Donna Flemming, 20, enjoys her summer job at Sara’s Garden Center on East Avenue in Brockport. Photograph by Cheryl Dobbertin.

Summer. Things are slow. Plenty of relaxation. Vacation, feet up, iced tea.

Unless, of course, you’re one of the people who works a “seasonal” job like scooping ice cream, serving red hots, or tending other people’s lawns. Then summer’s more like 12-hour days, sweaty, and far-from-relaxing.

You might need to spend your summer evenings watering 70,000 containers of plants, like Kathy Kepler, manager of Sara’s Garden Center in Brockport. Perhaps instead of watching fireflies you’re watching small-fry soccer teams stream into your restaurant clambering for ice cream cones, like Kevin Freitag, manager of Krony’s in Churchville.

If you’re lucky, you might get the iced tea. Otherwise, forget it.

“What’s ironic about how hard I work in the summer is how I used to joke about it,” said Jim Barton, owner of Barton’s Parkside Hots, a portable restaurant that appears on Main Street in Spencerport every May. “I used to say, ‘how hard is it to put a hot dog in a roll and take the money to the bank?’ Boy, was I wrong.”

Once the warm weather comes, the Barton family works 12-hour days, starting at 6 a.m., to prepare and serve more than 100 hot dogs and hamburgers a day from what has become affectionately known as the “weenie wagon.” Family matriarch Carol drives into the city for fresh rolls, comes back and fries up peppers and onions, then prepares a batch of hot sauce. The younger set - Barton’s daughters and son for a while, now his nephews - show up around 10 a.m., load up the cart, and haul it to its daily parking spot. After several hours of serving hungry customers, the cart gets lugged home for clean up. After that, the Bartons might roll out again in the evening for a party, or on a Saturday for a wedding. All of this is on top of Jim and Debbie Barton’s full-time jobs.

Why work so hard when the rest of North America is taking it easy in the sunshine? “We started it to get the kids some money to pay for hockey,” Barton said. “But now it’s because people like it. As soon as the weather turns people start asking, when are the hot dogs coming?”

The simple fact of it is, some businesses wouldn’t survive without employees willing to work hard in the summer. Take, for example, tree and lawn care or ice cream sales.

“Summer for us means the physical part of the job,” said Bob Ottley, owner of One Step Tree and Lawn Care, based in North Chili. “Eighty percent of our employees’ time from mid-March to December is what we call production work - applying fertilizers and pest controls, analyzing how things are going.”

Faith Burdo, 18, of Churchville just started her first summer job scooping ice cream at Krony’s. “I’ve only worked worked here a month,” she said. “I’m not exactly sure how it’s going to be this summer, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to be too busy to notice.”

“We’re crazy in here on summer evenings when the sports teams finish their games,” agreed Faith’s new boss Freitag. “Of course, we like it that way. We’re trying to be a family friendly place.”

That hard work in the summer means that other things have to be put on hold. Folks who work for One Step and businesses like it don’t take summer vacations. “We have a strict policy,” Ottley said. “Vacations happen in the winter months.”

“One year I put the battery in my boat on August 13, went for a ride on August 20, and winterized it a couple of weeks later,” Barton said. “I guess it would be nice to have a summer vacation that was more than a couple of hours long.”

On the up side, summer jobs give high school and college students the opportunity to earn much needed cash and learn job skills before the “real world” sets in, said Donna Fleming, a college student who is in her second season serving customers at Sara’s Garden Center in Brockport. “You learn a lot of people skills, plus compassion for all of the people who work in service jobs,” she said.

“This has already taught me a lot of patience,” added Brynne Samuelson, 18, a Brockport High School student who just started at Sara’s. “I know I will never be rude to anyone at a counter ever again.”

“My kids matured very quickly by spending their summers working with John Q. Public,” agreed Barton. “They got a great sense of how people can be and how they should be in return.”

Summer work also exposes teenagers to work they may never have considered in their career plans. “I have a new found passion for gardening,” Fleming added. “That’s something I never would have had without this job.”