April / May     next »

A year in the life of a family of herb farmers in Dürrenroth, Emmenthal, Switzerland.

Liseli Rentsch, 81 years old and the grandmother of the family, briefly interrupts her work in the kitchen. Beatrice, her 29-year-old granddaughter who has popped by from neighboring Sumiswald, is a farmer herself but also has a job at the local registry office. Without her, the family portrait we are planning to take in the parlour would be incomplete. Tim, the family's playful two-year-old watchdog, has no problem with cameras and poses with the rest of the Widmers, a family of herb farmers in Switzerland's Emmental, for our photographer. Rosmarie Widmer (50) and her husband Franz (53) live in the village of Dürrenroth and together with their son Stefan (26) run the Gerbehof, a farmstead with a history going back some 200 years. For 17 years now, one of their sources of income has been the planting, tending and harvesting of valuable organic herbs for Ricola. These include peppermint, lady's mantle, lemon balm and marshmallow. Our plan is to accompany the Widmers through the year, calling in on them once a month to watch over their shoulders as they cultivate and tend their herbs.

Lunch at the Widmers in Dürrenroth is on the table at 12 o'clock precisely: the cook - in this case Gran - makes absolutely sure of that. Daughter Rosmarie, son-in-law Fritz and grandson Stefan are only too appreciative of the role she plays in the Gerbehof household. "Thanks to Gran," says Rosmarie Widmer, "we can stay out in the fields all day. Without her, a family business like ours would be completely out of the question." Because, out there in the fields, successfully growing herbs calls for expertise, green fingers and no end of hands-on, hard work. "It's all down to weeding, weeding and weeding again, otherwise it just grows wild," says Rosmarie Widmer. The reason why any unwanted vegetation has to be removed by hand is because weed killer is forbidden in herb beds. Admittedly, Fritz and Stefan did develop something last year that was designed to make their work easier. The fruit of their labors is a tractor with a range of tools that cost them hours and hours of work and around 20,000 Swiss francs. But now they can also save countless hours of work, says Fritz Widmer. "I figure the machine will save us around three weeks' weeding a year."

Stefan takes the tractor and drives off to the fields to the left of the stream. Here, where the lemon balm and lady's mantle plots are still pretty bare, he uses the machine to till and break up the dry earth mechanically, expending a minimum of effort. After doing this, he explains, they only have to weed the area immediately around the stems by hand. Regularly hoeing and breaking up the soil while the weeds are still germinating is the best way of getting rid of them because they've had no chance to put down roots.

Spring 2003 got off to a good start, says Rosmarie Widmer: week after week of fine, dry weather had been ideal for working in the fields. "Last autumn was wet and miserable but this year has been fabulous." If the weeding's hard in spring, you can be pretty sure the rest of the year's going to be tough. She admits that weeding can be exhausting and tedious, but still has its creative sides. "When you're weeding, you're constantly having to bend and stoop and that can be hard on your back. But at the same time, your mind's free to think about other things. I can re-run a film in my head, for instance, or let my thoughts roam and get my ideas straight about all kinds of issues."

The important thing, she explains, is that the entire family is there to help out with the herb farming. "You need lots of hands when you're cultivating herbs and everyone has to be completely committed to what they're doing. Everybody has to pitch in."

On this Saturday morning in April, Fritz Widmer has one or two chores to take care of in the herb fields. He's already milked the cows, mucked out the barn and set up the fences in the fields. Today is the cattle's first day grazing in open pasture: although they have been out regularly during the winter, this is the first time the cows have been allowed onto the meadow. Now, he wants to see how the marshmallow seedlings are coming along. These are currently being tended in a plastic hothouse with neighbors in Waltringen, Peter and Theres Nyffeler. The Widmers cooperate closely with them on herb cultivation and the two parties share certain machines and tools. The warm, humid conditions in the plastic-covered tunnels are ideal for the 40,000 seedlings sown (in 300 containers by the gardening department at nearby Wauwilermoos prison.) These will be ready for planting in May.

