On A Farm in France - Potatoes (Series 001, Episode 012)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/. 

Potatoes

 
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One of the main problems that we faced whilst on our working holiday on a farm in France was food.  Our first challenge came on the first night after our hosts had dropped us off at the cottage where we were staying.  Soon after meeting the other two lads, Alex and Julian, who were living and working with us, we got hungry and asked them what there was to eat.  “There’s loads to eat,” said Julian.  “They feed us really well,” added Alex.  This seemed like good news, but the reality was not so good.  “There’s loads to eat” wasn’t altogether a lie, technically there was lots of food but it came in the shape of a huge bag of courgettes and potatoes, nothing else, no herbs, no spices, no ‘store cupboard ingredients’, but although it wasn’t going to be delicious, at least we weren’t going to go hungry. 

Alex and Julian weren’t very helpful in coming up with ideas of how to cook an edible meal so we decided to just slice everything up and fry it.  They weren’t very helpful when it came to cutting up the food either; in fact we worked out quite soon that they weren’t very helpful at all.  There was also very little in the way of cooking equipment.  Alex found us a saucepan to cook everything in, but it was tiny, and the food (enough for 4 hungry adults) couldn’t all fit inside.  The small size of the pan was matched by the small size of the flames from our gas hob and, if it were indeed possible to cook potatoes with this set-up, the earliest we would be eating would be breakfast time.

We searched our little kitchen for a frying-pan but there was nothing.  What we did find was an enormous old metal watering can that, after a quick clean, did the job of a frying-pan perfectly well, even if it didn’t really look the part.  The potatoes didn’t take too long to fry up in our make-shift pan, and although our meal was boring, we were at least fed.

We were quite proud of our frontier style innovation, but I wasn’t keen on eating the same thing every day, so I wondered what food Alex and Julian usually ate and I worked out that they must eat something other than potatoes, because whatever they ate must be something they could cook in their tiny pan but I couldn’t work out what it might have been. 

“So when you have more food, what sort of things do you cook?”  I asked.  

“Just simple, seasonal things really, but we’ve not had any food deliveries for nearly a week, so recently we’ve mostly just been eating potatoes and courgettes,” said Julian.  

“How have you been cooking the potatoes?” I asked.

“Just in that little pan,” said Alex.  “Until you found that watering can, it was all we had.”

“How did you manage to cook them properly?”  I asked.  “It must be nearly impossible in that tiny pan.”

“Yes we think it’s impossible,” said Julian, “in fact, this is the first time that we’ve not had to eat our potatoes raw.”

Alex and Julian had been eating raw potatoes the whole time that they had been at the farm, and for the last week they had been eating raw potatoes every day.  The next day we called our hosts and asked if they could lend us some pots and pans, and send us up some food.  They apologised about the food, but this actually wasn’t their fault.  Apparently, when Alex and Julian ran out of food, Alex was supposed to call our hosts to tell them, and then they would deliver more food the next day, but Alex hadn’t phoned, and our hosts had therefore assumed that there was enough food.  Our hosts also explained that they owned another holiday cottage next door to ours that had a fully stocked kitchen and that we were welcome to use it.  

Alex and Julian, it appeared, had known about this other kitchen the whole time.  We found it hard to believe that anyone would eat raw potatoes if there was another option, we suspected at first that they did it because they were too lazy to go next door and cook them properly, and this wasn’t far from the truth.  In fact, there was an elderly neighbour who lived between the two holiday cottages, who would often see them walked between them, and ask them to do something for her, like chop some wood or fix something or move something heavy, and, because they were lazy, Alex and Julian preferred to eat raw potatoes then help this lovely old lady with her chores.

On A Farm in France - Coffee (Series 001, Episode 011)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/. 

Coffee

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Whilst my girlfriend and I were on our working holiday on a farm in France, one of our jobs was to turn fruit into jam.  On our first day of jam making, we were told that we would start work at nine o’ clock in the morning, but when we arrived at the workshop on the dot of nine, it was closed.

