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Help us tackle invasive species at our home in the Redwood Forest, Ben Lomond, USA

  • Enregistré comme favori 88 fois
  • Activité récente: 18 janv. 2024

Disponibilité

  2024 

 Séjour min. souhaité : Pas de minimum

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Infos

  • Description

    Description

    Matt and Ariel live with our 3 cats and one small dog in a small home on an acre of redwood forest in Ben Lomond, CA. Our house is nestled on a steep hill among the redwood trees, and the land has been overrun by an invasive species - English Ivy - and over-population of a fire-risky species of tan oak - so the focus of our workaway is getting rid of the ivy and tan oak! Ben Lomond is a lovely little mountain town, with typically great California weather. Wikipedia says that "August is the warmest month with a normal maximum of 85.5 °F (29.7 °C) and a normal minimum of 50.4 °F (10.2 °C)." Ariel works from home 40-hrs a week as a software engineer, occasionally teaches yoga, does a lot of Pilates, and is learning to speak Spanish and plays concertina in her spare time. Matt is currently working full time remodeling the interior of our main house. Our grown kids visit from time to time (they are 26, 24 and 24) but otherwise it's pretty quiet around our house.

  • Types d'aide et opportunités d'apprendre

    Types d'aide et opportunités d'apprendre

    Pratique d’une langue
    Jardinage
    Bricolage et construction
    Cuisine/repas pour la famille
    Aide à la maison
    Entretien général
  • Echange culturel et opportunités d'apprendre

    Echange culturel et opportunités d'apprendre

    We are excited about sharing with workawayers the unique environment in which we live. While engaging in the task of clearing invasive species off our land, our guests will learn about the redwood forest ecosystem and learn to identify the many interesting native species that inhabit our forest. Our home is surrounded by redwoods (sequoia sempervirens) – trees which grow bigger than many people have ever seen in their lives. The trees around our house are less than 100 years old - just babies - so we will be sure to to take our visitors to Big Basin, where you can walk among trees that are thousands of years old. If they want to see more of the local flora and fauna, there are many opportunities for hiking in the woods near us, and we are not far from Santa Cruz, a beach city on the Monterey Bay, which is a National Marine Sanctuary with many opportunities for surfing, scuba diving, sea kayaking, and sailing. Santa Cruz also offers the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, museums, art galleries, musical venues, and many restaurants. We would also love to bring our workawayers to Elkhorn Slough to kayak (close encounters with egrets, harbor seals, sea lions, and sea otters!) Other travel opportunities exist since we're about 128km (80mi) from San Francisco and 128km (80mi) from Big Sur, a region that has numerous state parks, beautiful coastline, and lots of hiking trails. As Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” Since we don't have opportunity to travel ourselves at this time, we hope hosting workawayers will bring the world to our doorstep! We look forward to learning about the cultures of our visitors. Ariel would love to exchange cooking techniques with any guest - she'd be happy to teach how to cook our regular foods and learn how to make their favorites! We'd be *especially* excited to have guests who speak Spanish, since Ariel is learning that language and would appreciate the opportunity to practice speaking with anyone with any level of Spanish!

  • Aide

    Aide

    We are looking for 1 to 2 helpers (maximum of two people!) to remove invasive species from our 1-acre property. The main plant to be eradicated is common English ivy, but on some parts of the land it is mixed in with poison oak. If you know you are allergic to poison oak (or its cousin poison ivy), or know you are sensitive to plant irritants, this is not the workaway for you! Also, the terrain is steep, and it can be hot and dirty task.

    Since pulling ivy 3 hours a day, 5 days a week is really hard work and can get tedious, when there are other tasks available, you will be welcome to substitute 4-8 hours a week pitching in in other ways such as cleaning the shared bathroom, general housekeeping, taking a turn cooking dinner for everyone, interior or exterior painting (if you have experience), gardening, walking the dog, making improvements to the camping area, or trail-building if you have that skill. If you speak Spanish, I would gladly trade 30-minutes a day of practicing speaking Spanish! From time to time, you might also be invited to go up the mountain with Matt up to the source of our water to flush sediment out of the settling tank, shovel sand out of the creek pickup, or make improvements to our make-shift dam on the creek.

    We ask for 15-20 hours help per week in exchange for room and board. Generally we would like you to help from 10am-2pm weekdays, but there is a great deal of flexibility around the hours. You MUST be able to help completely independently based on general directions. You will be doing tasks alone most - if not all - of the time. Since we are looking primarily for outdoor help, rainy days will usually be free holidays!

    We are looking for volunteers with:
    - common sense
    - concern for the environment and interest in land stewardship
    - the ability to complete tasks alone with generalized directions
    - willingness to carry out tasks to the best of their ability
    - ability to correctly identify plants after instruction on the types of plants to be removed

  • Langues

    Langues parlées
    Anglais: Courant
    Espagnol: Débutant

    Cet hôte propose un échange linguistique
    I have a deep desire to become fluent in Spanish, so I would be delighted to host a Spanish speaker.