May / June     « previous | next »

A year in the life of a family of herb farmers in Dürrenroth, Emmenthal, Switzerland.

Flip the Swiss Freiberg, one of the Widmer family's two horses, is not his usual lively self today. In fact, he gives the distinct impression of being slightly despondent out there in the meadow. Could it be he's missing his stable mate, Que d'espoir, who's had to leave home with Stefan for a few weeks?

Stefan, 27, is the son of Rosmarie and Fritz Widmer, herb farmers in Switzerland's beautiful Emmenthal, whom we'll be accompanying through the year here on Ricola's website. At the moment, he's doing the annual repetition course that's part of life for all young men with Switzerland's militia army. First, he'll be in Davos for a few days and from there he'll be going to the "Lushütte" on the Napf, the Lüderenalp region's best-known mountain, where the Widmers still have a patch of alpine meadow. And if Flip is missing Stefan's horse Que d'espoir, the Widmer's are painfully aware of their son's absence at this important time of the year.

For Fritz Widmer on the Gerbehof in Dürrenroth, it is not easy getting by for long without the help of his son. This is the reason they are doubly pleased that Rosmarie's mother Liseli, 81 and still extremely active, can cook for everyone on the farm and relieve Rosmarie of the housework. To go with the coffee after lunch this sunny day in May, Gran's made a wonderful cake.

May didn't start out quite as promisingly as they had hoped, following a dry March and an equally auspicious April. The main problem was the marshmallow on the gently sloping field next to the Höchwald. On 5 and 6 May, the entire family got together to plant the 30 000 seedlings — using a special machine or individually and by hand — that had been sown by inmates at the nearby Wauwilermoos prison and tended by neighbours in Waltrigen. Another neighbour, Walter Heiniger, also offered his assistance because on those two days the family needed every hand it could muster.

Scarcely were the seedlings in the ground before the area was battered by a devastating storm. On 8 May, the rain came thrashing down on the plants. These, of course, had had no time to put down roots, with the result that several thousand of them were swept away by the floodwater or buried under centimetres of mud. "It was a sorry sight," says Rosmarie Widmer. Fritz estimates that the harvest could easily be down by as much as ten percent and adds, laconically, that no one will compensate us for the damage.

In the meantime, the herbs have made a strong recovery and the Widmers are not people to complain. "It could have been a lot worse," Fritz consoles himself. Apart from the storm on 8 May, Rosmarie adds, the rain has done the herb fields a power of good: with a few spells of very warm weather and regular showers, the herbs came on so well you could almost watch them grow. And it's true: the lady's mantle and lemon balm are like a lush green carpet covering the narrow valley floor on both sides of the stream between Rotwald and Höchwald. Soon, it will be time for the first harvest. Those parts of the field not covered by herbs for Ricola are a pale shade of blue: this is "Nüssler", which the Widmers have planted to act as organic fertilizer. It is now blooming, glimmering in the sunlight like pale forget-me-nots.

While Fritz sets to work with the tractor below the marshmallow field, making haystacks that he will put into the silo later on in the evening, Rosmarie has cycled out to the herb fields to take care of a few things there. No matter how often she goes, there's always weeding to be done. Although, as Rosmarie points out, we're not supposed to talk about "weeds" any more. "At the moment I'm going to this organic gardening course and they never talk about weeds: it's all "other vegetation". Whether it's "other vegetation" or just plain weeds, we don't want it in our herbs. When harvest time comes round, the only crop we want from our lady's mantle field is lady's mantle, because we want to produce nothing but the real thing for Ricola. And even if a lemon balm seedling manages to get a foothold among the lady's mantle, it's not simply "other vegetation" that we can simply forget. For us it's a weed and has to be got rid of."

It's a different picture, of course, over there in the wild flower field they are setting up for seed production. This is a veritable riot of colour, currently dominated by pale violet mournful widow, pink ragged robbin and yellow potentilla. Clusters of bees and butterflies swarm around the blossoms, while individual petals teem with ladybirds. And if Rosmarie hadn't pointed him out, we wouldn't have noticed the huge kite that suddenly appears high up in the sky, circling around in search of prey. After all, life down here in Widmer's herb garden is lively and fascinating enough.

