In April 2008 Judy and Dave Kashoff temporarily shut down their lives in the Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County and set off for travels around the world. Judy, 58, closed her accounting ledgers and turned off her potter’s wheel while Dave, 53, sold his dental practice. Rather than wait for the proverbial golden years, they rented out their house, dropped their cats off with Dave’s mother, kissed their two grown children good-bye, and set off for a year or more of travels by bike, by horse, by foot, and by golly let’s just do it! France Revisited caught up with them in Italy, where they filed the following report about their experience with WWOOFing, World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, an international organization that matches organic farmers with volunteers willing to work a few hours a day in exchange for room and board. Though Judy Kashoff’s account takes place in Italy similar experiences are possible in France. GLK.
Ristonchia, Italy–We woke to a great deal of noise coming from the coop where Walter’s chickens and guinea hens were kept. Walter was our host while WWOOFing in Tuscany. We were staying with him as guests willing to work in exchange for room and board. It may or may not have been in our job description, but Walter’s favorite rooster had lost a battle with a fox the day before, so my husband dragged himself out of bed and crossed the street to the pen to see what was going on.
It wasn’t what my neighbors in the suburbs of Philadelphia would think of as an actual street. The grassy path in front of our little cottage was a thoroughfare through the medieval hamlet of Ristonchia, perched high on a hill above the Tuscan countryside.
It was the middle of the night. Wearing only sandals, Dave expected the rest of the village to be sleeping. Instead he found another person shuffling away, our host, more formally dressed in a t-shirt to go with his sandals. Walter had also heard the commotion, and Dave arrived in time to see him heading back to bed.
Dave found nothing wrong, and neither did Walter, we learned when we spoke to him the next morning over a breakfast of homemade German black bread and honey. Walter had a bit of a laissez-faire attitude about the chickens anyway. Of the ten chicks originally following mother hen around the yard, he told us, they were down to four by the time we arrived. Another was soon lost when it fell into the goat’s water trough and drowned.
“I don’t expect to keep them all,” he said. “They get lose, they have accidents, they’re not very smart.” And of course, over time, he kills quite a few of them himself in the process of preparing his gourmet meals. But he also cares about them. Not just to keep healthy for egg laying or tasty dinners; he also has favorites. We could tell he was moved by the loss of the rooster he’d had for ten years.
We first met Walter as we were pushing our bikes up a hill. He passed us in his car when we were on his way to his farm. We had arranged to work for him through WWOOF, World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, an organization that matches organic farmers with volunteers willing to work a few hours a day in exchange for room and board… and possibly a good night’s sleep. As we followed our emailed directions, I thought we’d be working in the heat of the flat valley on the many olive trees we passed. But soon we started up a gentle incline, and I believed we’d be working on the quilt of brown and green, plowed and planted, patches that cover the Umbrian rolling hills.
We then climbed higher. It took us almost two hours to go five kilometers, pushing our heavily-loaded bikes upwards into Tuscany in the process.
Ristonchia consists of just a few ancient stone houses located at the top of a mountain overlooking a valley and with a view of farmland, villages and other mountains. A castle can be seen in the distance on a smaller peak. About 18 people live there, more on weeks that Walter accepts paying guests as an “Agroturismo,” a farm that offers accommodation and meals. Every door has a keyhole and every keyhole has the key in it. That first evening, at dusk, we heard a cuckoo bird.
Walter’s land spreads away from the village, both down the hillside and up to the vineyard overlooking the valley. From there, you can see the castles of two typical Tuscan walled towns, Cortona and Castiglione Fiorentino. The farm has olive groves, a chestnut wood, pasture, woodland, farm animals, and a garden.
The farm has been organic since the 1980’s, when Walter and his wife, Irma, bought it. Walter moved here permanently from Germany 30 years ago when he got fed up with his job, leaving his wife behind with a recalcitrant 17-year-old daughter, grown now. Irma still lives most of the year in the Black Forest, leaving her job as a physician to join her husband for weekends once a month and for a few weeks each summer.
We were lucky to be there when we could enjoy Irma’s straightforward warm hospitality. Walter had been a senior analyst before exchanging computers for the farm; now he has an old laptop hooked to a slow dial-up connection, which conks out every 30 minutes or so. But he has quiet, a menagerie of animals, an interesting assortment of guests, and the satisfaction of the harvest.
Walter is a wonderful cook. He sometimes he makes true Tuscan dishes and other times his native German dishes, but usually they’re just Walter dishes. Walter and Irma have a lovely set of plates that was handcrafted in Cortona. When we first arrived, I was surprised to see how many had been broken, repaired, but still in use. A few days passed, and I broke a beautiful crystal wine glass. Irma overrode my apologies by telling me it was not one of the “good” glasses – she pointed to another type of wine glass and said, “THESE are the good ones, lucky you did not break this one.” A week or so later, during one of their impromptu dinner parties, another guest broke a glass—this time a vin santo glass—and I saw Walter pick up a different glass and say “good it was not one of these that broke.” A neighbor turned to me and whispered, “This is what they always say when a guest breaks a glass.” I felt like an accomplice to an inside joke as well as an accomplice to good living as Walter filled his chipped plates with the bounty of his farm.
