Day 3

It's been so long since I posted a journal! I was so busy lately, with those SATs and APs (I still got one left to go! eek), that I did not have much time to farm or to blog. Sorry about that! Anyways, spring season is almost up and summer is coming soon! so we had to quickly plow the ground once again to form lanes and plant the seeds (we decided to plant corn). That way, when the rainy season comes, our seeds will have already been deeply rooted in the ground by then and will not be washed away. 

i just took this photo because it is absolutely beautiful! haha i don't have a valid reason. but then, what is more legit than appreciating the beauty of nature. :) by the way, these are cherry blossoms! 

Finally, we are back to our farm! See how we dug up lanes? Lanes come useful in many ways: we organize plant seeds, we can move around the 'unplanted' lanes to pick out some weeds and water the seeds on the 'planted' lanes, and the water will drown faster through the garden, preventing any flood damages. 

it may not seem like it but it takes a whole lot of time to dug these lanes. almost fifty people participated on this day and we had to farm for more than five to six hours. 

to spice things up, i also uploaded a few videos for you to watch. nothing fancy going here, just some friends having fun. because we were tired of the hard work, we constantly made jokes to keep us going. 

a friend trying to act like a superhero while digging up the lanes. seriously, it was hard work and we had to put in our best efforts to organize these lanes. he was just exaggerating how hard the work was. haha 

so this is a video of our farm and our school. i just wanted to show you guys the whole view of our farm. even though it is a bit small, it's a beauty, isn't it? 

now we are finished with our lane-digging! time to move on planting the seeds. We chose corn seeds because..we like corn? haha we thought it would look really cool when these seeds are all grown up. i know, it is not the greatest reason in the world to chose corns for your garden but still.. what other plants are both delicious and fabulous? corns. 

okay, this is a really really cool and useful device while planting seeds. When you plant the seeds, you first have to dig in the ground, about four to five inches, and then plant the seeds. (by the way, when you are planting corn, you have to plant three to four seeds in one hole. that way, these seeds will grow faster.) It is quite time consuming to dig up the ground. This device helps you to dig up a small portion of the ground. Another cool thing about this device is that after it digs up the ground, it automatically implants several seeds in the hole. It sounds quite complicated and strange but when you try this out, it is the easiest thing in the world of farming! 

nope! you have to plant two or three more seeds! 

there you go :) 

after you plant the corn seeds, you have to water them! don't forget this step! or else, the seeds will dry up soon. 

Day 2

I wasn't able to take any pictures on our first day. But no worries! What we did on our second day is very similar to what we did on our first day. Basically, we threw away rocks and other useless junk hidden in our garden. That way, the seeds (that we are going to plant on our next day) will have no problem shooting up from the ground. Even though this is a very strenuous process in farming/gardening, it is one of the most crucial steps you have to take to grow a successful farm/garden! If you skip over this step because you think your farmland is already pretty clean (see the joke here?), you will regret (big time!) afterwords! All of us thought our farmland did not have enough rocks and thought we would get over this procedure in an hour or so, but the more we dug up our ground, the more rocks and trash we found! 

The pictures below are some that I took while farming on our second day: throw-away-all-the-rocks day! Even though we complained about the hard work, we all had fun and hope you guys will have too! What's the point of farming if you are going to be all grumpy and annoyed about it? :-) 

See the chunks of useless weeds we dug up? We had endless piles of these weeds! 

We dug our dried up land using basic farming tools such as shovels, plows, and hoes. (an insider's joke: "Hoe" in Korean sounds like "Hommie"(호미). So we joked around saying "Where's my 'Hommie' at?" "I'm digging up with my 'Hommie'." "My Hommie is doing some serious work!" I know, pretty lame, but it was still one of those awkward-dorky-funny moments! The joy of farming!) 

Can you see the hard work we are doing here?! 

One of our biggest, if not the biggest, problems we had to deal with our farmland were the massive amount of rocks hidden here and there. But this rock was no plain, average rock! It was the most gigantic rock we had ever seen in our farm. Five to Six guys struggled with digging up this big rock for almost an hour! I'm not joking! 

This is another piece of farmland being grown by other groups of friends. You can see that we are lacking way behind than these guys. haha. But you never know! If we work hard as we did today, it would be only a matter of time to win over these guys. 

Do you see the pretty recycled bottles that we are using as our fence? We gathered up some bottles, washed them, painted them, and planted them on the ground. Pretty clever, huh? It's both pretty and environment-friendly! 

A huge group of kids planting the garden! Can you feel the passion and the enthusiasm?  

This is our counseling teacher who is also managing our farming project! He always comes to the farm and helps us with the farming. One great amazing teacher-farmer you're looking right there! haha 

Can you see our school behind the farm? Our school, Hankuk Academy of Foreign Studies, is a pretty big school for a Korean high school. It is also one of the most prestigious schools in the nation. Studying can be sometimes (or always) very competitive but we can always get rid of our stress through farming! :-) 

Sorry for the photos lying sideways. But I hope you can see that we dug up our gigantic rock that was planted deep in the ground (see the photos above)! human victory!

You can see that the soil is a bit orange-ish than the other plain dried up soil. I heard that these kind of soil are full of nutrients and vitamins! Good for the plants! Sometimes farmers buy these types of soil but we have them for free :-)! 

See the endless rocks that we've dug up? There are more piles of rocks to come. 

Yes! the ROCK! Everyone cheered and hip-hip-hurrayed when the guys dug up the rock from the ground. 

See the massive hole that the rock was in? 

Endless heaps of rocks! 

We were almost done with the plowing and digging here. It took about three to four hours of digging and plowing to remove the big rocks. (and there were like fifty of us!) We were not able to get rid of every single rocks in the ground but we were pretty much set for planting the seeds the next day. 

A picture of my school! It's a beauty, isn't it? :-)