We waited for half an hour, then went into town to see if we could find Colette, who was the mother of our host-family, and therefore our boss.  We found her in town doing the grocery shopping.  We asked if we could help but she said she was ok, and that we could go back and wait for her at the workshop.  She said she would be down shortly to show us what work we had to do.  She gave us a key and told us to let ourselves into the kitchen above the workshop and have a coffee while we waited.

We were back at the workshop at about ten o’ clock.  We made coffee and sat down to drink it but Colette still hadn’t returned by the time we’d finished, so we went into the workshop to see if we could work out what we had to do.  There were no fruits to do anything with, and there was nothing else obvious to do, so we had another cup of coffee.  We don’t drink much coffee (we much prefer tea), and the caffeine was already making us feel very alert.  At eleven, our boss finally arrived.  We asked what she wanted us to do.  “First things first,” she said, “I need a coffee.” 

After coffee, we went into the workshop but before we could start work there was a knock at the door.  It was one of our hosts’ English neighbours.  She was eager to meet other English people and although we said we were happy to work now and chat later, Colette wouldn’t hear of it, and so we went back upstairs for a coffee and a chat with the neighbour.

The neighbour left after a while and we went back downstairs to the workshop, eager to get to work because we were buzzing from all the coffee, but our boss was on her way back up, and she told us not to start work as it was half past twelve and time for lunch.

After lunch, and yet another coffee, we went back to the workshop but when we got there we realised that the fruit hadn’t been delivered, so we couldn’t start doing our work and so Colette asked us to drive to the farm that they were buying the fruit from, and pick it up for her.  We arrived at about two thirty but there was no-one there so we waited for a while and then decided to go back.  As we were leaving we met the farmer, who told us he’d just delivered the fruit and was sorry for the delay.  He also told us that one of our boss’ children had banged his head at school, and so our boss had taken him to see a doctor.  There wasn’t much point in going back as we didn’t know what to do with the fruits, so when the farmer suggested we have a cup of coffee with him, we said yes.

Feeling quite jittery and hyperactive after all the caffeine, we made our way back to the workshop and got in just as Colette was returning from the doctor’s with her child.  Before we started work, she insisted that we have a quick coffee to calm her nerves as she was understandably worried about her child, even though he was fine.  At about half past three, I went into the workshop, found the fruits and started washing them ready for peeling them.  My girlfriend was looking after Colette’s son whilst Colette went to pick her other kids up from school.  As she was leaving she had a phone-call from her husband, Vincent, who had run out of petrol on the way back from a farmers’ market, and needed her to bring him some fuel.  She couldn’t do this and get the children from school, so she asked me to pick them up for her. 

I collected the kids from school, and when I got back their mum still hadn’t returned, so we gave the kids something to eat and kept them busy.  When Colette arrived, she insisted that we have another coffee and when we went back downstairs to wash and peel the fruit, the caffeine was making us feel very nauseous. Just as we were starting work, Vincent came in and seeing us working looked at his watch and said that it was five o’ clock, and that we should stop work.  When we protested he said that we weren’t legally allowed to work more than a 9 to 5 and that he didn’t want us working anyway because we were both sick, pale and shaky and looked like we were about to faint.  “You’ve worked way too hard today,” he said, “tell you what, come upstairs and I’ll make you a nice cup of coffee.”

On A Farm in France - Raspberries (Series 001, Episode 010)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/. 


Raspberries



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“Raspberries are our most important fruit.  Without a good raspberry harvest, we could go bankrupt.” I remember our boss, Vincent, telling us this as we were about to start our first day of work on our working holiday on a farm in France.


“Your first job,” he told us, pointing to one of the two fields full of raspberry plants, “is to cut all the raspberry canes in this field down to ground level, new canes will grow from the plant, and they produce more fruit than if I just left the old canes to fruit again.”

We did as we were told, and at the end of the day, as we were finishing cutting the raspberries canes in the field, Vincent came over to see how we had done.  Whilst we were chatting he suddenly slapped his hand against his forehead.  “I don’t believe it,” he said, shaking his head, “I’ve made a mistake, I made you cut all the raspberry canes down, but these raspberries only produce fruit when the canes have been growing for a year, I should have made you leave the older canes, because we won’t get any fruit from the new canes this year.”

“There are loads of plants that have grown wild next to the field, we’ve not cut them down at all, could you just transplant those?”  I asked.

