One Week On The Farm

The farm I traveled to is not a regular farm. The main goal here is to help build an aluminium sailboat that Zeyang, the man who runs the place, has been building for about 5 years. He plans to finish it this year. You can read some more info about the project here. Right now I’m here with two other volunteers, but more will arrive in the coming weeks.
I’ve been on the farm for a week now, here are some impressions.

There’s always porridge with jam for breakfast, and we often discuss what to do during the day. Nils and Zeyang talk about blocks here.

The boat is in a separate temporary building, most things are done in the workshop right across it. I haven’t done much on/for the boat yet though.

Instead, my first task was to get the old farm motorcycle running again. An old ’92 Yamaha XT600 that had some electrical issues when they last tried.

After brushing off the sawdust and chicken poop I got it running again in two days. I put the battery back, cleaned the fuel system and had to try kickstarting it about a 100 times but then it fired up and ran well.

It was fun doing this and I like how Zeyang gives me tasks that cater to my interests a bit. There’s a list of things that previous volunteers wrote down they would do last summer, fixing the bike was one of them but they never got to it. I also spent another day putting some missing parts back onto it and fixing rear indicators for it.

Next up is the old 1951 Ferguson TEA20 tractor, also called a “Gråtass” in Norwegian; which means something like ‘little grey dog’. It’s been on the farm since 1952, replacing the horses they had. They put it in the barn running about 4-5 years ago, various volunteers have had a try to bring it back over the years but none has managed to get very far.

I’ve been working on it for a day or two, I fixed the electrics and checked and fixed the ignition system so it is sparking again, as well as topped up some fluids. There’s still a few days left on it.