The Weekly Digs #107

After a week and a half of dry weather we were expecting rain on this past Wednesday. In the dry weather, I had been plowing a new garden area to prepare for planting potatoes. Plowing our soil takes a long time because it is heavy clay. But thankfully I only need to do it once and then we don’t need to till after that.

I spent many days plowing and even the kids helped me one of the days! I wanted to plant potatoes before the rain on Wednesday but by Tuesday afternoon I still wasn’t even close to having the area ready.

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I help the youth at our church on Tuesday evening so I had to pause and do that for a few hours. I got home at 9pm and told Cam I needed to go back up and finish planting the potatoes before it rained. 

Getting ready to plant. I plant my potatoes whole. One year I lost too many from rot after I chitted, cut, and cured them. Instead of doing that, I make it much easier on myself now and plant whole. It’s worked well so far.

It sounds a little crazy,  but with how long it takes our soil to dry out and be workable, I knew if I didn’t do it now it would be at least another week, maybe two before I could plant the potatoes. 

Cameron offered to help me, and we headed up there at 10pm. I immediately finished the initial plowing and Cam got the stakes out so we could string line and make raised beds. 

By midnight the raised beds were done and I started to plant potatoes. I was hand digging a trench through the newly raised bed because I was afraid the plow (which is on an axis and spins) would mess up the raised bed.

At 1:30am we finished planting 40lbs of potatoes in the first 100 foot row. It took so long because we hand dug the trench. We were both so tired that I said just run the BCS tractor with the plow down the next row to make a trench. It will mess up the garden bed we made but I can fix it later. 

Potatoes planted in trenches. I cover with a few inches of soil until I see sprouts, then slowly add soil as they grow.

So we did that and it was so much faster and easier. Another 30lbs of potatoes went into the next 100ft garden bed. At 2:30am we finished, had packed up and were heading home. We both usually go to bed at 10 or 11pm so it was way past our bedtime 🙂 We were exhausted.

I was so glad to have it done though as it was a big to-do on my list that had been lingering there for a while. 

It did rain on Wednesday and again on Friday so I was really glad we finished when we did. 

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Direct sown onions in the front. Further back I transplanted the onions from indoors. They are quite a bit larger than the onions that were direct seeded.

In the Garden

  • Planted 50 lbs of Kennebec Potatoes and 20 lbs of Yukon Gem Potatoes
  • Indoor sowed hot peppers. Poblano, tam jalapeño, yellow jalapeno, buena mulata, and Korean Dark Green
  • Planted indoors genovese basil and purple basil.
  • Planted indoors little gem lettuce
  • Transplanted Onion Seedlings

Chickens, Turkeys, Pigs, and Cows

Cameron finally got the pigs moved to their new pasture area and they were so happy! He had food to lure them with but it didn’t really work. All they wanted to do was root in the new ground. 

He said it was really hard to get them to move 10 feet to the new pasture area but the kids and Cam made a little makeshift pig shoot and got them in. They had no interest in food for about 12 hours which seems long considering those pigs are always hungry!

It was fun to see more of their natural behavior. And they haven’t escaped from the electric fence either so that is a big accomplishment too!

We continue to move the cows around the land to graze and it’s working great! 

In about a week and a half we are expecting 150 chickens and 15 turkeys. We are now hurriedly building brooders. 100 of them are meat chickens. The last 50 are for eggs and breeding. 

The kids will do a chick selling business starting next spring. 

House Progress

I can’t believe we are nearing the end here! It’s looking more like a house inside everyday! They finished the tile floors this week and started putting in trim.  I will put pictures of trim on here next week. I forgot to take some when we were there today.

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