“Yes, we could transplant them into this field,” said Vincent, looked relieved, “I think there are enough, it’s just a shame you’ve wasted all your time.  We’ll start work on that tomorrow morning.  Lets go in for dinner now, and a well earned glass of cider.” 

The next day we transplanted the raspberries that had grown wild into his field.  We had finished by lunchtime and Vincent was pleased with our work.  The day after that we were working on the second raspberry field.  Our job was to transplant raspberry plants from where they were too close together to places where there were large gaps in the rows.  At lunchtime, Vincent came down to see us.

He told us that all the plants that we replanted yesterday had died.  “I meant to water them yesterday,” he explained, “but I completely forgot about them after all those ciders.  I went to water them just now but they’d all wilted, I don’t think any will survive.  Unless some more magically appear from somewhere, it doesn’t look like we’ll have many raspberries this year.”

Vincent did seem to be learning from his mistakes though.  “This time,” he told us, “I’ll set up a sprinkler system for the rows that you’ve been doing this morning so they’ll definitely have enough water.”

We weren’t working that afternoon, or the next morning, so we spent the night camping in the mountains, and we didn’t get back to the farm until the afternoon on the next day.  The first thing we did was go to see how the raspberries we’d replanted had done.

As we half expected, they were all dead.  We went to tell Vincent, who was fixing the gate at the entrance to the farm.  “Oh no, not again.” he cried.  “Yesterday I disconnected the hose for the sprinkler system so that I could water the plants in the greenhouse.  I must have forgotten to reconnect it.  What am I going to do?  Unless some more magically appear from somewhere, we’re hardly going to have any raspberries this year, or next year.  We’re going to be ruined.  My wife’s going to kill me.”

“Hello,”  someone shouted.  We all looked round to see that Vincent’s neighbour, who was also a farmer, was calling him from the drive.  “I’ve finally got around to neatening up my fields, I’ve spent all day pulling up plants.  I started a fire and was just going to burn them when I thought that you might want them.”

“What plants do you have?” asked Vincent.

“There are apple trees, rhubarb plants, and blackberry bushes if you want them,” Vincent's neighbour replied.

“I’ll come and have a look, we can probably use some of them.” Vincent didn’t seem too interested.  He was obviously more worried about his failed raspberry crop.

“Help me take those bags down to the fire, and then I’ll show you what plants I have.” said Vincent’s neighbour pointing to a dozen large white sacks sitting at the end of Vincent’s drive.  We all went over to help him with the sacks.  “It’s a shame that we have to burn these, but I just don’t have room for them and I know you have hundreds already. 

“What are they?” I asked.

“Raspberries of course, the fields were a mess, I had to pull up hundreds of them, all varieties and all ages, I just don’t have room to keep them.”

Vincent spoke slowly.  He looked like he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or not.  “It is a shame to waste them,” he said “maybe you could leave them with me.  I can probably think of one or two places where I could grow them.” 

Click above to listen.  You can get the .mp4 here, and the .mp3 here (opens in new window).

On A Farm in France - Jam (Series 001, Episode 009)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/. 

Jam

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Julian was a Polish guy who worked with us during our holiday on a farm in France.  He was completely hyperactive and capricious, and he often acted more like a naughty child than an adult.  This was often annoying, but it was hard to stay angry at Julian, whatever he may have done, because he was a lot of fun and a really nice guy.  At first we thought that he was not very bright, but he was actually a fantastic artist, and was brilliant at logic problems and was the only one amongst us who was able to complete the Rubik’s Cube that we found in the cottage where we stayed.

The first thing that struck us as strange about Julian was that he always walked around with a spoon in his hand.  The second thing that we found strange was the amount, and how often, he ate, especially considering that he was in good physical shape and was, in fact, incredibly strong.  Not only would he eat more than everyone else at mealtime, he would also eat huge amounts throughout the day.

Julian wasn’t very good at cooking, and so would instead eat anything that we left lying around, even if we specifically told him not to eat it, so we had to hide everything that we didn’t want him to eat.  If we made bread for breakfast the night before, it would be gone by the morning.  If we turned away from food we were making, even just for a second, there would be less of it when we looked back.  In fact we sometimes had to physically restrain him to stop him eating our food, and because he was so strong, sometimes we couldn’t, and so we just had to watch him eat it.

