The Weekly Digs #157
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I woke up Thursday morning and checked the weather. Around noon it said, “Snow showers”. I had to do a double take. It’s pretty late for snow here in Arkansas. I mentioned it to Cam before he left for work and he didn’t believe me!
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He texted me at 1:30pm from work and said, “Well you were right.” With a bunch of snow emojis. Thankfully the snow didn’t stick to the ground but it was cold so I brought my tender seedlings inside our house. That night it was 24ºF.
Today, Saturday we were back up to 65ºF and sunny!
In the Garden
I’m so grateful for the sunny warm days where we can spend hours and hours outside. We managed to check off a bunch of to-dos this week in the garden.
#1. Planted tomatoes in soil blocks! They are always fun to plant and Cam kept saying to me, “Eating cherry tomatoes sounds so good right now.” This is the life of seasonal eating. It makes you appreciate when you do have fresh food!
Here’s what we have in so far: San Marzano II, Amish Paste, Roma, Blue Beech. 36 soil blocks of each type 144 paste tomatoes total. This is a lot for me but better to have too many.
We also planted sunrise bumblebee, bing cherry, black cherry, brandywine OTV, and eva purple ball. All of these made up a 36 block tray.
#2. I planted flowers in a tray, specifically Sweet Alyssum. I had a panic this week because I thought I was out of the seeds. I scoured every website I usually order seeds from and they were ALL out of stock. Luckily, by a miracle they appeared in my box of flower seeds. I looked twice and hadn’t seen them before but they were there when I went to plant today.
#3. I transplanted the mizuna and the onion seedlings. The onion seedlings that were in the trays in my caterpillar tunnel germinated faster and got large way quicker than my in ground sown batch.
I covered the soil around the onions (the in ground ones) with some compost but it got thick in places and the onions wilted and looked almost like they froze underneath. That was a lesson I learned this year. It was my first sowing of plants for the year and the garden is teaching me already.
So I filled in all the gaps with the soil block onions. They are looking good otherwise.
#4. The kids and I spent several hours getting out dandelions and wild onions. As you may know, dandelions have a deep taproot so hoeing is not effective. We used our new soil knives and wow they are cool! They work so good, I’m not sure how I got along with out it. The link to the soil knife can be found HERE.
We worked on it almost every day this week, including our snow day. I was looking through my phone and found this candid shot Noelle took on my phone as we were working.
Turkey Update
Our turkey hen is still diligently sitting on her eggs. From my calculations she has about one week left.
We have been moving their turkey shelter less often because she is in the brooder box on the ground. And everytime we move the shelter we have to pick up the box and move the whole thing with her in it.
I’m always nervous that she is going to hop off the eggs when we move the shelter but so far so good. We are moving them again on Monday so hopefully all goes well.
