White Oak Farm

We've been at White Oak Farm, near Burnsville, NC since a quite dark, rainy, and chilly Sunday night. Unfortunately it's stayed dark, rainy, and chilly since then. As a result, our wwoofing experience here as consisted mainly of food preservation and childcare. We're now experts at canning; the lineup of products includes Apple Ginger Marmalade, Zucchini Apple Butter, Apple Plum Butter, Applesauce, and Raspberry Blueberry Preserves. Today it's Apple Basil Jelly, Pickled Okra, and trying to figure out how to make fruit leather.

White Oak Farm is way up near the top of a mountain, with a beautiful view of multiple ridges out of the panoramic living room windows. The house is really neat, with a few stone walls, and raw timber beams inside. A greenhouse is attached to the basement, which keeps our room down there bright and warm.

Our morning and evening chores consist of taking care of the animals - letting out the three flocks of chickens to roam around for the day, collecting eggs, feeding the goats, milking one of them, and checking up on the two horses. I wish I could ride more, but it's been too wet and nasty out. Christy rode bareback on Frosty one morning, and Connor even got on a horse for the first time!

There is another wwoofer here, Adrienne. Turns out she went to William and Mary for a year, and we know quite a few of the same people. Yesterday was her 21st birthday, so the boys Jack (age 10) and Haven (age 6) took us on a hike down the mountain as a surprise for her. It was a beautiful walk, complete with mossy forest and small waterfalls. Yesterday evening we went into town to celebrate with the whole family to Jack of the Wood, a small Asheville-based brewing company and British-style pub.We had a deliciously appropriate meal and listened to the old-time jam that just happened to be going on right then. Afterwards, we poked around downtown after hours, enough to get the idea that it's a pretty cool town and that we'd like to hang around during daylight hours a bit.

We'll probably stay here until the beginning of next week sometime. Then we're talking about moving on to another farm about 45 minutes away from here. They grow sorghum, and right now it's time to harvest it and make syrup out of it. We think it'd be interesting to learn how to do that. After that, maybe we'll couchsurf in Asheville for a few days, then head out west? We'll see.