Have been at Wollam gardens for 2.5 weeks now and am thoroughly enjoying working at the flower farm. It helps that I'm here with great people! There are 4 interns - Taylor, Jen, Josh and myself as well as Kim and Jim who work at the farm and the owner - Bob.
The 11acre farm and surrounding areas are lovely, it's very green with rolling hills and lots of buttercup. We are located about 45 mins to Washington DC and 15 mins to the nearest town of Culpeper which has about 17000 people. It isn't as isolated as I thought which is nice!
Bob and the interns (which include me although technically a volunteer) all live in the white farm house and share duties for cooking, cleaning etc. All our food and accommodation is included in the internship and we get to use the company vehicles whenever needed. It's like a little community here which is really nice and I feel lucky to be able to have this experience.
I have driven on the other side of the road a few times now which has been pretty scary! I've already been in trouble with the law for not obeying a hwy sign and they hit me with a $100 fine. In my defence I was kind of preoccupied, trying to hurry to the dentist in a fair amount of pain from dry socket! I had an infected tooth pulled out after only being at the farm for 2 days and have since been back to the dentist 6 times getting it healed. All cleared up now though with the help of some very strong pain killers.
The work is hard but very rewarding. We work 7am - 5.30pm 6 days a week with Tuesdays off. The average day consists of picking all sorts of flowers and foliage in the morning as well as seeding, propagating and planting new plants. The afternoon is spent making bouquets for farmers markets, harvesting flowers, sorting orders for florists and undertaking farm maintenance work. We drive around on golf buggies which is cool. At the moment we have things like poppies, snap dragons, sweet peas, dianthus, fox tail lilies, lily of the valley, spirea, albia, viburnum, peonies, anemones and ranunculus. Soon we will have dahlias, zinnias, iris' and baptisia as well as heaps of others. Bob just sold heaps of flowers to the USA Vice President just this week gone which is pretty impressive.
For our days off we have created a large list of things we want to do and see. So far we have seen Iron Man 3 (awesome), been to a psychic (just for fun), visited the White House and International Spy Museum in DC and also visited some local wineries. Next Tuesday we plan to have a picnic at the river and consume lots of wine :)
We take it in turns to go to different Farmers Markets around Washington DC and sell our cut flowers. This is definately the best job of the week. It's good fun, great for people watching and there is lots of yummy food! At the end of the market we get to exchange our flowers for other fresh produce and also give away the flowers that only have a short life pan left. Seeing people's eyes light up and the smile on their face when you give them free flowers is awesome!
On a side note, everyone here loves country music so I'm completely in my element. I've even bought tickets for myself and Taylor to go see Brad Paisley and Chris Young in concert at the end of June!
Missing everyone back home. Sending big hugs. Until next time.