June / July     « previous | next »

A year in the life of a family of herb farmers in Dürrenroth, Emmenthal, Switzerland.

The afternoon heat lies like a thick blanket over the Emmenthal hills, the only relief coming from the occasional, listless breath of wind. The Widmers would welcome a spot of rain again. The fields are dry, much too dry, for this time of year. And Stefan is out there constantly with the tractor, water tank and spray, doing his best to give Mother Nature a helping hand.

But Fritz Widmer isn't one to complain: if the dry spell gets any worse, they'll simply hook up the pipe they use for spraying liquid manure to a 12,000-litre water tank. The weather, he tells us, has been anything but ideal the last few weeks. When they were haymaking it rained virtually every day, and now, when they could use a shower or two, it's bone-dry. "The best thing for us right now, during the harvest period, would be a decent thunderstorm a couple of times a week."

Nevertheless, he's reasonably satisfied with the first harvest of herbs for Ricola. The bad weather forced them to cut the herbs a week later than they would have liked and there were a few bottlenecks because all four drying machines in the area were working to full capacity. "Herbs need to be dried the moment they're cut. We had to spread out all our herbs on four drying frames. There were two loads of ladies' mantle that didn't come up to our quality standards, so we had to use them as feed for the animals."

In volume terms, however, he was satisfied with this first harvest. They managed to harvest about 600 kilograms of dried herbs for Ricola of each type - ladies' mantle, lemon balm and peppermint - or twelve cartloads full. From a quantitative point of view, this was an excellent result.

Things also look pretty good out in the fields where the wild flowers are a riot of colour, teeming with swarms of bees; the blue viper's bugloss, for instance, which can be harvested entirely by machine and threshed back at home to extract the seeds, or the scabious, from which the seeds are manually separated in a process that often takes days.

Rosmarie and Stefan are busy with the mournful widow: they hand-pick the ripe pods which they then only need to rub to remove the seeds. Actually, Rosmarie explains, this is a time when the herbs for Ricola would need regular weeding, but because the seeds in the wildflower fields develop so quickly in this hot, dry weather they have spontaneously had to revise their priorities.

Although the family is working flat out in their wildflower and herb gardens, Rosmarie still manages to find the time to attend yet another course on organic farming. "The herbs we grow for Ricola are organic, so it can't do any harm to learn as much as I can about the subject. I find it particularly valuable for learning new ways of fighting plant disease but I also enjoy seeing how other farmers work and finding out more about different techniques." She also appreciates the constant exchange of ideas. "This morning, for instance, we had a visit from women at the Agricultural College in Waldhof."

Her son Stefan, now back from his repetition course with the Swiss army which he and his horse Que d'éspoir completed together, is happy to be back at work again on the family farm. For him, the time he spends with the army is almost like a holiday, particularly if he manages to live up to his role as an officer and motivate his men. He is very happy with the way things have developed at home during his absence, although he too would have welcomed "slightly better quality" from the first herb harvest. "The peppermint, for example, needs to consist of at least 75 percent leaves, otherwise there are deductions. So it's in our own interests to try and improve our quality all the time."

While Rosmarie and Stefan are combing the ragged robin field, gathering more of the valuable ripe seed ahead of a possible thunderstorm, Fritz has already started milking. He is proud of his cattle, some of which won prizes at the Dürrenroth cattle raising association's 75th jubilee celebrations. "One of them", he tells us, "was even voted Miss Protein". But milk is no longer the good business it used to be. "In 1980, we were getting one franc and seven cents for our milk - now it's down to 73 cents. In situations like that, you're glad when you've got herbs as an additional source of income."

July / August     « previous | next »

A year in the life of a family of herb farmers in Dürrenroth, Emmenthal, Switzerland.

For lunch today there's smoked ham, peas, carrots and fresh potato salad. But the meal doesn't need to be on the table until 12, explains Liseli Rentsch, 81, the grandmother of the family, so there's still time for her to go out and trim the roses in the garden.

