This was our last week farming for a while (well, until the 31st August when we hope to start another Workaway planned at a small farm near Whistler). Tomorrow we will be heading out into into the wild! Instead of staying on a bus, we will be staying in our car. Or maybe in a tent if we manage to find a cheap second-hand one.

Following the build last week, we added some nuts to the ends of our “drop pins” which have made the bed much sturdier. We’ve neglected to take many pictures of the finished project again… and now we are rushing to write this so we can pack our stuff and enjoy a BBQ dinner with our hosts! Here are a couple of shots with our $3 duvet as an extra cushion layer.

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We’ve bought sleeping mats, cooking equipment, a water filtration device, a power inverter to charge our laptops from the car battery and an emergency jump start kit for when we drain the car battery by charging our laptops from it. Rosie has made magnetic curtains to fix to the windows (well, half of them are finished at least). Tomorrow we will pick up some sleeping bags and buy a few more necessary items before dropping off our winter tyres into storage and finding somewhere to camp!

We’ve had the most wonderful time at our adopted home for the last two months. Our hosts have been a pleasure to work for and so generous with their knowledge, time and vegetables. We are going to miss them a lot and hope to return to visit next year. We’ve learnt a lot about growing vegetables. It’s very strange to think back to our tiny raised beds in Baldock and how proud Rosie was of her few courgettes!

Having spent nearly 100% of our time in Canada on Workaway placements, the next few weeks are like a holiday for us (even though we feel like we’ve basically been on holiday since February…) We will be hiking up mountains and looking at lakes, waterfalls and wildlife. We don’t plan to visit many large towns or cities, so hopefully we won’t notice any global pandemics that might be happening. Internet will be limited for a while, unless we can get some Starbucks wifi from a few car parks. Ollie’s phone is still operational, so we will try to update the blog next week from that.

We hope you are all doing well and enjoying the heatwave in England, it’s going to be roasting here this weekend too.

We spent a lot of our free time this week shopping for parts and building a bed frame that we will sleep on when camping in our new car. We stuck mostly to the design from last week’s post, including: plenty of space for storage boxes underneath; hinges to fold up the headboard panel so that the front seats can be pushed back to a comfortable position when driving; easily removable panels and legs so that the whole thing can be packed away into the boot.

The main components are:

• A large plywood panel (cut into quarters at the hardware store so it would fit into the car)
• Several lengths of 2 by 2 for the frame and legs (which is actually 1-1/2″ by 1-1/2″)
• Hinges for the headboard panel and front legs
• Right angled brackets to make the frame more sturdy and to lock the removable legs in position
• Bolts to use as “drop pins” to attach removable legs and panels
• Screws

First, we marked up the plywood panels and our host Dion very kindly cut them to size on his scary table saw! He also lent us his skill saw and electric screw driver which was very helpful (vital in fact…)

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Rosie doesn’t find the skill saw so scary, so she cut the 2 by 2 lengths (as dictated by the CAD model) and we put the main frame together.

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The removable legs for the panels came separately. We wanted to double check their lengths as the back of the car has a slight slope where the seats are folded up. This ended up being a bit of a guess after we realised the spirit level doesn’t give you a local level within the car if the car is on a slight hill.

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Finally we attached the two front panels together with hinges and made two hinged legs for the second front panel. These had to have a slight angle to them to account for the sloped back seats. Someone* put them on backwards initially, so the slope was the wrong way round – but nobody blamed anyone else and separation was only mentioned once or twice.

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Here are some highlights (AKA the bits we remembered to film):

Some minor changes were required to the design. A third back leg became necessary after Rosie almost flipped one of the back panels during the first test climb. Also the clever “drop pin” idea (drill holes through several layers of wood and drop a long bolt in) wasn’t as clever as we hoped. The panels rattle around a bit, so we are going to get nuts for the end to hold it all together more tightly. But a success overall!

