Ruffled Feathers and Spilled Milk

Farming with ducks and dairy goats, chickens and children.

Work Out.

Posted on | September 15, 2014 | 2 Comments

I see what you’re doing there.  Posting your daily workout so you can keep track of your progress, make everyone else feel fat and lazy, and encourage and inspire the rest of us.

That’s sweet.  I appreciate it.

Thank you.

I’d like to participate in this new fitness trend but my daily workout usually consists of walking on the treadmill at the gym in order to get a glimpse of satellite television for 30 minutes.   I don’t have a “leg day” or “chest & back day” as much as I have “Celebrity News on E! day” and “Alaska: The Last Frontier day.”  Which is more entertaining and doesn’t have all the horrible side effects.

But then I realized I do have some workouts that are crippling.  Which is apparently encouraging and inspiring.  For example, today I started with toe touches.  Otherwise known as removing all the broccoli, brussels sprouts, collards, kale, cabbage, and lettuce transplants from their 6 pack planting containers.

Then I moved on to 8 million squats.  Or however many were required to put in those transplants plus seed additional rows of those crops as well as spinach, swiss chard, mesclun, and beets.  I stopped counting after 45.  Because once you hit 45 and there’s still an entire row of blank soil ahead of you, it’s better to just think about something else.

To break things up a little bit, I did several wind sprints.  This is also known as chasing the chickens out of the garden.  I forgot to close the garden gate and nothing attracts hens faster than digging in the soil and putting in tiny fresh greens.  Hens can hear the soil being turned from a mile away and spot a newly sprouted seed as soon as they exit the coop at first light.

Now you might consider wind sprints a simple exercise.  Just up the intensity of your exercise—-go faster or increase resistance in short bursts.  I suppose you can do that if you want to take the easy way out.  Chicken wind sprints involve walking casually towards the chicken, while studiously looking in the opposite direction.  Under no circumstances do you want to make eye contact with the hen.  When you’re within 6 feet, make your dash!  Continue at top speed, zig zagging with the chicken around the garden, jumping over newly planted rows, swerving around garden stakes until said chicken panics enough to corner herself against the fence.  Then grab her by the leg and hoist her over the fence.  Repeat with remaining chickens or until you’re so winded that it feels like someone is stabbing you in the chest when you breathe.

Once I was able to breathe pain-free, I resumed my planting.  The next step involved lunges.  Front lunges, lateral lunges, lunge and twist, curtsy lunge.  All in the name of reaching the opposite side of the row.  Smart gardeners make their garden rows narrow enough that the entire row can be reached comfortably from one side.  Failing that, a gardener could always plant one side of the row, then walk around and plant from the other side.  But if you’re the kind of gardener who makes the row too wide and is too anal to plant 1/2 the row at a time (That messes up the symmetry, people.  Sometimes you end up with only 2 plants in a row instead of 4 by doing it that way.  OMG.  Only 2 when every other row has 4!!!) then lunges it is.

With the plants and seeds in the ground I moved on to bent over rows.  This is the process where I work my way over the rows, picking up large dirt clumps or rocks and old plant markers that were exposed by the planting and tossing them out of the way.

Then a quick cardio break when Good Vibrations came on the radio.  Because you can’t not dance to that song  And Marky Mark was much more enjoyable when he didn’t take himself so seriously.

Some kettlebell dead lifts hauling the piles of debris even the goats found too stemmy to digest.

Which only left a few bar raises to wrap things up.  All the stakes, rebar, and t-posts that were supporting the summer crops need to be hauled back up to the greenhouse for next year.

That’s the way we work out around here.  Only takes a few hours.

Oh, you ran a 5K?  Good for you.

I put in 60 ft of garden beds.  That’s right, feet.  Because I’m a patriot like that.

What’s that?  You finished an Ironman and got a trophy?  Nice work.

Can you eat that trophy?  ‘Cause I’m looking at 3 types of lettuce, kale, spinach, swiss chard, mesclun, broccoli, brussels sprouts, collards, cabbage, and beets.

Stay tuned.  Next week’s workout includes potatoes, carrots, and onions.

Now if I could just get up that step into the house to take a break.  Or I could rest right here….

Category: Uncategorized

Comments

2 Responses to “Work Out.”

  1. Andrew
    September 15th, 2014 @ 1:28 pm

    I see you must have seen that recent “conversation” I had with a certain medic whose name shall remain Garry Pomerleau.
    …about making a “workout” actually count for something.

  2. Jill
    September 16th, 2014 @ 5:53 am

    I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: You exhaust me. 🙂

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