A glorious riot of colour, the lovingly tended country garden in front of the Widmers' 200-year-old farmhouse in Dürrenroth is also very neat. Mainly because each of the flower beds is lined with closely cropped green boxtrees, which demand a lot of attention. "The garden," explains Liseli Rentsch, "is Rosmarie's pride and joy. She looks after it very well." Rosmarie Widmer, the lady of the Gerbehof, laughs. "Yes," she adds, "the garden is very important to me. It's where we plant our own vegetables, so we know what we have: cauliflower, beans, fennel, cabbage, lettuce, strawberries, horseradish and all the other things you'd expect to find in a farmhouse garden. And then there are the flowers to enjoy, of course. We're always picking a bunch or two to decorate the hallway or to put on the kitchen table. They're absolutely wonderful again this year - the orange and yellow marigolds, the roses in various shades of red, or the delphiniums, which are already beginning to fade but still look magnificent."

Another fabulous mix of colours can be seen out in the distance where Rosmarie Widmer and her son Stefan spend more or less every hour of their working day: in the fields of wild flowers and herbs, which stand out attractively against the fields of wheat, now almost fully ripe, in the pale blue colours of the speedwell or the yellowish shimmer of the ladies' mantle. "The herbs we grow for Ricola," explains Rosmarie Widmer, shouldn't really bloom before the harvest, otherwise they get too old and woody. We need as high a proportion of leaves as possible." Rosmarie and Stefan are, "as always", out there weeding. Stefan moves up and down each furrow with a little weeding machine, neatly singeing the edges of the fields with a gas burner to prevent the weeds from outside spreading into the patch under cultivation.

Things look pretty bad in the viper's bugloss field, where a plague of caterpillars more or less destroyed everything in June. "Suddenly, they were there, painted lady caterpillars," says Fritz Widmer, "thousands of them. And they'd finished off the leaves within a matter of days. Here, we'll manage to harvest about 20% of the seeds." Fritz surveys the damage, considers it for a few seconds, and then turns to another field where his help is needed right now, at precisely this time. "Between 11 and 12: that's always the best time to harvest the HAFERMARKSAMEN because that's when the seed pods are nice and downy, almost like dandelions. This time he has a young woman, Stefan's girlfriend, to lend him a hand: Simone Habegger, 26 and a cook by trade, comes from nearby Oberdiessbach. She's on holiday now and working in the Widmers' herb and wild flower garden "is relaxing and makes a really pleasant change."

Fritz Widmer is very satisfied at the progress being made by the Habermark. "We should get around 40 kilograms of seed, at between 250 and 300 francs a kilo. But there's a great deal to be done before the crop can be harvested." The long spell of dry weather in recent weeks, interrupted only by the occasional thunderstorm, would have had a devastating effect on Widmers wild flowers and herbs had they not regularly watered the fields. But now Fritz is even happy with the way the Ricola herbs are coming along. "The second crop is better than the first - it wasn't as big, admittedly, but the quality is absolutely first class. And there'll be no bottlenecks on the dryers this time when we turn up with our herbs: first the ladies' mantle, then the lemon balm and finally the peppermint."

In summer, especially, the Widmers have a long working day, as Stefan explains: "From six on, when we start with the jobs in the barn, until late in the evening." Even so, they give themselves a few hours' relaxation every week: Rosmarie and Stefan go riding while Fritz heads off to the local hostelry to play a few hands of cards with his pals. Stefan also took "a few days off" to go to Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, with Simone. It important that they simply make the time even if, as farmers, they've always got things to do at home.

In the meantime lunch is on the table. And everyone turns up punctually, some on bikes, others by car. And they cool off a little at the well in front of the house before sitting down and tucking in. The smoked ham, potato salad, peas and carrots are excellent - Gran's excelled herself again today. Tim, the dog, has found himself a nice little spot in the shade. He seems a little subdued since he - "poor dear", as Rosmarie notes sympathetically - was castrated in June. And Mausi the cat makes sure of the attention she needs: she's caught a bird and is now bringing it proudly into the living room.

