My first Workaway farm! Harvesting herbs and flowers in Switzerland

It's Monday at 12:15 and my train arrives in Läufelfingen, Switzerland, less than one hour away from Basel. Martin, with whom I spoke a couple times for a few minutes on the phone, picks me up at the station, I recognize him from the picture and hop into the van. 'Does it smell like mint in here?' 'Yes we are harvesting peppermint today'. It smells so good! I'm immediately very grateful and happy to get the chance to spend time living and working on this organic farm, ArsNaturalis, as my first Workaway experience. The main work in the summer is harvesting herbs and flowers for herbal tea and medicinal use. There are also some cows but they don't need much care in the summer as they are just grazing in the field all day and night. Although later in the week I participated in the moving of cows from one field to another or bringing them back in the stable for pregnancy check or insemination - and saw some sides I had never seen before.

We arrive at the farm and Martin suggests me to just leave my bag at the door and directly start helping harvesting the mint with them. Yes, here I go! A special small machine is used to help cut the herbs and collect them in a huge bag that we then empty in several boxes. We then sort the mint by hand, taking out bad leaves and weeds.

This was another day, harvesting sage, same method as the mint on my first day 

Around 2pm is lunchtime. Julia, another Workawayer has prepared the lunch while we were finishing the sorting of the mint and we all eat together with the 3 other 'Workawayers' from France, Germany and Switzerland, as well as Martin, his father who helps on the farm everyday and his daughter, super cute and quite wild, running barefoot around us on the farm and playing with anything she can find (the fences for the cows, etc). Almost all the food comes from the vegetable and herb garden! Even some edible weeds go in the salad, this delicious purslane plant with lots of healthy nutrients (pourpier in French).

PReparing lunch: first step is going to pick things from the vegetable garden :-)

Purslane - delicious nutritious weed from the garden for the salad

At 5pm, when the sun is a bit weaker, it is time to pick the blue corn flowers, by hand, one by one. I like the old school style basket we put them in. 'What are these corn flowers used for?' 'To beautify the tea'. Indeed, in the delicious flavored green teas that I used to buy a lot of, there are always some dried colored petals. The field of corn flowers is filled with bees, wasps, little (and a few huge) spiders, grasshoppers and probably lots of other insects we can't always see. I almost feel bad to pick the flowers that so many bees are coming to gather pollen from. But there are so many flowers! Even when we have picked for 2 hours, it still looks the same, full of flowers. Wikipedia says, corn flowers (bleuets in French or Centaurea cyanus) are a native species from Europe but endangered by intensive agriculture. So I am glad to feel this work is promoting biodiversity and preserving native plants in Europe.

Also, after the course 'Elegant Simplicity', beauty no longer seems something superfluous, but an essential part of enhancing our lives and sharing love. So I say 'Yes' to the corn flowers, tea beautifiers and source of nectar and pollen for bees :-)