Fun

A friend of mine wrote this to me the other day:

Do you guys ever get tired? you and the gang there seem to have endless energy? You must feel great at the end of each and every day.

Good questions, and I'm here to tell you that the answers are: yes, not even close, sometimes.

Personally I've found myself with so much more energy now that I've had a chance to adjust to the work and the routine and, most importantly I think, over the past three weeks I've been keeping a fairly strict schedule of waking up and going to bed. During the day I usually find myself with enough pep to start or carry on any task, but I regularly feel a bit sluggish after we take breaks. Maybe that's because we're usually cramming food in whenever we stop working so I'm sharing resources with my digestive system.

By the end of the day, and especially if it has been hot like it has been this past week and a bit, it feels really great to call it a day. I don't necessarily feel great but more often just satisfied with what we've been able to accomplish. My ride home is a lot slower than my ride in, and I end up getting caught up in thoughts about the traffic and the people I see rather than just motoring home. But anyhow, I'm usually not so totally drained that I don't have the energy to go for a short run or something. But this is now; for the first month and a bit I was pretty wiped out after a day and I could only really think of sleeping or reading.

Anyhow, what have we been up to? Well, today was a massive harvest day. We harvested: kohlrabi, radish, turnip, broccoli (!), cabbage, lettuce, lettuce mix, beet greens, pac choi, cilantro, dill, green onions, and snap peas. This took us the entire day. Half of it was spent harvesting the 110 pounds of snap peas. It's amazing what has come up though -- it seems like just last week that everything was still a little seedling.

Yesterday we transplanted thirteen beds of fall brassica and covered them with floating row cover (that took all morning). In the afternoon we harvested garlic scapes from most of the garlic patch. That's a bit of a grueling job. It involves bending over just slightly so that you can reach the scapes (which are about knee high) and picking as fast as you can. My back held up okay, but several other people found it extremely harsh and eventually picked on their knees.

(I figure we really need some sort of device that will bring our hands and face close to the ground without having to support ourselves with our backs and legs. I imagine some sort of rolling massage table with peddles that you would lay down on so that you could reach the crop easily while being supported, and then peddle to move forward. If I have a spare afternoon I'm going to try building it.)