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We didn’t get many pictures of the final result and it’s raining now so we can’t be bothered to go out and take any. You can see the completed set up next week after our epic online camping equipment order arrives. After work during the week, we went to the local thrift store to look for some rugs/blankets/curtain material. We were in luck and are now the owners of a disgusting pink rug to put under our bed frame, a rather dated old flowery duvet to put between the plywood and our camping mats, some questionable grey material for curtains and a surprisingly sharp knife, all for the price of $8! Bargain! Let’s not talk about the online camping equipment order…

Going camping and getting to see some more of British Columbia is exciting, but we are also equally sad. This time next week we will be leaving Heart and Soil, after two and a bit amazing months here bunching beets, picking peas and harvesting hakurei. We will miss our hosts and hope to visit them again at some point before returning to the UK. Our first thoughts are to travel to Strathcona Provincial Park for some hiking, before heading to mainland Canada for some more hiking!

_*Rosie

We now have our very own car and we have named her Elsie! Firstly, a big thanks must go to Thomas Lane Thomas Lane and Hannah Kacary Hannah Kacary, who actually paid for Elsie… We had previously arranged with the seller to pay with our Revolut accounts, which would take a few days for the payment to go through. As we got off the ferry to Nanaimo it turned out they had changed their minds and we were left at the mercy of some really horrible exchange rates. Luckily, Ollie remembered that Thom and Hannah had nothing better to do than pay for our car with their Canadian bank accounts (other than a birthday weekend mountain biking in Whistler).

We wanted to see the number plates before coming up with a name. Interestingly, in Canada number plates are not associated with the car, but with an individual. Ours start with ‘LC’, so after a small argument over whether we should name her after Rosie’s sister, we decided on Elsie. Thom and Hannah own a van called Elvis, so that made Elsie seem even more appropriate as a partial tribute to our investors.

As well as day trips, we want to use the car as a mini camper-van for a few weeks at a time. Some people have asked us why we haven’t opted for the traditional cargo van, to live our best #vanlife. We did consider a van, but for what we wanted it didn’t seem as good a fit as an SUV as we are not planning on living in it for an extended period of time. We have really enjoyed the workaway experiences and would love to do more of these in the future. These always come with accommodation and occasionally other travellers, meaning having back seats would allow us to take trips with them. Also, more SUV’s come with 4WD capabilities, which may come in handy during a Canadian winter and up some steep mountains! Finally, it’s also easier to nip around in, and Rosie has a small chance of being able to drive it.

Of course, the SUV is much smaller than a van, so space and storage will be a challenge. Luckily, we are both fairly short. We have spent some time during the last week coming up with a raised bed frame design that should: support our weight, fold away into the boot/be removed relatively easy, and be big enough that we don’t fight too much over space. Luckily Rosie has a little bit of engineer left beneath all of the farmer. A few hours with the measuring tape and the (totally necessary and not at all ridiculous) CAD software resulted in this:

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We’ll be constructing the platform from 2x2s and plywood. The orange and pink panels are hinged, the purple panels are removable and held in place with drop pins. We can leave the bed assembled when driving (strapped to hitch points for safety) but the orange panel has to be folded up to move the front seats back to a comfortable position. The grey boxes represent plastic storage boxes which we can slide out of the boot for easy access to camping equipment. Construction begins this weekend.

We’ve driven Elsie the whole way across Gabriola island a couple of times so far (about a half an hour round trip) and are planning to go much further during late August and September. We’ll start with a few final days on Vancouver Island visiting Strathcona Provincial Park, then we’ll get a ferry back to Vancouver and head off on a road trip up to Northern BC.

First, we have our last couple of weeks working on the farm. Our friends and fellow volunteers for the past couple of months are leaving tomorrow. They will be replaced by two new people shortly after. We are sad to see them go and hope the new people live up to the high standards they have set! We said farewell with a final cultural evening of German tofu schnitzel, Dutch potato salad and British blackberry and apple crumble. All cooked in the glamping kitchen of course.

