Gagie WWOOF volunteering

WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) is an international organisation, where volunteers provide practical help in return for board and lodging.

Wwoof  started in England in 1971 when 4 idealistic Londoners arranged to work for a weekend on an organic farm in return for board and lodging.  From this small beginning, it now has branches in 88 countries with 6,000 hosts worldwide. 

We have been Wwoof hosts since 2004 and have enjoyed meeting wwoofers from many countries, including Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Finland, Spain and USA.   Maintaining a historic house and its grounds involves a great deal of work and we are very grateful to all the wwoofers who have helped us.

Gagie is a small country estate, with a lot of woodland and a marsh that is a nature reserve.  We have a flock of about 50 Jacob sheep, which are reared organically, an apple orchard and ornamental and vegetable gardens around the house.  Parts of the garden are open to the public from February until the end of May, including a woodland walk which is part of the Scottish Snowdrop Festival, so there is path maintenance & transplanting snowdrops.  We are interested in sustainability, green architecture and recycling and have recently installed a wood-burning central-heating furnace, which is supplied from our own woods.

We accept wwoofers throughout the year and there is always a wide range of jobs to be done, including: planting and pruning trees, splitting firewood, tending the vegetable garden, strimming, weeding, cutting grass, helping with the sheep - especially in spring at lambing time - repairing stone walls, painting and building maintenance – and some more weeding!  In the winter, with short days and sometimes bad weather, there is less outside work available and wwoofers may be asked to help with painting and other inside jobs.
Wwoofers have the opportunity to learn many new skills, from sowing vegetables to beer-brewing, from using garden machinery to medicating sheep.    We are also happy to help non-English speakers to improve their English.

Wwoofers live in the house and are expected to help with the preparation of meals and a few normal household chores.  Volunteers must be members of Wwoof UK and in general, we do not accept wwoofers for less than 3 weeks.  There is no separate accommodation for wwoofers, so they live and share meals as part of the family.  For more information, e-mail us at smoor@gagie.com, providing as much relevant information as possible, such as: your age, if you are a student, what you are studying, your interests and hobbies, what experience you have and the dates you might be interested in coming here.

Find out more about wwoofing by clicking the WWOOF UK link.
http://www.wwoof.org.uk/