The Weekly Digs #137
Preserving
It’s been a fun week! We took a break from homeschool this week because my sister Amy and her family came to visit. Since I had extra time and a willing helper we did a bunch of canning!
Amy was surprised that I only had one water bath canner and one pressure canner. She does lots more canning than me so I trust that she is right when she says it’s better to have two of each so I can get things done fast.
This post contains affiliate links. Here is the full disclosure.
More of my love and interest is in the garden and I don’t hesitate to spend money for a garden tool that helps speed up the process. But for some reason, I haven’t done this in the kitchen for canning! I definitely need to upgrade my set up and buy more canning pots this winter.
We canned 21 quarts of apple pie filling, 5 quarts of beef bone broth, and 6 quarts of applesauce.
Yesterday after she left I finished up another 7 quarts of applesauce. I also started a batch of sliced green peppers drying in the dehydrator, and then got some chicken bone broth cooking.
In the Garden
We were anticipating our first frost this week and got all our peppers harvested.
The first frost came on November 3rd but luckily wasn’t a hard frost.
Today we went out as a family and got all our garlic planted.
It was a huge relief to get it all done because this is the last big garden chore that needed to be done by a certain time.
Cameron whipped out a new version of a garlic hole planter in about 30 minutes. He made me one last year, but the dowels were too small and too short. This year he used scrap wood and the handle of an old hoe that I never use to make the holes in the soil.
We still have some stiff clay dirt in this area so it wasn’t super easy to do but I think the tool is a keeper! I forgot to take a picture of it but if you follow me on instagram it was in my stories today (Saturday).
Homestead Projects
Cameron has been working on getting firewood chopped and piled up. We are way behind on this but he will work on it all winter so that hopefully we get enough firewood stored up for this year and next.
I’ve had many of you ask about heating for our home and now that I’m thinking about it I will do a future blog post on that. We debated for a long time about what to use so I’ll definitely address it!
