Friday, July 6, 2012

Garden Update and RKC training

The garden is in full swing now.
We've cleared out all of the beets and broccoli and replaced them with cabbage, cauliflower, more beets and carrots.
Everything is coming in nicely.

Unfortunately we've encountered some pests, specifically, cabbage moths, that lay eggs on the leaves of the Brussels sprouts plants. Tiny little yellow-green worms hatch on the underside of the enormous leaves and eat them. So we have an all out bounty on both the moths and worms - $5 per moth that is caught and $1 per worm...but seriously, they are rampant. We inspect the leaves daily and pick off the worms.
Here you can see the leaves, some eaten up almost entirely, and others with holes in them.
















However, despite all that, tiny Brussels sprouts are forming and growing!

We also have chipmunks that like to take our tomatoes, eat one bite and leave them for us in our driveway.
The birds ate most of our ripe blueberries and we have 2 more bushes that are ripening up. I hope to enjoy a bit more of them once they ripen, as we only got to have about an ounce from the first bush (which was only ~10-12 berries).

Pests aside, the garden is doing great. We have a variety of hot and sweet peppers coming in now, as well as eggplant, which are flowering.


We have some strawberries that are ready to ripen up.

The tomatoes, carrots, leeks, onions, rainbow chard and marigolds are all growing away. Look at the beautiful colors in this box!!

The heirloom beans have flowered and are forming as well.
We've also planted some decorative gourds in a separate area that are just about ready to begin to flower.
Harvest totals
My last post had us at 3.19lbs of produce. The totals now are:
Broccoli 27.3 oz
Radishes 3.2 oz
Basil 3.2 oz
Beets/Greens 42.2 oz
Golden Beets/Greens 6.5 oz
Blueberries 1.0 oz
Lettuce 1.4 oz
Fennel 0.1 oz
Rainbow chard 1.9 oz
Sun Golds 1.1 oz
Total: 87.9 oz = 5.49 lbs of produce! Wow! Pretty good for only the 2nd week of July.

RKC is less than 3 months away and my training is going great. I met w.my coach, Mike Perry from Skill of Strength 2 weeks ago and got my new program, which I've been following. It includes the snatch test, once a week, which Mike had me do as a 3 min test, and then each time I do it, I'm to add on 15 seconds.

For those who don't know, the snatch is a one arm kettlebell move that is dynamic, powerful and graceful all at the same time.
Here, RKC Tracy Reifkind leads her class through an intense snatch workout: Snatch Tracy is so powerful and really is an inspiration.
One of the requirements for RKC is to do 100 snatches in 5 minutes time. For women, what size bell is used is based on body weight - under 123.5 lbs and the 12kg (25lbs) can be used; over 123.5 and the 16kg (35lbs) has to be used. Using the 16kg is significantly harder- that jump from 12kg to 16kg is a big one.
I am currently under 123.5lbs and keeping a close eye on that. So, when I did the 3 min test, I used the 12kg bell.
At 3 min, I had 68 snatches. I continued on to make sure I was even on both arms and at 3:30, had 80, and that is good news. My hands felt good. My forearms were definitely on fire :) but that is to be expected. I stopped at 80 but definitely felt I could have gone on to 100. I will test again tomorrow and we'll see where I'm at.
I'll continue to train snatches with both the 14kg and 16kg to keep my strength and stamina up!!

Other things I'm working on are my cleans, presses and paying extra special attention to my roll to elbow on my TGUs.

Stay tuned for more garden tales, recipes and RKC training updates...
:)








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