  • Hébergement

    Hébergement

    Depending on who else is staying with us at the time, workawayers may stay in a guest bedroom in the main house, or in a small cabin on the property or in a tent on platform up in the yard. All of these options will use a bathroom in the main house. You will have access two shared (all sexes) bathrooms in the house each of which has a shower, toilet, and sink (well, as of 7/2022 only one bathroom has a shower - construction work is in progress!) You will have access to a shared laundry facility (washer and dryer) which can be used between the hours of 9am – 9pm daily. There are also two outdoor bathtubs with varying degrees of privacy. Cigarettes, and marijuana use are allowed, but not encouraged, and are NOT allowed inside the house or cabin, and NOT on or around the camping platform (because of the risk of wildfire.) Smoking is allowed in designated areas of the property where the risk of fire is low. If you are discrete, you may choose to consume alcohol occasionally in your sleeping area, but only strictly outside helping hours.

    THE CABIN: Able to accommodate 1-2 people and separate from our main house is our cute a little cabin in which there is a full-sized futon that can be used as a sofa or a bed, and a loft with a full-sized futon. The cabin also has a table, two chests of drawers, TV and internet access and a wee kitchenette with a tiny refrigerator, toaster oven, electric tea kettle, and a hotplate. The cabin is down one flight of stairs from the main house. There is **NO SMOKING** of any kind allowed inside the cabin. Our home is in an area with high danger of wildfires (over 85,000 acres burned here in our mountains in a wildfire summer of 2020 and the fire perimeter was just a few miles from our house) thus there is also **NO SMOKING** allowed on the porch of the cabin. There is an area near the main house or in the parking area designated for smoking.

    THE TENT PLATFORM: About 75 feet up the hill from our house, we have a platform on which you can pitch a tent. With advance arrangement, we can provide tent, pad and sleeping bag. The camping platform is visually private and has a view of trees all around, but you can hear cars on the two-lane highway that is a quarter mile below our property. There is electricity by the tent platform where you can charge your electronic devices or plug in some lighting (getting that all set up nice is one of the things on Ariel's wish-list of campsite improvements!) and there is limited WIFI signal up there - it's a little weak. Our home is in an area with high danger of wildfires (over 85,000 acres burned here in our mountains in a wildfire summer of 2020 and the fire perimeter was just a few miles from our house) so there is **NO SMOKING** OF ANY KIND IN THE CAMPING AREA. NO candles, NO camping stoves, NO flames of any kind are allowed in the camping area. There is an area near the house or in the parking area designated for smoking.

    Food is provided, though often you will need to cook for yourself, as we don't currently have a regular schedule of organized family meals. Ariel is hoping the presence of workawayers will inspire the cooking of more family-style meals, but isn't making promises about that! We keep the kitchen stocked with staples of our diet - such as eggs, milk, cheese, homemade milk kefir, cereal, oatmeal, dried fruits and nuts, lunch meat, peanut and other nut butters, bread, beans, pasta, rice, ramen, corn chips, homemade salsa, homemade kombucha, frozen salmon, fresh greens, in-season fruits. If you want to help Ariel with the grocery shopping, then you can have a big influence on what is available to cook! You may also choose to bring your own food into the house, and we will set aside some shelf space and refrigerator space for you. You are expected to wash all of your own dishes on a daily basis, and clean up after yourself when you use the kitchen.

  • Autres infos...

    Autres infos...

    We are walking distance to a bakery, a grocery store, a coffee shop, a community theater, a tiny library, three restaurants, and a bus stop, from which a 45 minute ride will get you to Santa Cruz. The bus stop is down hill from our house, about 3-minutes to walk there, 8 minutes to walk back up (depends on your fitness level!) Unfortunately as of this writing, there is no bus service to Big Basin Redwoods State Park, but we can help arrange a ride there, and if you decide to hike Big Basin to the Sea one weekend, Ariel will pick you up down at the beach (or she might want to come with you and let Matt pick us all up!) Some of the very-near-by attractions include Loch Lomond, a reservoir around which you can hike or rent boats to boat around in (no swimming) and a small island where you can have a picnic lunch; Fall Creek and Henry Cowell, two state parks with some nice hiking, picnic areas, big redwood trees, and some riverside beaches where you can take a dip in the San Lorenzo River; Roaring Camp Redwoods, a local park with narrow-gauge railroad (steam trains!) where you can hike, picnic, or even ride the train all the way down to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (an amusement park with roller coasters and other rides as well as a big arcade); a lesser known attraction near by is the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, that's a fun place to visit to learn about Big Foot lore. In Felton there are several restaurants, including the Felton Music Hall which has performances (a mix of many genres including local bands and internationally renowned artists.) We are also a few hours drive away from other famous places in California such as San Francisco, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, Mount Shasta, Napa Valley.

  • Informations complémentaires

    Informations complémentaires

    • Accès Internet

    • Accès Internet limité

      Accès Internet limité

    • Nous avons des animaux

    • Nous sommes fumeurs

    • Familles bienvenues

  • Possibilité d’accueillir les digital nomads

    Possibilité d’accueillir les digital nomads

    We have Xfinity internet service and solid wifi. Ariel works from home full-time using the wifi, so it has to be reliable! Starting in 2020, from May through about October, there are sometimes 12-48 hour interruptions due to the power company shutting power off to prevent wildfires. This happens when weather conditions are particularly dry and windy.

  • Combien de volontaires pouvez-vous accueillir ?

    Combien de volontaires pouvez-vous accueillir ?

    Deux

  • ...

    Nombre d'heures attendues

    Maximum 3-4 hours a day, 5 days a week

N° de référence hôte : 945568716937

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