Minimum stay is two weeks and if everyone gets on and you are happy we have no maximum length of stay. The best length is a month since you learn the work, get to enjoy the place and make friends.
Farm working shoes are good since it can get wet, slippery and muddy when it rains. We have a no-shoes-in-the-house rule in all the living buildings so slip-on shoes are useful. We do keep some spare gum-boots which people are also welcome to use.
Currently we have chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, turkeys, kune-kune pigs. The neighbours have cows, sheep, donkeys, goats which are all visible from the road. We also have 5 dogs and 3 cats.
There are regular chores and projects always on the farm and inside and outside work from housework to gardening. See the Work tab on the website.
Usually we expect 5/6 hours work a day although some people help out all day. There are also others with valuable skills who exchange 4 hours a day of their time. Everyone has one day off a week, usually the same day of the week that they arrive at the farm.
We prefer, particularly in summer, an 8am start with everyone working until 1pm. There is a regular chore that takes half an hour in the afternoon which our workers take turns to do-feeding chickens and walking the dogs. We are open to negotiating different work hours where necessary-i.e family stays.
We have various accommodation places on our farm-see Accommodation on the web site.
We are meat and vegetable eaters, bread, dairy etc. We try
and eat organic and almost all our meat is farm produced. We do grow our own
vegetables but how much depends on season and time available to work in the
garden as we commercially grow garlic as our main crop.
We prefer non fussy eaters as what gets cooked depends on who cooks, however
we have no complaints about the food we serve from those that stay.
Take a bus from Auckland to Warkworth-there are 3 bus
companies-mains, intercity, northliner. The cost is approx $15-17.
The farm is 17km from Warkworth on the road to Matakana and Leigh. The farm is
half-way between Matakana and Leigh. We can pick you up from Warkworth as long
as we know the arrival time.
Audrey can sometimes meet people in Auckland and bring them to the farm on the
days she works in the city.
7km from the farm in Leigh, a small fishing village to the north-east. Matakana is 8km from the farm heading south-west. Someone usually drives into Warkworth each day where there is a supermarket, email at the library, postshop, banks etc.
