don't like livin' in a dirty town: Week one!

Whew. I made it through the first week. I kept telling myself that the first week would be the worst week (as far as pain in my body goes). Hopefully that will hold true, as my body hated me a lot this week. There is so much awkward bending and squatting and crawling and carrying involved with this work and my body doesn't quite know what to make of it. Needless to say, ibuprofen is my friend and staying up past 11pm has become extremely difficult.

We did a lot of different work this week, which was nice. We "potted on" about 1,000 tomatillo/pepper/eggplant seedlings (see photo below) so that they now have more room to grow before we plant them into the ground. It was super repetitive and monotonous work, but I really enjoyed it for some reason.

Later, we planted lots of seedlings into the ground, including cabbage, kale, and various types of flowers. We also did some direct seeding, which means just putting seeds straight into the ground, of carrots, radishes, and turnips (ick), and even planted some potatoes.

Least favorite task of the week: mulching. I had to carry and spread tons of wheelbarrows (I legitimately thought that word was "wheelbarrel" until just now) full of mulch over the perennial flower bed. It was a really hot day, the work was super tiring, and the pitchfork gave me a blister. Hooray!

Favorite task of the week: harvesting. Since we go to market on Saturdays, we spent a good portion of our time on Friday harvesting and preparing crops to be sold at the market. We don't have many crops ready for harvests yet, but we do have plenty of collards, kale, swiss chard, and green onions. Interesting note about the swiss chard: I didn't even know we had swiss chard because the rows are absolutely engulfed in weeds. The remainder of our Friday was spent weeding the swiss chard rows and we still aren't finished. Fantastic.

Okay, okay. I'll stop writing now and just show you some photos. I know that's all you really want anyway.

So many tomato plants: