Woofer General Expectations

General Expectations:

We want you to enjoy your stay, so have these general guidelines rather than rigid rules.

We provide all the food and accommodation (towels and linen) for your stay, plus you have use of all the Retreat Healing and Wellness Tools including the Spa pool. See this retreat guide for all the bush walks and basic fitness gear. In return, we ask for about 4 hours of productive work a day, and if you don’t enjoy it, let us know so we can find some other work that is more enjoyable. That can be 8 hours one day and nothing the next. Totally flexible in how it can work.

Food and Meals

  1. For lunch, you make your food from the ingredients we provide. Just tell us the type of food you like and we will buy it for you.
  2. For the evening meals, we share the cooking. If a woofer cooks the evening meal, that’s part of your  4 hours of productive work time. General dishes, such as loading up the dishwasher and the basic level of keeping the place tidy, is not work time; that’s just the normal life duty of being a good human. However, household/retreat cleaning is part of the 4 hours of work time.
  3. If you cook an evening meal, we like to make enough extra food for another day’s lunch. Just see how you go with the food prep and let us know, depending on how many people are staying.
  4. We are a vegetarian retreat. While you can cook meat, we prefer vegetarian if possible. Every Week we get new recipe ideas from https://menuaid.co.nz/ which helps us with plenty of vegetarian meal ideas.

Some of the Work Jobs to be Done

  • Basic firewood cutting if you know how to use a chainsaw and drive our mower with a trailer.
  • Mowing the glade with the 4WD ride-on mower
  • Track building (only for longer stays, as you need to learn how to drive the mini digger)
  • Cleaning windows / general retreat cleaning tasks
  • Gardening 
  • Painting the interior of the house/retreat plus some exterior
  • Track maintenance within the 40 acres of native bush

What we need from you:

  • Notify us of next of kin contacts
  • No smoking in any buildings
  • After 9 pm, please be aware of noise, living in the forest, some like to follow the sun and wake up early, but of course, you can sleep in as much as you want. Just be aware of reduced noise between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m.
  • While we provide WiFi, and a Chrome book laptop for woofers, we are a retreat to get away into the beautiful healing energy of living in the forest so we encourage you enjoy our beautiful 40 acres of private forest to recharge your soul. 
  • Please leave your room as you found it, although any general cleaning is part of your 4 hours of productive work.
  • Most of all, we hope you have fun, but if it doesn’t work out, just give us a day’s notice you want to leave, and we can drop you into Warkworth to catch the bus. And we reserve the same right if it doesn’t feel right, then we would talk about it first and then maybe suggest other options.
  • Please let us know if you have any questions. Thanks for checking out Stargate Forest.