https://sites.google.com/site/prayersofreconciliation/,https://sites.google.com/site/godintheuniverse/,
https://sites.google.com/site/menfrancoreconciliation/, www.catholic.org/,www.catholic.org.au/, www.catholic.org/bible/, www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html,
http://diybrickwork.com, http://manneedsgod.co.uk, http://frankmenchise.com
My farm life story continues
Welcome to blog article, my farm life continues
Dear readers, in one of my last articles I was telling you, how I have felt during my life, when I was living in the farm; I wrote an entire article to explain my personal negative situation, with the intention of turning those negative events of my life into a positive way of thinking; I believe that because I have done that I feel better now, and I hope that one day I can ignore that painful part of my life.
Now that I have done that, let me tell you about my farm life when I was young, in a different way. Therefore, now let me review what I have done during my life, starting from my first job in the farm. Anyhow, I am writing my life story, in a language that is not my native language, which happen to be Italian, but I am writing my life story in the English language, which I had to learn as a grown up, because I migrated to Australia.
Anyhow, I feel that I am one of the few people left in the world that is willing to tell you the story of my life. I want to tell you how the world was when I was young, and what we did, so that a record can be kept even if it is going to be a simple record of my life, and some of the things that I experienced then. What I want to say is that everything is changing these days, but people don’t take the time to record those changes that occur, for this reason the old ways of life will soon be lost forever, because nobody is writing about it. But I believe that it is good to know how we used to live in the past, perhaps to compare the past with the present ways of living. Speaking for myself, I can easily compare the ways of life that I have lived, to the ways of life that my forbears were telling me about themselves, and then to the ways of life that we are living today.
Here I must say that the way of life is changing more quickly all the time, hopefully for better times to come. Anyhow, I believe that overall our standard of life is improving, as I have pointed out in our article called, Farming today compared to the old way, where we are trying to show you the great difference, how we lived then, and how hard it was to earn a living, compared to today ways of living, it is worth reading it if you want to understand the great difference, between today farming and the past.
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My first job on the farm
Dear readers, I started to work in the farm at the tender age of eleven. But do not feel sorry for me for having lived my early life in the farm, because in those times it was the normal way of life that farming people used to live; anyhow, I was working in our family farm and not in a stranger farm, where people can be mean to you, so, it was not as bad as it sounds. For comparison sake I want to point out that even today there are people that are worse off than I was then; you see, in the poor countries even today they not only start to work early in life, with a boss that pushes them to do more; but they also go hungry and thirsty.
When I went to work in our small family farm in Southern Italy, I was going to turn eleven that year and the first job that I did was looking after a small flock of sheep, which included also a ram and a couple of goats; I had to do that job because the lad that my family had hired to look after the sheep left us suddenly, so, I had to replace him for a few months until we were able to sell the small flock of sheep. It was a boring job to take the sheep out of the sheep-pen and into the fields to graze twice a day, I had to mind them that they would not graze in fields that didn’t belong to us, or fields which there was a crop still growing, I had to water them by driving them to a small creek also. I had to take them out early in the morning and then in the afternoon for a few hours each time, because this is how the sheep are grazed over there in summer times. Then when the town’s Fair was held we sold our small herd of sheep, we had to sell them because it would cost us more to hire a youth to look after them, than what we could earn from keeping them. Anyhow even though we sold our sheep I had to continue to stay in the farm to look after other farm animals.
Now to tell you what we did in the farms of those days, so, you can have a better idea, what sort of life I had to live in the farm when I was young. So, let me tell you about a day in wintertime, when all the main works of sowing had been done, and we were resting and waiting for better weather and longer days.
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Winter days in the farm
This is how life was in the farms of Southern Italy in the early fifties; in the morning we would get up early before dawn, as the days are short in winter, they are about 8 to 9 hours of sun light; so, as soon as we got up we start doing our chores, we would start by feeding the horses and other farms animals, and at the same time we had to clean the stables, virtually we collected all the manure that the horses and the other stable animals had made during the night, we loaded it on a strange devise like a field stretcher made of timber and wire, and then two of us would lift it and carry it to the manure heap, which was outside about 20 meters or so away from the building, at the same time we would be grooming the horses with a hand brush, and at the same time we would continue to feed the horses and other farm animals, such as cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals with fresh serving of straw, oats, hay, grain, and whatever else was needed according to the animal’s needs, and sometimes according to the tusks that those animals were supposed to do during the day, because if the horses were going to do some work, we would give them more oats than normally did, when they would be staying in the stable the entire day.
Once we had finished grooming the horses and cleaning all manure from the stable, the chicken coop, the pig stay, sweep the floors and everywhere else; then one of us would go to the well with a couple of buckets or other containers, so, we could bring some clean fresh water for the small animals to drink, and also for ourselves to drink and to wash our hands and face, and everyday even if it was very cold we used to wash our hands and face outside the building: at any other time, when we got our hands dirty, we had to find a way how to clean ourselves with anything available around us; I know that for anybody that is used to tap water sounds terrible, but it was not that bad because in winter time there are several small creeks around the fields, where you could wash your hands.
