With the plan of improving my French and my English, I started an exciting year in March this year.

I spent three months in Montreal in a language school for French and stayed after those 2.5 months longer in Canada. My plan was to see as much as I could of this huge country. But if you have many plans and travelling for a long time, there is always the struggle with the money, how you might know.  Do I have enough money for everything?

A friend of mine recommended that I try out helpX. It’s an internet platform where you can open an account and find places to stay and work for accommodation and food. It sounded interesting to me and so I decided to do it and it was an amazing experience!

I spent three weeks on an organic farm in Winnipeg, in the middle of Canada. I lived there with a young farmer and everyday there were three other employees coming to work with us. We started at 6 o’clock in the morning and the main part of our job was harvesting all the different vegetables. We had spinach, different lettuce, turnips, beets, garlic, carrots, cucumbers and a lot more! It was very interesting to learn more about the vegetables, even though I already knew them from our family garden at home.

Working on a farm is hard work and we only had a short lunch break at around 12 or even 1 o’clock and continued after that for a few hours more. My back was hurting a lot but I still enjoyed the work and the lifestyle on the farm. We always cooked with delicious fresh vegetables and once a week I could join the farmer at the market to sell all our fresh vegetables. It was a lot of fun! Also the relationship with the other workers was very good and I could just enjoy this time and I would do it again anytime! You also learn much more about a country because you spend your time with local people and usually there is also enough time to explore the surrounding area.

Did you also have an experience working on a farm? How was it? Did you enjoy it?

Julia, CAE