The Weekly Digs #159

Preserving

This week marked the beginning of the preserving season for us! All our spinach matured and was ready to pick. We picked a bowl and made spinach pasta for dinner. Then I decided to make a bunch of extra spinach pasta to dry for later.

We have a pasta maker, which makes it quick and easy. I dried it on a rack overnight but then I decided since I wanted to store it a little longer  I ought to dehydrate it to make sure it was really dry. 

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I plan on making  and drying pasta several more days this week. It’s a great way to use the spinach and our eggs which are in abundance right now as well!

In the Garden

#1 Our strawberries are coming up pretty well now through the mulch. You can see from the pictures that they are popping up more on the sides of the rows since those areas got less mulch. 

#2 Last week I mentioned my peas were coming up. This week I noticed that there were some big gaps in the peas where they didn’t come up at all. 

As I was pondering why the peas didn’t come up in certain areas, I had a memory of chickens that flew over the garden fence one day (their chicken tractor was nearby and they flew from the top of that over). I caught them eating peas but honestly I didn’t think much of it at the time. 

My pea seed was super fresh for the shelling peas so I know it wasn’t old seed. The only other thing I could think of was maybe they were planted too deeply in cold soil and they rotted? I’ve never had that happen to me before, so for now I’m thinking it was the chickens. 

I replanted the bare areas this week but it’s about three weeks later than they should be planted and it may get too hot here before my replanted areas produce.

I did soak the seed this time, which I never normally do but I wanted to speed up germination. I also hand planted this batch.

#3 Cam finished installing the gate for the garden expansion.

Every time Cam makes something it gets better. Our first garden gate was good, but had its issues. Now that he had another chance to make one, this prototype is quite an improvement. We have two gates now into the garden. It is great!

Turkeys and Chickens

The kids finished up another chicken tractor build this week. Cam assists them with the power tools but they pretty much do the rest.  It’s a good feeling to say my kids have way surpassed me in carpentry skills!

I finally got a picture of our turkey and her poults. She started with ten and now she is down to six. This is the first time for her and for us with having a mama hen care for babies. 

They are outside but she has a box she nests in with them. Two disappeared and we think they just walked out the fence we had because they were small enough and a predator got them. After that happened we lined the fencing with chicken wire.

One poult  looked sickly from the beginning and the other we found I think Turkey Tom may have stepped on. Now we kick Tom out of the pen during the day and let him back in at night.

We put some high protein turkey food and water in the nesting box and outside of it. The survivors seem to be adapting well.