When we finally started hiding our food, so that there was none lying around for him to eat, Julian was forced to cook.  The only thing he knew how to cook was pancakes, but he would make them whenever he had a spare minute, even getting up in the night to cook them.  For the first 2 days, he ate the pancakes with a small amount of jam.  When we first arrived on the farm our hosts had generously given us 30 jars of home-made jam.  After a while though Julian just ate his pancakes with nothing on them.  We presumed he must have got bored of eating jam all the time.   

On the third day of our stay at the farm I decided to make a dessert.  There were only enough ingredients to make something simple, but as I’d found a jar of chocolate spread at the back of the fridge, I decided to make tarts. I made the pastry for the tarts with no problems and I was going to fill some of the pastry cases with the chocolate spread and make the other pastry cases into jam tarts.  When I searched in the cupboard for the jam, however, I found that it had all gone and all that was left were empty jars.

I thought immediately that Julian must have eaten it all on his pancakes, but then realised that there was no way he could have eaten 30 jars in 2 days like that, because he only ever put a small amount of jam on his pancakes.

“Do you know where all the jam has gone?” I asked Julian, turning to face him.  “No” he answered, but he said it in a strange way, and with a guilty expression on his face.  He was holding something behind his back, and then I noticed he had chocolate spread on the side of his mouth.  I looked behind him and he was indeed holding the jar of chocolate spread, which, apart from a spoon sticking out of the top, was now empty. 

The idea that someone could eat chocolate spread with a spoon, directly from the jar, made me smile at first but I quickly stopped laughing and instead looked at Julian in amazement as I realised why he carried a spoon around with him all the time, and why there was no jam left.  He had been using his spoon to eat the jam, directly from the jar, and had managed to eat 30 jars of jam, in just 2 days.  It’s no wonder he was hyperactive!

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On A Farm in France - Marshmallows (Series 001, Episode 008)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/. 

Marshmallows

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I can’t believe they stole your marshmallows.  Thank you for telling me, they’re in bed now but I’ll tell them off tomorrow, and they won’t be having sweets for a while.  They’re good children usually, I’m surprised at them, stealing from a guest.  It’s not as bad as it could have been though, they managed to connect up the hosepipe and soak our last guests with water, and earlier this year we had to evacuate some guests from the holiday cottage because the children found some matches and set fire to the garden. 

I’ll tell them off this time, they need to know that they aren’t allowed to behave badly, although I generally don’t like to be too hard on them, they need to be able to have fun, and anyway, boys will be boys, after all.  In fact we don’t really believe in disciplining our children, we don’t think telling them off stops them from being naughty, and when we do they get upset, and it can’t be good for them to be that sad, so we forgive them very quickly, they don’t often do anything really naughty anyway.  I didn’t realise they liked marshmallows so much though.  Maybe I will buy them a packet or two when I go shopping tomorrow.

I’m glad it was food they stole, I think its important for growing children to eat lots so that they grow up to be strong and healthy.  Maybe I won’t tell them off too much, I don’t want to put them off eating.  I’m quite proud of them really, finding the sweets on such a high shelf, and then getting a chair so they could reach them.  They’re only young and that involves quite a lot of coordination, its good to see them using their brains. 

Some of the teachers at the school think they’re a little behind the other children because they don’t perform well in tests, but this goes to show that they’re quite clever really.  The problem is they don’t go to school too often, they prefer to stay at home, and it’s difficult and tiring to make them do things that they don’t want to do, so its easier to let them stay at home. I don’t want to force them to do something they don’t want to do either, I want them to enjoy themselves. 

I try to educate them at home, but that’s difficult too, they aren’t really interested in learning and they can be disobedient, so I usually just let them play.  I work from home, so I am able to look after the kids at home instead of sending them to school, only it’s difficult to work at the same time, so I end up not getting much work done, which means we have less money, but I think its more important for the kids to be happy.

