, some families would subsist almost entirely off of polenta and chestnuts. The forested hills are abundant with wild chestnut trees, which families would tend and harvest in centuries past. It gave us hope that today there is effort to bring back the traditional harvesting and community roasting of such a bountiful wild sustenance.

Our hosts also took us out for some traditional Italian pizza at one of their favorite local spots. Catrin patiently translated most of the extensive pizza menu aloud for us, and after much deliberation we decided on Four Cheese and Genovese (Tomato, Mozzarella, and big glops of pesto and mascarpone). When the sizable individual pizzas arrived, we were excited for the prospect of ample leftovers. However, they were just so tasty and with the traditional long dinner, we kept slicing just one more piece until there was almost nothing left. The meal concluded with the common Swiss dietary aid, an espresso, and the Italian influenced lemon liqueur digestivo.

And of course, we savored the farm’s abundance - snap peas, a green salad at almost every meal, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, cherries, and wine produced from their vineyard. We tasted the veal they had raised, reflecting on the extra appreciation and connection that comes with having known the animal. Julia yet again got to share her family favorite rhubarb-apple crisp, with rhubarb fresh from the garden and last year’s far-gone apples. We also enjoyed cooking some of our favorite “American” meals like burritos and curry.

Mealtimes with our hosts always felt like a celebration of connection - a time to sit down together and enjoy life. We bonded with our hosts over our shared value of wholesome food. At the farm, we not only talked about but also experienced how home-cooked meals made with fresh ingredients can cultivate health and connect us with the natural world. We all wished that this approach were more widely valued, and lamented how mainstream society generally focuses on getting food as cheaply and quickly as possible.

Over our meals, we had ample time to delve into thought-provoking conversations about all sorts of topics. We learned about Swiss society, shook our heads over Trump’s frightful insanity, discussed Native Americans, got to know the local plants and animals, shared how Colby’s family farm operates, learned about Switzerland’s multi-party political system, and so much more. It was so fulfilling to learn from each others’ experiences of life and the world around us. We talked with our hosts about how hopeful it is to encounter similar movements for change happening simultaneously all around the globe - specifically, how energizing it is to know that your local community’s efforts are not isolated but are part of a larger transition toward a better future. Although our hosts often feel concern for the direction of the world, they are also hopeful. It seems like they have found a lot of fulfillment and joy in living out their values and doing what they can in their life.

We were deeply touched by Catrin and Lorenzo’s kindness. They welcomed us into the rhythms of their life and treated us like family. By the end of our two weeks there, it had really come to feel like home. As we finished a candlelight farewell dinner on our last night in Ticino, we were given a magical goodbye as the first firefly of the season appeared and twinkled around us in the darkness.