Since the beginning of June, I’ve been working on a farm 60 km southwest of Parma. Most of our efforts go into growing fruits, vegetables, and herbs but we also run a bed & breakfast, keep bees, and even have a couple horses and a very talkative donkey named Elio. We recently fenced off some land and even put up a house for a few pigs, but their arrival keeps getting delayed. Right now I think we’re on week 3 of , “They should be here in ten days.”
My hosts, Angelo and Simona bought the farm a little over a year ago, after having worked ten years on another farm a few kilometers away. We’re still getting many of the very basic operations up and running, and a cold winter followed by a rainy spring have put us even further behind. When I first arrived there were very few plants in the ground, and our largest field didn’t even have irrigation lines. My first couple of weeks were mostly spent planting, fertilizing, and mulching. All the planting has really helped to familiarize me with everything that we grow. Since we refer to each plant in Italian, there are a couple of herbs and vegetables that I’m still not sure I could match to an english name.
That brings up another topic, language. If you ask them, Simona and Angelo will tell you they don’t speak any English. What they actually mean by this is that they speak English better than I could ever hope to speak Italian. Still, this doesn’t mean communication is always smooth, or even always possible. It takes a back and forth hodge podge of broken english and italian to communicate anything aside from very basic sentences. If Simona weren’ so good at pantomime, sometimes i think we’d be completely lost. Despite this, I think we understand each other and we get along very well. They have many friends who are around all time, many of whom I’ve gotten to know very well. Between these friends, the guests at the B&B, and half a dozen or so trips off the farm, I’ve met quite a lot of people considering how otherwise isolated I’ve been.
Most days I get up a little before eight, and have a small breakfast. Tea, toast with jam that Simona makes, andsometimes a cup of yogurt. Afterwards I go out to cut hay for the horses, and work on my main project for the day. At first this was planting, but for the past few weeks, I’ve been weeding, working on the new greenhouse, staking tomatoes, and cleaning up some of the overgrowth with good old fashioned industrial weedwacker. I tyically work with my friend Francesco. He is about 60, speaks no English but but has a great sense of humor and would have made a great silent era comedian. Yesterday he unbuttoned his flannel with a smile to reveal a SEx Pistols t-shirt. At around noon Francesco and I stop and lay out in the shade for a while before Simona calls us for pranzo (lunch). Pranzo often has several courses and for the first couple weeks, I kept eating until I was full only to have another course come out. There’s usually some sort of pasta, salad or plate of salame and cheese, and often another course of meat after that. I plan on doing an entire post on food soon,where I can try to do more justice to Simona’s excellent cooking. After lunch we break until 4, since the sun makes it too hot to work. At 4 I cut more hay for the horses and then start working on some smaller project, either planting a couple lines or picking strawberries or cherries. By 6 o’clock I’m done and have more down time until dinner. We usually sit down to eat a little after 8, and rarely get up before 9:30. Most nights dinner consists of the full italian menu, antipasta, primo, secondo, and dolce. I’m still getting used to 3 course meals, and Angelo worries that I don’t eat enough. If I’m not careful he’ll slap half a pound of cheese on my plate and say, “You work hard, you are hungry, manga!”
By the time dinner’s over it’s dark and i’ll head off to my trailer to read a little bit and go to sleep. For the first week my trailer didn’t have electricity and I was out with the sun. Now I’ll stay up and read for a little while, before going to sleep in order to get up early again the next day.
Oh, hurrah. I LOVE the food descriptions. Do you feel like you’re dreaming in Italian yet?