and a ONE! and a TWO! and a . . . . .

[digitS']

I've been "gearing up" for the season by doing exercises. :weight

I've never been one for machinery (exercise or otherwise) and I seem to need a cheerleader to get me moving and keep me going. The "Classical Stretch, the Esmonde Technique" has been around for a few years but I'd never seen it until this Winter when the # of PBS stations increased to 3 on my TV .

Many years ago, I joined Joanie Greggains for the "Morning Stretch" every workday. That really seemed to help. My son got into Tai Chi a few years ago and I tried to follow suit but the video I bought soon became boring with the repetition. So, I relied almost entirely on Winter snow shoveling and gardening thru the growing season. Well, there was lots of snow this Winter but every time I went out there to move it around at the end of a stick (also known as the handle of a shovel ), I felt like I was at risk of serious injury !!

So every morning, I'm joining Miranda Esmonde-White and now that I can spend a few hours now and then in the garden - I'm better for the stretching!

How about you?!? Are you using exercise to help you "gear up" for gardening??

Steve

 

[patandchickens]

Uh huh. Of course. We made sure to get a property that floods every spring, requiring large amounts of backbreaking manual removal of ice and snow from ditches and re-cutting of trenches through flooded paddocks, followed by wheelbarrowing soggy stall bedding all over the place, followed by a rolling program of pulling the leaniest fenceposts by hand and resetting them, followed by buying truckloads of gravel and wheelbarrowing 'em all around by hand when the ground dries off, just so that I would be in good physical shape when the time comes to plant vegetables.

Yep, uh huh, you betcha


Pat, who has never had the slightest desire to pay money for a gym membership but if anyone wants to write me a check for the privilege of exercising *here* they are quite welcome and I can give you a long list of Special Outdoor Exercises that need to be done...

 

[Southern Gardener]

I do have a gym membership but I haven't been in, oh two months or so. I can tell to after I couldn't lift my toothbrush last weekend after plowing the garden plot.

 

[Rosalind]

I have a Pyrenees dog, which at 10 months old is still technically a puppy, although he weighs almost as much as me. I walk him four times daily in a futile attempt to make him tired and docile.

In comparison with attempting to exert Cesar Millan brainwaves at a stubborn dog the size of a baby bear, hauling 12 wheelbarrows of chicken and horse poop across the yard is a piece of cake.

 

[digitS']

Rosalind, that guy made sense to me but I've seen other people take real offense at what he has to say . . .

How 'bout Patricia Simonet? She's the psychologist who once worked with Washoe, the chimpanzee that learned sign language and then went on to "dog rules" & "dog laughter." Now kennels are playing her recordings to reduce doggy stress. Think that might help?

I don't know anything about these sorts of things. Sound is nearly foreign to me. I just learned that there's interesting music on the "Classical Stretch." Couldn't prove it by me . . . altho' I'm aware that the captioning sometimes gets in the way when I'm trying to figure out what kind of contortion I'm suppose to get into .

How-some-ever . . . . I'd think that a Great Pyrenees would be quite a wonderful companion . . . . ultimately. Maybe you can get him to pull a cultivator in the garden. Hmmmm?

Steve

 

[Rosalind]

Oh, my puppy is hardly stressed. He has oodles of exuberant energy and is at the charming age when he tries to test his boundaries and forgets half his training. His favorite method of demonstrating his adolescent stupidity is charging at me, mouth open, then turning his head to shoulder-check me and coming up to mouth a corner of my jacket as he bounces off. I can see using gentle clicker-type methods to train a small dog out of doing that--a small dog isn't going to do any serious damage in play. My Pyr is quite capable of knocking me to the ground, and I've already gotten a broken foot on his account. And that was when he was about 40 lbs. smaller. I agree with her that they do respond to social cues, though, I get him to do whole routines of tricks just by social cues.

Actually, I am planning to use him for carting when his bones have stopped growing in 8 months or so. He is learning carting commands, that's how I'm teaching him that there are appropriate times to run and other times when we walk slowly. My spring/summer project is to build a coop raised up high enough that a cart will just fit under the door--that way I can have him back a cart up to the door, I can sweep all the chicken litter into the cart, and he can truck it out to the garden for me. Then all I have to do is rake the litter around, or sweep it into the compost heap.

My neighbors said that I can try him for herding on their cows, but he needs to know more commands first. And do them reliably...