The Weekly Digs #108
In the Garden:
It’s been a fun week of gardening! After our marathon of potato planting last week, we moved on to a marathon of planting raspberries. I definitely got in over my head on all the bare root plants I ordered over the winter.
It seemed like a good idea back then but now I wish I had ordered less. I had a few raspberries from last year from a friend that I planted in early spring of 2020 but with the dry weather and no water at our land last year some of them didn’t make it through summer.
This post contains affiliate links. Here is the full disclosure.
Thankfully my Mother in law sent me some more from her patch to fill in the gaps last fall so we had 50 raspberry plants going into winter. But berries are my favorite and the kids go crazy over them so I figured why not add 150 more?!
I added yellow “Anne” raspberries, Heritage raspberries, Boyne Raspberries, and Joan J. I left enough room to make one more row to expand if we need to later. I won’t need to buy more, I’ll just pull extras from our patch to expand in future years.
I got about 100 in the ground, with 40 Heritage raspberries left to go. I need to finish next week for sure, bare root plants don’t keep for long.
We started getting the beginning of significant vegetable harvests too! It’s so nice to switch over from canned and dried food to fresh. We are harvesting kale, spinach, broccoli raab, and green onions.
- Indoor sowing: zinnias, meteor and envy
- Directly planted: New Kutota carrots, cherry belle radish, little gem lettuce, slo-bolt cilantro
Chickens and Turkeys:
This week we continued working on building the chicken brooders. We are building four and have them almost done. Chickens and Turkeys will arrive this week!
We went and bought everything we needed so that when the chicks arrive we are ready. Hopefully we’ll get the brooders finished by Monday. And then as long as I can convince Cameron of it, we’ll have them stay in our garage the first few weeks.
I debated back and forth on putting them in the barn on our property or garage. But my sister Amy (and a few others from Instagram) convinced me that the garage will probably be the safest spot for now. We have a lot invested into the chicks and would like to avoid losing any if we can help it.
House Progress:
We are in the final month before our house finishes up, wahoo! I’ve been working on picking paint colors, cabinet hardware, door hardware, and trim details. Cam is trying to finish up the walk-in cooler room and he will be painting the exterior too.
Before we got started on our house, we interviewed potential contractors. Some of the contractors we interviewed were a husband and wife team, where husband does all the construction overseeing and wife does the designing.
All of them were more expensive because you are paying for the design aspect. I knew that I could save some money by doing all the design myself.
Luckily, being an artist and knowing basic design principles really helps with home design. I have enjoyed designing everything from the ground up but it’s also more time consuming than I realized.
I feel like between homeschooling, overseeing our house build and designing everything, gardening, blogging, youtube videos, cooking, cleaning, church responsibilities, and mothering, I have about 8 full time jobs. It’ll be nice to have the house done and one less thing on my list.
I’m just praying it will be done by May 15! We have to be out of our rental by then. If it isn’t done the plan is to camp in a tent at our land until it is. With all the chicks, garden, and animals it wouldn’t really work to stay in a hotel or air-bnb. Haha. We have funny priorities. 🙂