Anyhow, by the time we had done all these chores, it would be time for the horse and the cows to be taken to the well to water them, (the horses and other large animals were watered only twice a day in wintertime) here, we had to stand on the well head to draw water with a bucket attached to a rope, we had to let the bucket down the well, and then with a flick of the rope we would make the bucket turn upside-down to fill itself, and then we pulled the bucket up the well and empty it into the trough; we had to draw as many buckets of water as they were needed until all the animals would stop drinking. Today when I think about it, it was a hard and dangerous job for a youth of my age, but because it was normal to do it, we never thought that it was dangerous.
After we had done all those chores, it was time to eat something, so, we would sit down on some wooden stools that most time we had made ourselves in our spare time. Breakfast was usually brought in from town, from one of us or one of our neighbors, there was always somebody on horseback that would go to town the evening before, and then bring prepared food in the morning. Breakfast would usually consist of a few fried dry capsicums and a few olives, and at the best one or two small pieces of sausage, or something similar which my mother would have fried in the early hours of that morning, and then placed it in a saucepan with a few drops of fried oil at the bottom, we set around a larger wooden stool which acted like a table, and with a slice of bread in one hand and a fork or knife in the other hand, we would eat our small share of breakfast from the saucepan with as much bread as possible, as there was plenty of bread of very good nutritional quality, but not much of anything else. At lunch or dinner time we would have something similar to eat, as we did at breakfast, and in the evenings, we had to do our own cooking, so, I am going to describe here how we used to prepare a warm quick and simple meal, by using stale bread.
How to prepare cooked bread
How we prepared a quick meal called (panecotto) cooked bread
This can sound strange to you, that we prepared a meal of cooked bread, but in the farms we did; it was called with the Italian farmer’s name “panecotto” anyhow, let us talk about this quick meal called panecotto that we used to prepare in the farms most days.
We know that when it is cold, we need to eat at least one good warm filling meal every day, to stay healthy and strong, especially if we have worked during the day, so, in the evening we had a large warm meal that we had to cook ourselves, sometimes we would cook pasta which could be bought from the shop or homemade pasta, but usually we made a quick meal called ‘panecotto’ which was easy to prepare, because it is just cooked bread.
To prepare this ‘panecotto’ all that was needed was a fire, which we had going in the farm chimney, or we would light one easily to keep us warm and to cook, you see in the farms to light a fire is very easy, because there is so much dry straws around in the mangers of the horse or other farm animals; so, all we had to do is grab a bundle of this straws put it in the chimney and light it with a match, then we could add wood to it and you have a fire going. Anyhow, to cook this meal called ’panecotto’ we had to make this fire more lively to boil some water, sometimes we would add to this boiling water some vegetable, since they were available in the farm, or some slices of potatoes, since we would grow our own in the farm, at least for our own family needs; then when these vegetables or potatoes were nearly cooked, we would throw in this boiling water as many slice of durum wheat bread as required, and in a minute or so we would drain the water out of the saucepan; now let me tell you, this sort of panecotto works well if you use bread made from durum wheat, because the durum wheat is like the past, you see the best pasta is made from durum wheat, anyhow, over there in those times we did not need to look for durum wheat bread, because all the bread that we were eating in the farm was made from durum wheat; anyhow, once we had this durum wheat bread in the saucepan on a lively fire, in a minute or so we would drain all the water out of the saucepan, at the same time while we were cooking the bread, we would fry a small amount of olive oil in a fry-pan with garlic and pepper or tomatoes and when this was ready we would pour it on the cooked drained bread, or cooked bread and vegetable and that was all that was required, at this stage the ‘panecotto’ would be ready to be eaten, usually from a large plate and sometimes even from the saucepan itself, depending on how well we were organized in the farm, and how many people had to eat this meal.
Some farm work in winter time
Anyhow, now let me go back in the morning, after we had breakfast, weather permitting we did some minor jobs outside, like hoeing in the kitchen garden, which was about half an acre of land, or working in the vineyard, or going out to cut and collect firewood for ourselves, and for our families in town, since they depended on us for their wood supply, in order to cook their meals including our meals and keep themselves warm, because in the town in those times there was nothing to burn, it all had to come from the country, so, we had to supply the wood to them to keep warm and prepare meals for themselves and us. It worked out all right both ways; anyhow let me go back to tell the farm work that we did.
During the day we would feed the animals every now and then and bring in the stable new straw and hay for the following night. This is how life in the farm was in winter times, when the days were short and the weather was cold and wet.
But when the days became longer and the weather was fine, there was work to be done in the fields even if it was winter. We would have to get up earlier then, to feed the horses and get them ready for the tasks that they had to do: it could be that we had to Plough a field or something similar, but to do that we had to harness the horses and attach them with their harnesses to the appropriate devices; all this had to be done early in the morning even if it was very cold, so that some work could be done during the short winter days in the fields. We had to start early also for safety reasons, you see, we wanted to be back to the farm house well before sunset, it was safer that way.
Apart what I have said above, there were also other chores which had to be done in the farm in wintertime, like pruning and hoeing the vineyard, planting trees, pruning fruit and olives trees, cutting and collecting wood, and other small jobs, so, everyday there was always plenty to do.
But even though in wintertime we were busy in the farm, wintertime was very dreadful and sad especially for young people, because we were more isolated than at any other time of the year, so, we were happy to see springtime coming. In our next article we will talk about, springtime in the farms and what happens there.
See you soon.
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