day two

lord almighty.

i feel like i'm in boot camp. seriously. my body is being worked over like never before. today, i was outside by 7:30 and ivan and i picked about 5 lbs of purple beans. this involved picking the pods, opening the pods and dumping the little beans into the bucket. each pod had 2-3 beans inside. we worked on this for about an hour and a half and had only 1/8 of a bucket full. (about 2.5 lbs). at 9am we had our break, then continued from 9:15-10:00. this time we had a new system though. instead of standing in the hot sun and picking the pods apart one by one, we would first collect all of the pods, then go in the shade and open them up. it worked much better this way.

when this chore was over, we were then to do the same for the fava beans. pick, open, dump. we sped through to the quicker method this time and managed to get to 5 lbs faster, which was nice. by 12 PM, we had about 10 lbs of beans. this was all that we did today.

thankfully, we were set free at this point. although this doesn't sound like a ton of work (and it truly isn't), standing in the hot sun sucks a ton of energy out of you. and the monotonous walking back and forth and crouching down and standing up is also a drain on the energy. we came in at 12 and i ate a box of strawberries that i picked yesterday, talked on the phone for a little while and then took a 2 hour nap. i feel a lot better.

today made me appreciate all of those little beans that you see at the grocery store just sitting there innocently in their bags. if only people realized the amount of labor necessary to grow, pick and package 1 lb of beans!