We hope you are all doing well and look forward to sharing our car/camper conversion progress next week.

Good news – after this week, we will have some new found freedom and some different things to write about. We are picking up our new (to us) Kia Sportage on Saturday! But for now, you can read about us picking vegetables and going to the beach again.

It has been hot this week. Our farm bosses have been very good to us and try to keep the hard manual labour tasks for the morning. Ollie was given a particularly scary task in the poly tunnels, with strange noises coming from the tomatoes… luckily he was well prepared!

We’ve been visiting the beach a lot in the afternoons, but have heard rumours that it’s also a beautiful place to visit at night. In July and August, bio-luminescent algae can be seen in the water around this area. There was a new moon on Monday night, so we waited until it was dark enough (at about 11pm) and bravely walked down to the sea. We weren’t holding out much hope, but it was worth the late bed time! As well as seeing millions of stars in the dark night sky, we also saw lots of sparkling lights in the water. The algae lights up in response to movement, so it could be seen most clearly around rocks where waves were breaking. We also waved our hands in the water and the lights followed them around like magic. Our host suggested swimming at night to get the full effect. We’re thinking of going down again on Saturday night, but not sure we’ll be brave enough to wade out into the darkness.

Here is a picture Rosie managed to capture with her fancy camera:

Equally as exciting this week, were Ollie’s pancakes on Sunday which have become a reoccurring theme. Rosie has been wanting to make a tower with them, so Ollie lent her his pancakes in return for half of the finished masterpiece (which can be seen below, along with our froggy neighbour, some flowers and more beach photos).

This week was suppose to be the end of our travels across Canada, from west to east coast. We originally had a flight booked to Malaysia for our friends’ wedding (and some extra travels) for 3 weeks before more than likely settling in Vancouver with some form of office job. Instead, we have enjoyed our time learning about farming, haven’t made it east of our landing destination, and now we are searching for a car and making plans to travel for a much longer period.

This reflection mainly stems (gardening pun?) from the fact that the weeks go very fast when you’re having fun with vegetables everyday and we’ve forgotten to prepare anything for the blog… Also, our free time has been swallowed up looking at used cars. Tomorrow we are catching the ferry to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island to see a few, so wish us luck and we’ll report back next week.

That change was Ollie’s barnet. Rosie decided to try out her hand at hairdressing and Ollie was relieved to find that she wasn’t too bad… well, it could have been a lot worse. We have some before and after shots, as well as our old favourite, a timelapse.

It’s a pity Ollie wouldn’t let Rosie near his beard…

Time for a Car

Recently we have been discussing that it might be useful to have a car to get around wherever we are workawaying, especially now Canada seems to be opening up a bit. It is also necessary if we want to do some travelling (public transport not so easy in Canada). Therefore, we have started to look at the used car market. Essentially we would like something that would be fairly economic and practical to get around in, but big enough that we could sleep in the back occasionally. We’ve come up with a shortlist (based on YouTube videos and creepily peering into the back of parked cars by the side of the road). If anyone has any advice for buying second hand vehicles, we’d be more than happy to hear from you!

• Honda Element

• Subaru Outback

• Subaru Forester

• Honda CRV

• Kia Sportage

We are hoping to get one before mid August, but will have to make a trip to mainland Vancouver Island to view some, fingers crossed! It will undoubtedly look a lot older than the photos above.

Recent Photographic Highlights

This week on the farm, Rosie has been stringing up tomato and cucumber plants and Ollie has been on a fertilising mission. Cherry tomatoes are starting to ripen and we have snap peas and courgettes coming out of our ears. We are still enjoying our glamping experience, we’ve even had homemade gnocchi and campfire jacket potatoes. There is one more volunteer joining us tomorrow, staying for a couple of weeks, so we look forward to meeting her.