Almost fully free range, his chickens and guinea hens live in a large pen for protection from foxes, but they often get loose. Walter has a dog named Wanda who will help herd or catch the birds when they do. He obtained Wanda when she was about a year old. A neighbor saw a strange car drive up, open the door, push the dog out and drive away. Wanda was not left with any aversion to cars, and in fact she often hitchhikes. She likes to accompany Walter’s guests on hikes down the mountain to Castiglione Fiorentino but will skip the climb of the return by smartly trotting to an intersection by the town’s edge to wait for a local to give her lift. Wanda went for walks with us, and one day we worked along side her; three guinea hens had gotten loose. It seemed under control by time we arrived; we could see Wanda had caught one, but Walter shouted, “Run, hurry,” and Dave grabbed each hen from Wanda, because it seems Wanda will hold onto a hen for only a short time before she considers it fair game for a meal.
There was other excitement on the farm, sometimes excitement that we witnessed, such as bringing home an escaped goat, and often excitement that we heard about as Walter told stories through our leisurely meals and glasses of wine. Like the time the two donkeys got loose and found a pile of fermenting grape mash. Walter had us roaring with laughter as he described the progress of these intoxicated donkeys, rolling in the meadow and staggering about. [The photo above is of Dave riding one of those donkeys when sober, at least the donkey.]
He also talked about local characters, some of whom we got to meet, such as the Italian folk musicians who came to lunch and three-year-old Julian who spoke three languages fluently. We also met friends and neighbors who came to dinner, for example the vicar who spoke no English but brought us a ladder when he saw us picking fat black mulberries from the fruit laden tree in the churchyard. I left them in the kitchen in the afternoon and after dinner they were returned to us in a creamy compote.
Dave and I spent a good deal of time in Walter’s kitchen. Although not expected of us, we couldn’t help but turn up in time to assist with dinner preparations. We tried to be good sous chefs, cutting and chopping fresh ingredients that Walter turned into gourmet delights. But our primary jobs were to feed and water the animals, collect chicken eggs, stake vines in the vineyard, and repair fencing by the goat and chicken pens. Dave and I worked on the goat fence together, patching the wire fencing, but I fixed the fence by the chickens on my own. I was very proud of myself—I inspected the fence carefully and made a cute little door for the chicks that could remain open in the daytime and closed at night. But I felt like a dolt when the one chicken in that pen hopped easily through a large opening I had missed.
Walter was always patient with us. He considers WWOOFing to be more than of a global exchange than a labor exchange, meaning that we couldn’t help but have fun while we were there. We rode the horse and donkeys in the mountains, met interesting people over delicious dinners, and even took a few days off to visit Lake Trasimeno, with its turquoise waters and gelato-eating holiday makers. We saw the Palio at Castiglione Fiorentino. We followed a parade of medieval-dressed trumpeters and drummers from the church to the square, where nine horses and their bareback riders raced around to complete for a silk banner. We learned a great deal about all sorts of things over dinner: Italian history and politics, organic farming, and how natural food is so valued in Italy that there are towns with the title of “Citta Lenta,” or “Slow City.” Born out of the “slow food” movement, a “slow city” must have a visible and distinct culture and heavily depend on resources from within.
At Walters we enjoyed the pleasures of slow food production. We cared for animals, we sang while we weeded, and after tending the grapes we lay on our backs looking at clouds that hung above the vineyard. We pulled and plucked our dinner from the garden and the farm and filled each evening’s wine bottles from a tank in the basement. Dave held a chicken in his hands for the first time, and I learned a little about Italian cooking. I made gnocchi (3 parts potato to 1 part whole wheat flour – no egg or water, just kneed together with a little seasoning if you like), and while I rolled the dough into little balls, I learned how they make spaetzle in the Black Forest. We learned how to tie grapevines and how they make Vino Santo wine by harvesting the grapes late, hanging them in the attic until after Christmas. We dipped Walter’s homemade almond cookies into the sweet wine, savoring both the taste and the knowledge of how cookies and wine were made.
On moonlit nights, when no one was running naked through the night, we would watch stars undimmed by city lights and listen to the cuckoo bird.
(c) Judy Kashoff
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For information on WWOOFing
The international WWOOF website: www.wwoof.org
For WWOOFing in Italy: www.wwoof.it
For WWOOFing in France: www.wwoof.fr
Walter Rossteuscher’s website, English version: www.toskanawalter.it/english.html. Walter not only offers WWOOFing but also agrotourism stays whereby, for a reasonable price, you can enjoy the pleasures of time on the farm without doing any of the direct work.