August / September     « previous

A year in the life of a family of herb farmers in Dürrenroth, Emmenthal, Switzerland.

Widmers are satisfied - "very satisfied in fact". The fact they were able to water their herb fields regularly means that months of record-breaking heat this summer has had no effect on the size or quality of their crop. "All the watering involved a lot of work," concedes Fritz Widmer, "but now we'll get an extra crop. When we've harvested the third crop - and assuming it doesn't get very foggy - we'll be able to harvest a fourth in autumn. If it's foggy, there's always the danger the plants will 'rust'".

This particular Saturday, after lunch, the Widmers will be cutting a load of lemon balm and taking it to Wynigen for drying. Fritz sets out with the motor mower and cuts four swathes through the field. Stefan and his girlfriend Simone grab hold of a rake and pitchfork to help load the cart. Despite the gentle breeze blowing across the fields, it is still hot - very hot. Many of the surrounding meadows have turned a yellowish-brown but here in the herb field, if you kick away the dry top layer of earth you uncover moist clumps of rich, brown earth. The herbs are a lush green and an intensive, refreshing fragrance of lemon balm is intoxicating: all you have to do is rub a few of the leaves between your finger and inhale deeply.

While Tim the dog concentrates on catching a mouse, sticking his snout into a hole in the ground almost till it covers his ears, the cart is soon full. "There's room for around 500 kilograms," explains Stefan Widmer, "but after drying it will be just under 150." In quality terms, i.e. the proportion of leaves per plant, the second and now the third crop have been excellent, for all types of herb. The same goes for the volume. "In August we'll harvest something like 500 kilograms apiece of peppermint and lemon balm. We'll have to wait a while before we start cutting on the ladies' mantle, which is why we'll only get three crops there."

After loading the cart, Fritz Widmer is clearly in a hurry. The drying shed in Wynigen, which Fritz and Käthi Jau run alongside their farm, is half an hour away by tractor, and Fritz doesn't want to risk his precious herbs getting matted before they are taken off the cart for drying. "We have to get a move on, otherwise the herbs turn black." If the herbs are dried out in the open air, they become discoloured. The drying shed has a constant temperature of 35 degree and a steady supply of fresh air. "If you don't do it this way," explains Käthi Jau later, "the herbs suffer and lose a lot of their goodness." She, too, is full of praise for the quality of the herbs the Widmers have delivered yet again. "I'd say they're between 75 and 80 percent leaves." Fritz Widmer agrees and hopes that Ricola will give him a premium for the excellent quality.

It was very fortunate, as he stresses once again, that they had official authorization to pump water from the stream running close to their land. "We pumped the water from the stream mornings and evenings and ran it through a 500-metre pipe to the watering machine in the herb fields. It was time-consuming but, boy, has it been worth it!"

One thing there is no shortage of at the moment is work. Work with the herbs and with the wild flowers. Last Wednesday, it transpires, they were out in the fields until late in the evening and there wasn't even time for Fritz to go down to the local and meet his pals for his usual game or two of cards.

Fodder is another thing they're having a problem with here on the Gerbehof. There's hardly anything left to eat in the meadows and the cows are now being mainly fed with hay. All the same, they have plenty in store and won't run out in winter. Besides, he's just taken two cows to be slaughtered: Senta and ten-year-old Bianca, two prime head of cattle that had been awarded 95 and 97 points in shows and were getting too old. It's "always hard" to let go of a cow you've "milked, fed and pampered for ten years." On the other hand, there are six calves there now that demand their full attention, two of them from Bianca.

Stefan also has his hands full at the moment. Whenever he finds the time he gets on with the troughs he hammers and welds together to go out in the meadows so the animals can get a drink there. With all the glorious weather of the past few weeks, the demand has been "higher than ever before". Rosmarie Widmer takes a low profile today. On Saturdays, as she explains, she's "mainly a housewife". And if the family is to have a delicious, freshly baked plait for Sunday's breakfast, someone has to knead the dough.