Yoga Farming Part 2

I'm going to press on and finally start talking about what we did on the farm. But first, I should perhaps reiterate that this was not so much a farm as a complex with extensive gardens. Thus, a large amount of our work was not "farming" per se; still, there were some lovely vegetable boxes that produced both forked carrots (which we learned is due to manure in the soil) as well as a ridiculous overabundance of courgettes (British for zucchinis) so we learned about 15 different ways to cook them. One of our favorites was making courgette fritters with a spicy caramelized onion jam. There was also a small greenhouse on the property which managed to produce some delicious corn, despite the Irish climate.

Which reminds me of a joke Chetan shared with us: "A - How did you like the Irish summer? B - I missed it - I was in the bathroom." Which is pretty much true. We managed to be in County Galway for the rainiest August on record. The rainiest August in
IRELAND. That's beaucoup rain (pardon my French). We found everyone remembered those two hours of sun last Thursday for days.

So, with the setup and the weather, we didn't "farm" too much but we did a lot of other things. We painted the bathroom, we painted the boards around the yoga room, we painted a new container in yard... we also trimmed back a lot of the overgrown bushes and trees, cleaned out the pond, and mowed the ridiculously huge lawn, which was only more difficult as I managed to not switch the mower to self-drive mode which meant that I was straining waaay more than needed (which isn't that bad when compared to the family tragedy that happened while we were there - Shraddha's sister in law ran over her hand with a mower and lost three fingers).

Other duties included cleaning out the yoga barn to prepare it for classes, power washing the cement (which was actually kind of fun), polishing the doorknobs (mostly because it was raining and they were running out of things for us to do), filling the
giant compost box, pulling a tick off one of the cats that always sat in the windowsill and watched us while we ate, taking out the dying and/or overripe veggies, and weeding - lots of weeding, sometimes so much so that it called for a flamethrower.

I'm serious. Burning weeds is an organic alternative to pesticides, so I suited up with the Sheen Flame Gun X300 a few times and rained a fiery, wrathful vengeance
upon those impudent weeds, sending them to a ghastly fate worse than the deepest depths of hell... Actually, the flamethrower was kind of annoying and kept going out on me, but it was still pretty fun for the first few minutes every time I got to fire it up.

Which reminds me... Chetan and Shraddha had so much (blind and probably misplaced) faith in my flamethrowing abilities that they assigned me to my first mission of destruction while they were out of the country. I'm serious; midway through our stay, they decided to get a little sun and took off for Biarritz, but ended up going south into Spain. And they left us the farm to ourselves. Our schedule remained fairly similar but we also watched a lot of movies on their huge plasma TV, especially as Saorise had come by with a hard drive one of her friends had filled with movies.

There was so much more but I think this post has done our time on the farm justice... and we're even splitting up our time into a few different posts... but enough for now, I'm signing off.