9:27 PM Saturday, 27 February 2010Temperature: 43 F, cloudy with some breezes
Today we had three teenaged sons of friends of ours over because their dad wanted them to get a taste of 'real' work. They were not exactly falling over themselves with glee at the idea, to say the least, but they came and were fed (breakfast of scrambled eggs, bagels with smoked salmon and snipped chives, grilled steaks and mushrooms, and a choice of muffins and bananas, cookies at tea time, dinner of mutton stew and a butterflied pork loin I'd seasoned with salt and brown sugar and spices and rolled up and slow-roasted with olive oil, and asparagus with sea salt and green beans and butter and garlic bread with maple ice cream and marzipan ice cream for dessert).
They did get to dig holes, and learn the basics of staking down hardware, moving sheep pastures and raking up muck and feeding animals at dinner time. They do not precisely care for their ovine overlords, but they were reasonably polite and one of them learned a very hard lesson about not swinging a mattock at a farmer.We include here some cute pictures which indicate a little bit of how our week has been; the highs of the week, as it were. Tomorrow there is more work to be done and no more teenaged labour to exploit, but some of the seedlings are done again (all of what had been done previously except for the Harbinger tomato and the Alpine strawberry, neither of which were available, with the addition of Brandywine and Sweetie tomatoes, both planted to be thinned). More seedlings still need to be planted, but it's a good start, and tomorrow perhaps we'll get our rosebushes planted as well.
So basically a taste of "real work" and an "unreal menu" :) You fed those boys well! When I would go work on my uncle's farm in the summer we did not get meals quite like yours. :)
ReplyDeleteI take it "swinging a mattock at a farmer" meant that he did not think where the head would go if it flew off the handle (as it might). Something like never pointing a loaded firearm.
ReplyDeleteThey might forget the hard work, but I bet they'll remember the food for a long time.
Yes, he swung the mattock to strike the ground, but with a farmer right in front of him. He immediately got a piece of the farmer's mind, and did not repeat the error.
ReplyDeleteAt the end of the day, his parents also got to hear about it, and it turns out that they had given him the exact same warning. Ah well, he will probably not forget soon.