I'm trying to imagine the readers who wouldn't like the Plough and Stars website and blog being operated by two former Boston Globe colleagues whom I barely knew: Erik Jacobs and Dina Rudick. Both are photographers, though that's only the beginning of a serviceable description.

Erik has left the paper to enter a farmer-training program, and he and Dina are documenting the experience on Plough and Stars. Erik, IMO, is doing a great job describing his immersion into the farming life, such as in the recent posting "Farmer Midnight," which he says is 10 p.m., "Ideal bedtime, but never happens. Lights out a 11:20." The comment completes the description of a busy, long day, and is followed by this:

Once the lambs come in April, this schedule will seem lax. On top of everything else, we’ll be working in teams to check on laboring ewes every two hours, day and night, and do our best to assist if things get complicated. This has been the first real brush I’ve had with a schedule dictated entirely by the whims and whimsies of plants and animals. The physical demands of the work have yet to pick up, but the relentlessness of it all makes me panic a little. From now until September, this farm pinball machine will bounce us around from cows to chickens to fields to market until it spits us out on our backs in November. Until then, no weekends. No sick days. At least, not on a real farm. It gives me fresh perspective on why people who were born into farming might run as fast as possible toward a nine-to-five job in the city in the hopes of the occasional Saturday lie-in.

I connect with his comments in two ways. First, I chat occasionally with Jim Wilson, one of the guiding family members at Wilson Farm a couple of miles from my house, which has more acreage under till than any farm in New England, both in Lexington and up in New Hampshire. Several times I've inferred a certain disdain for people who romanticize farming as something less than the relentless backbreaker it can be.

Second, the comments, especially in the specific chore descriptions, lay bare my diletante-ish attitude about gardening, which is decidedly not farming. I have spoken other times about the rewards I reap along with the produce from my own tiny plot and from my community cooperative garden (which begins work for the season about five hours from this writing).

Having reached this point, from total disinterest in anything more than house plants to a fifth year in my garden and a fourth with my coop mates, is a progression, certainly. But I don't do any of it in a systematic way and I don't sweat the small stuff that would certainly boost my harvest. Maybe someday.

Anyway, Erik and Dina: The texts are informative, entertaining, personable. But the absolute bonus is the fact that they're two international-level photographers, and they're producing one stunning photograph of Erik's apprenticeship after another. That's why I began saying it is hard to imagine who wouldn't like this blog, which evokes something of the old Life magazine: Even if you don't want to read along, you'll love to look at the pictures.