So here we are at Notre Dame de Ham, a small village near Victoriaville, between Montreal et Quebec, more or less. We with Annette and Rejean on a really magical farm in the middle of the prairie.

We arrived a week ago and we've already learned a load of things! Here, they produce almost everything they eat. There's an absolutely fantastic vegetable garden, full of stuff growing, each more luscious than the next. It's an organic garden, of course! Which means it needs looking after and weeding by hand! It needs mulching to stop the young plants from drying out and, of course, we have the pleasure of picking the fruits of our labours. Every other day, we go and pick strawberries for a delicious dessert. Every day, lunch is a mixed salad of gigantic, crisp leaves that melt in the mouth. We're cooking beautiful, multi-coloured vegetables and we're rediscovering the pleasures of a wide range of cereals (I tasted millet for the first time!) This is happiness on a plate! Let's hope that all the farms are like this!

There are also a lot of animals. There's Sniffou the dog and Mika the cat. There are also the two goats, Pampille and Pampillette; the two cows Normandie and Babette; the two Percheron horses, Queen and Toupette; the two calves that don't have names because we're going to eat them soon; the goat kid who's just too cute, but will also end up on the plate; as well as two little pigs. It's extremely varied! Oh, and there are the hens too, I forgot them! And of course there are tons of mosquitoes and flies that buzz around me and drive me mad, arrgh! Anyway...

Ella, Rejean and Annette's little girl (there are three other children too, but they're not here at the moment) taught me to milk goats! It's great! I'm not bad at it and Rejean said he'd give me a "peasant's diploma"!

Nicolas has spent two days cutting wood with a really great machine that splits big logs.

Then, together, we've started filling some cracks in the log walls of the cottage we're sleeping in. With the big changes in temperature, they've cracked a bit.

Do you know log walls? Nicolas will write an article about it. It's an old technique, where you lay short logs horizontally, set in mortar, in order to build up a wall. It's very pretty! We feel really settled here. There's a lake just by our cottage where we can swim. We can hear the stream running past the house and at night we can admire the stars because there's a panoramic window to the sky opposite our bed. It feels like paradise!

Anyway, this weekend we're taking advantage of the fact that Quebec town is so close to go and have a look around. Also, there's a festival beginning. We're often lucky and turn up at just the right moments.

Next week, we'll stay with Annette and Rejean until Thursday or Friday, then we'll head to Montreal to catch a bus to Toronto. We'll spend a couple of days there, then go and see the Niagara Falls before heading on to Hanover and our second farm, in Ontario this time.

We'd really like to spend more time in Quebec, it's really great here. What an incredible province. It's great to talk with the Quebecois, because we have the language in common and yet our cultures are so different. It's really funny when you don't understand certain words, and try to figure out why the French say something one way and the Quebecois another way. We've realised they speak better French than us. They have hardly any anglicisms in their language. For example, a STOP junction is an ARRET, a "weekend" is a "fin de semaine", an email is a "courriel", a car park is a "stationnement". There are thousands of examples like that. They really fight to protect the French language. It's true that - unlike us in France - they're surrounded by English-speakers. In fact, in the street or in shops, people speak to us first in English, not in French.

Writer: Nathalie Jouat
Translated by Craig Priestley

	Nathalie Jouat and Nicolas Bonniot (left) have been blogging their adventures (in French) at www.nature-construction.com This article and all photographs: © Nathalie Jouat and Nicolas Bonniot.	WWOOFING IN CANADA 900+ hosts to choose from! WWOOF Canada www.wwoof.ca
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