ABOUT US:
We have been hosting Wwoofers for 9 years (ever since Elijah was just a few weeks old) and our experiences of hosting people from around the world has enriched our lives.
Gareth is an English teacher at Tauranga Boys College, Kazel is an Organic Horticulture tutor, a volunteer Permaculture Designer and does pest monitoring for avocados, and our children are 9 & 14. Morgan lives in a cabin, and is a permanent wwoofer.
We have tenants in minor dwellings on the property, including a container house and a tiny house under construction.
We have dabbled in politics, the locavore movement, organic food and self-sufficiency. We are flexitarian, eating mostly vegetarian/vegan food, and our own free-range meat. This property is our lifeboat, our dream for the future, and our hope for a better outcome. It has forced us financially to sacrifice some of our ideals but we are moving towards a model that straddles achievability with ethics.
We are a new breed of hippie, blending modern technophilia and mainstream professions with a personal agenda of environmental awareness and self-sufficiency. We attempt to parent consciously, providing our children with skills needed for modern life and future proofing.
Our dreams for this property have no limits.
About Woodstock:
Our property has 40 avocado trees, a newly planted orchard of heritage apples (with a few summer fruits such as plums and peaches), about 20 citrus plants, 10 walnut trees, 10 almond trees, 70 hazelnuts, 20 figs, and we have plans to put in a macadamia nut/chestnut walk. We have strawberries and raspberries. For the first three years we had no fruit from the property, as the trees are were all too young but in a few years we will be self-sufficient in fruit.
We have chickens who provide eggs (and meat), rabbits who have in the past provided meat & fur but now are semi-retired, free-loading ducks, goats and occasionally a pig.
We have a half-built pizza oven and a running stream which is nice for summer paddling and provides us with water… there is potential there for power generation, but maybe the technology isn’t available for such a small scale yet.
Guests and Woofers stay in the spare room, or in summer the tent when the room is booked for Air BnB
This property has a self-contained granny flat with a tenant, and a converted sleep-out and a container house that are also tenanted. They help to pay the mortgage, and contribute to the community feel.
We are right on State Highway 29. When we looked for our forever home, and found this one, it was 9 out of 10 for ideal – it had the right size land (7 acres – we wanted between 5 and 10) it has avocado trees (that was a must that they be able to be grown) it has running water, a tenantable property, an enormous work-shed, enough bedrooms for us all, great soil (the best in NZ I think, a sandy loam with great drainage and volcanic ash), a great climate (not too hot in summer, not too cold for avocados), a short drive from our work (we have a stonking great mortgage to pay back now), but still rural. And it was within our budget. The 1 out of 10 that it failed was the motorway noise but luckily traffic is lighter during the evenings and weekends, and if you pretend the rumbling is the ocean waves it can be pretty peaceful.
Your contribution to any of our tasks is so utterly incredibly important to us. Everything you do to help brings us closer to our dreams, and helps free us up to have both a self sufficient lifestyle block and a life.
Read our feedback from past WWOOFers on the WWOOF NZ site.