Volunteers
"Beech Hill Farm has been a Host Farm under the WWOOF Scheme (www.wwoof.org.uk) for ten years and we owe much to the willing and generous help we have received from people coming from all over the world. Volunteers have helped with the sheep (mucking out, feeding, fleece cleaning), with the ponds (clearing weed, planting and transplanting wild flowers etc), with trees (pruning, tying, staking and watering in the drought), and of course in the vegetable and fruit garden (weeding, weeding, sowing, picking, mulching), textiles, (fleece cleaning and trimming, felting, knitting, spinning and more).. We have learned so much in the process and many have returned and become house-sitters and personal friends as well.
Here is a lovely poem which a volunteer from California wrote last summer when she and her partner were here helping.
"To be at a place like Beech Hill Farm is to be at a place that pleases.
And this pleasing is not the sort that comes and then that goes as is the way with so many contemporary pleases.
No.
This pleases is the sort that stays with one long after leaving the place.
This pleases stays lodged in the bone.
Cycles in and out through one's breathing.
This pleases, pleases even the lung.!
The thinking!
The knowing and the not knowing.
The places inside the body that do not have names.
This from two weeks at Beech Hill Farm.
This pleases that stays on pleasing."