Month on a Permaculture Farm in Chile

The best time of day at Tierra de Aprendices is just past seven in the evening. The sun is lazily stretching its rays one last time before settling behind the hill. Everyone is quiet, solitary, tending to the day’s final tasks.

Ros waters the plants. Pancho chops firewood for the night’s bonfire. Ben plants the seed of a plum he ate after lunch, musing that in 10 years he can return to see a tree enormous with fruit. I slice potatoes and veggies to blend into a spicy dipping sauce. We’ll eat it later with bread for once, a light dinner late in the evening.

Music plays, faint and unobtrusive. Yo prefiero estar en un lugar de caótica belleza.

Permaculture 101

I spent the month of February volunteering at Tierra de Aprendices, a permaculture farm 40 minutes south of Valparaíso.

I found the farm through WorkAway, which connects travelers with volunteer work on farms, hostels, or anywhere seeking temp workers. As a volunteer, my hopes were vague: to work with my hands, to experience a different way of life, to learn how to live off less.

I’d first secured a job on a vineyard in Mendoza, but when it fell through a couple weeks before I was due to arrive, I scrambled to find another opportunity. It was then that I broadened my search to Chile and stumbled across the Tierra de Aprendices profile. The farm was new. It was focused on community and learning. Its owners seemed fun and down-to-earth. I sent Ros and Pancho a message, and they answered promptly; within days, I was set to travel to Melosillas.

Welcome to the Farm

During my time at Tierra de Aprendices, our days were spent outdoors. We slept in tents — our bedrooms — but the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room were all without walls and roof.

When I arrived, Ros and Pancho were about to break ground on their house — ideally the first of several homes on the sprawling hillsides. Their focus is bioconstruction: simple, low impact, long standing and affordable. Much of the wood is sourced from a forest on the property. Other supplies come from friends and neighborhood acquaintances.

Everyday Lessons

For my part, I spent my first days creating a natural insecticide for the house’s raised wooden foundation. In the area, a plant called palqui has been known to kill animals — even a few cows who decided to munch on its branches. My job was to search for palqui plants, cut off the leaves, and muddle them in hot water. After the mixture soaked in sunlight, I coated each trunk with the thick, pungent stew. Throughout the process, we had a running joke that we were making tea.

Most of my time, however, was spent learning how to maintain the site and cook different meals. None of this was rushed. One morning, we hunched down beside a honey bee hive and watched them clamber over each other, their legs wrapped tightly around their petals. Another day, we spent a whole afternoon making pizza.

I learned how to make arepas and dulce de leche. How to chop wood and start a fire. Tend a garden and compost waste. Clean (and use) a dry toilet. Reuse and reuse water, and then feed it back into the soil.

A good portion of my time was spent volunteering alongside Ben, a French pastry chef who woke up before everyone else and preferred to walk barefoot. He taught me to juggle and make bread. In many ways, he reminded me of my eldest step-brother: private yet warm, widely talented, fiercely independent. He arrived hitchhiking and went out the same way, alone and whistling.

Three weeks later, my final task was the same as my first. This time, however, I was alone. Ben had continued his travels, and Ros and Pancho left the farm the day prior, suddenly and somberly for a family emergency. They entrusted their space to me — someone they’d welcomed only weeks before. It felt like an honor. And so it was with full gratitude that I took on the simple task of muddling palqui, our undrinkable tea.

Broader Community

Throughout my stay, Ros and Pancho introduced me to a handful of neighbors. Clarita, a farmer across the creek, had been milking cows for 50 years. One day I arranged to meet her early the following day and watch the process, to her absolute bemusement. Her hands expertly tugged on the cow’s udders as she told me about her life, her kids. She planned to sell the last few cows soon, and they were gone within a week. But she still has chickens — dozens of them — so we often stopped by her place for eggs.

Chini, another neighbor, spent 20-something years living in France before retiring to a property with an apple orchard. One evening, we struck a surprise visit on her while she watered the trees. We wandered through the orchard before heading inside for once. Her farmhouse felt magical: filled with life and history and books and blankets and tiny busts of women that she sculpted herself.

Up the street, Jorge y Quena have a proliferous vegetable garden with squash the size of baseball bats. After a late-night once, they piled up bags full of fresh produce for us to take home.

Nearby, Sergio has spent the past five years building his eclectic, artful home with bioconstruction techniques. We stopped by one morning to help with the walls of the bathroom. Each panel contains insulation I’d never seen before: plastic bottles stuffed with cleaned plastic baggies, medicine packets, food wrappers and more. The recycled bottles keep the walls light and well insulated. Around each stack of bottles, we stuffed mud and hay — a mixture that hardens into durable, rain-proof siding. Eventually, Ros and Pancho’s house will have adobe walls, too.

Chaotic Beauty

I can get antsy spending too much time in one place. I crave change and newness. But I continued to extend my stay at Tierra de Aprendices; I relished its rhythm. At times, it felt like a 24-hour yoga flow: bowing low over the plants during the day, arching toward the stars at night, resting heavily until morning. I felt at peace, able to explore in this growing space.

This sense of freedom is thanks to Ros and Pancho, who dreamed up the permaculture farm after volunteering and traveling around South America over the years. Ros studied pedagogy, Pancho philosophy, and their ethos weaves into every aspect of the farm. For them, education is a way of life. Knowledge comes from observing animals and nature, from reading and listening to others, from conversing with life-long farmers and diverse traveling workers. From the outset, they involved volunteers to expand the community, to keep the space dynamic. Although they were no longer on the road, in some ways, it could feel like they were.

I prefer to be in a place of chaotic beauty, the song says. I mentioned it one night during a bonfire — that I deeply identified with the lyric.

Tierra de Aprendices is one of those places: where play and learning are one and the same, where contradictions are explored but rarely resolved, where roosters sing throughout the morning and foxes shriek into the night.