They also miss a lot of school through injuries and illness.  They’re always getting hurt playing around in dangerous places and banging into things.  I try to make them be more careful but you know what boys are like, and I don’t like to stop them having fun.  They’re ill quite often too.  I worry about their health, so I make sure I give them a lot of natural food but it’s not enough. I try to treat them with herbal remedies, I don’t really trust what the doctors say, they just do what the big companies tell them, and all these medicines are made from plants, so I think it’s best to just use the plants and herbs and simple household remedies.  If they get stomach upsets I give them bicarbonate of soda, for instance, which can also be used for wounds and burns.  I use it in small amounts to treat insect bites, and I think you can use it to treat snakebites too, although I imagine you’d have to use a larger amount. 

It’s quite good that they get ill though because it boosts their immune system.  A lot of people get their children inoculated, but we don’t really believe in that, neither do many people in this village, its better if they get used to diseases naturally, and the more they get ill, the stronger their immune systems will be.  That’s why I was so surprised when they got measles.  There was an epidemic in the village recently and almost 100 children were ill. 

One of my boys was very ill and had to be moved to the big hospital in the city and he was there for several weeks.  It was the doctor’s fault, they didn’t think it was measles, despite the fact that all the other children in the village had measles.  The doctors said it was my fault for not getting the children inoculated, but I explained that I don’t believe in inoculations, and rarely give them medicine, so they should be very healthy and you know what?  They accused me of being a bad mother.  Can you believe that?

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On A Farm in France - Chopping Wood (Series 001, Episode 007)

'Hear English' is a blog that provides podcasts and transcripts to help people learn English, find us at http://hearenglishhere.blogspot.com/. 

Chopping Wood

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On our first night staying in the cottage, whilst on a working holiday on a farm in France, we were shown where everything was by a guy called Alex.  He said he had been working on the farm for 6 months, knew how everything worked and that if we had any questions or needed any help, we could ask him.

I found it cold at night-time in the mountains, so I asked if there was any heating.  Alex showed me a wood-burning stove and explained that he didn’t use it often and warned that it had a fault which made it hard to light.  I decided that I would light it, both for warmth, and for toasting marshmallows on.  Our hosts had provided us with lots of wood in the woodshed, but we had to chop it up to use it in the stove.  Alex said he would come to the shed and show me how to cut up the wood.  I said not to bother, because I knew how, but he insisted, saying that it was quite difficult and that he would show me the best way.

On the way to the shed, Alex showed me around the farm, and told me about our other chores, such as watering the plants in the greenhouse and feeding the chickens, and showed me the most efficient way to do these tasks.  I had the feeling that he knew how to do his job really well and that I could learn a lot from him and I looked forward to working with him on the farm.

The woodshed was hardly a shed at all, one of the walls had fallen down, and the roof was full of holes.  I wondered how the wood stayed dry.  When we got inside, Alex said that there was an art to chopping logs, and that you had to do it in the correct way, otherwise it could take ages to do a job that should only take a minute or two, and it could be dangerous.  I had thought chopping wood was simple, you just hit it with an axe, and it fell into 2 pieces, so I wondered what special trick he had for making it easier.  Alex explained that you had to hit the log right in the centre to split the log, otherwise the axe would get stuck.  I didn’t understand, because I had never had this problem before. 

With that, he picked up his axe and brought it down on the log, but he was right, the log didn’t split, and then I understood why.  He wasn’t actually using an axe, he was using a pickaxe, and the point was of course just making a hole in the log, instead of splitting it in two. 

Once I had finished laughing, I found a real axe, which was much more efficient, and soon we had a large pile of wood which we took back to the house and used to try and make our fire.  Alex was right though, it was very difficult to light the fire in the stove, and it took several attempts to get it going, but the stove wasn’t faulty, the problem was that all the wood was soaking wet, the woodshed, as I’d feared, actually didn’t keep the wood dry at all.

I asked Alex if he had been chopping wood with a pickaxe, and using wet wood every time that he wanted a fire and he admitted that he didn’t light the stove often because it took so long to chop up the wood, and because he had difficulty lighting the stove, and that all winter he had been freezing cold.

My first impression, that I could learn a lot from Alex, was very wrong, it seemed.



Click above to listen.  You can get the .mp4 here, and the .mp3 here (opens in new window).