This week, we thought we would test out your Rollie knowledge with a short quiz. Click on the answers to see if you’re right (green = yes, red = NO YOU SILLY GOOSE!). Have fun…

So? How did you do?

If you got at least 8 right, you may reward yourself with this photo gallery of our week, congratulations!

After numerous requests for another video we felt compelled to make one (sorry Craig – if you are in bed wanting to read our blog, we recommend headphones!) Rosie came up with the idea of videoing herself creating pupusas, a corn cake dish from El Salvador and Honduras, in our outdoor kitchen. She stayed highly motivated and everyone managed to get along throughout…

It was rainy and cold for our first week at the new farm, but on Tuesday the sun came out! All of a sudden our shoes are dry and the factor 50 is out. Although, today Ollie forgot to do Rosie’s back and she now has weird vest top tan lines, thanks a bunch Ollie.

We have had a very “chill” second week (we keep saying “chilled” which has been met with giggles, as apparently we are not beers). Plenty of bed prepping, planting, harvesting and weeding again. Highlights were picking peas and zuccCOURGETTES for the first time. We are still high up in veggie heaven, enjoying lots of delicious and nutritious dinners with our fellow volunteers (and the deer that drop round to visit).

Rosie’s packing back in February did not take into account a global pandemic, so she ran out of knitting material fairly early on. This week, she has dedicated a few evenings to searching for an online wool source (not as easy as you might think). Fresh supplies arrived on Thursday, along with a lolly-pop! So that’s a relief all round.

For our first weekend off, Ollie made everyone pancakes. He was a bit slow and had to deal with three women mocking him, poor thing. They were worth the wait however. We ate them with rhubarb from the farm and strawberries from down the road. After that, we hung around at the beach, did some yoga, went on a couple of walks, did a bit of reading and tried to learn how to do cryptic crosswords (see below – any help would be much appreciated.) The theme of our free time seems to be laziness, so looks like we’re set for a lovely summer!

We are starting this weekend with another Russian themed dinner. The varenyky last week were delicious, this week it’s borscht! We’re not sure we will enjoy it quite as much, but the chef shouldn’t beet herself up about it.

Last Sunday we made the long and arduous car ride (all of 10 minutes) to our new Workaway. We are now on an organic farm where they make all of their income from the vegetables they grow. The owners are lovely and have said we can help ourselves to the produce… I don’t think they realise how many vegetables Rosie can eat!

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We are staying in a simple cabin, more separated from the family than in our previous experiences. We have an outdoor (flushing!) toilet, shower and kitchen – glamping at its finest! Groceries are provided for us and we cook together with the other volunteers. We are currently joined by two students (originally from the Netherlands and Russia), who were previously studying in Squamish – just north of Vancouver. Apart from them initially assuming we were old enough to be their parents, we are getting on great so far! They are also vegetarians, so our shared meals have close to the lethal dose of vegetables that Rosie favours.

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We have just finished our first week of work. Starting at 08:00, we work until 11:30, have 1 hour for lunch, then back to work until 14:30. We have weekends fully off (hoorah!) to relax and explore more of the island. The farm have some really cool systems in place and we have already learnt loads! We manage to cram a lot into each day, highlights include: harvesting, washing and packing, transplanting, starting new seedlings indoors and preparing beds for new plantings. We have also done some weeding, but can’t claim that is a highlight.

An added benefit of the new location is that it is closer to the beach, so most evenings after dinner we have wandered down to relax and enjoy the views. There is also a cat called Sweetie, which Ollie has quickly bonded with. The friendship is a dangerous one however, as Ollie has already been caught with Sweetie on his lap when he was meant to be transplanting basil plants.

Tonight we are being treated to some varenyky made by our new Russian friend. The weather is colder than we expected, apparently “Juneuary” is a common phenomenon on the west coast. We will enjoy our glamping dinner in the garden anyway, with a glass of wine and extra knitwear.