Saturday, 6 October 2012

Market gardners of Brittany

26 hours of travel (5 trains and a bus) took us from Cuneo, Italy to Redon, France (in Brittany) where we began our first week of Woofing at a market garden and horse 'rest home' with Alison & George, the 10 horses, Nakita &
Pixal the cats and Elsa the dog. Phew.
Alison and George




Elsa and her stick




Helped out with loads of different jobs including picking tomatoes, carrots, beans, pumpkin, beetroot as well as packing veggie boxes, mucking out the stable, grading potatoes and puling up massive bits of weed mat. Still like horses but defiantly don't want to be a market gardner when I grow up :-)
D'Eilliot the horse, a quite rotund and inquisitive character








Sasha sniffing Topp (only a horse smells like horse apparently:)




The old body is in a state of shock at having to wake up and do physical work!
So we help out for 4 hours a day and then have the afternoon free to do as we please, slightly limited opportunity as we are about 10km to the closest little town and about the same again to the nearest decent town so has mostly consisted of playing with the dog and sleeping in our caravan :-)
Sasha also discovered that france is very into fruit flavoured milk which looks like juice containers, and that butter milk isn't milk. Was a scary glass of juice and cup of coffee.
The presidential suite - notice the special composting toilet at the back, so even has an ensuite!




On Thursday we got to take the car for a drive so did a little exploring around the area. Picked up a couple of things to make toys for the horses to play with during winter and supplies for cooking tea on Friday night.
Ate loads of beens and veggies, and nothing cooked at more than 60degrees so was nice to cook up a lasagne with meat and some roast veggies on our last night. They enjoyed it as well, showed them honey roasted baby carrots and beets - they usually just chuck out veggies that are too small so they were quite excited by the idea of eating them instead.
The main packing/storage/horse barn, didn't get any pics of the green houses but there were 3 big ones, 1 massive one and about 30x 20m rows planted outdoors as well.




Not drastically sad to be leaving, will miss the dog but market gardening is defiantly not our cup of tea :-)
Heading up to Belgium to say hi to Charlton and Lechelle for a couple of days now, so 3 trains and 7 hours on them should get us there.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Redon, Brittany, France

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