Calculating time spent in the garden

Calculating time spent in the garden

I don't note down how much time I spend working in the garden, but I do have a pedometer in my pocket all hours of the day. The pedometer shows how many steps I make each day / week and month along with the calories burnt, miles covered and hours physically moving my legs.

All year I have been trying to get my exercise levels up and maintained as high as possible, nothing strenuous, but being as active as possible. I walk where ever possible.

The end of this week will be 6 months of monitoring and I'm rather pleased with my levels of activity.

The graphs shows the number of steps per week, and the mean value along with the 4 week moving mean.

It shows that I do an average of 101,000 steps per week, or 14,500 steps per day (roughly 6 miles a day) and that I average 18 hours of exercise / walking per week. It works out to be about 2,200 miles per year!

From this I have tried to work out how much time I spend working in the garden. I've ignored the first 4 weeks, because I did very little in the garden and spent most of my time bush beating.

After removing the time for January I spent about 17 hours per week exercising. Of this 6 hours per week is walking the kids to school and back and another hour walking into town for shopping. That leaves 10 hours per week. I then take off Fridays from the equation because I am walking to work and then walking at the local Wildlife Trust. Fridays are about 3.5 hrs of exercise which leaves 6.5 hrs per week on average that I spend in the garden. I guess that time spent doing other things might be about 1.5 hrs per week, leaving 5 hrs.

This 5 hrs of exercising is just the time my legs move. It takes no account of me standing watering the garden, or kneeling while weeding and sowing etc. Some guess work and a little experimentation suggests that 30% of my work in the garden is moving and 70% is when my legs are static, so the hours spent can be trebled plus a bit. 16.5 hrs per week. Of this 16.5 hours a certain portion isn't working in the garden but walking around and enjoying. I guess that 25% of the time must be non work related, leaving 12.5 hrs per week in the garden actually working.

Obviously an average of 12.5 hrs means none some weeks in the winter and 20 hrs on odd weeks in the early summer. 

In order to get it any more accurate than this I'll need to write down the times, like a time sheet, which in all likelihood isn't going to happen :)

It's a very rough figure to work out how productive and time consuming the garden is and things don't quite add up because I haven't taking into account days off visiting people etc etc so this has to be an absolute maximum figure. In reality it has to be less than this but it's a good starting point.

....now I just have to wonder where all the other hours go in my life !