The Weekly Digs #163

We removed silage tarps from cover crops and were left with a nice residue to plant into. The kids and I planted 100+ tomatoes and 36 peppers.

I planted four different types of paste tomatoes, amish paste, roma, blue beech, and san marzano. I was really surprised because when it came time to plant some slicing types I didn’t have very many.

I thought I had started more, but I think the kids put most of the cherry and slicing tomatoes I started in their gardens. I was able to find and plant  a few- eva purple ball, brandywine OTV, bing cherry, and kellogg’s breakfast tomatoes. 

All the peppers are my favorite that I’ve been seed saving over the last few years are called emerald giant. 

I’ve been getting up early and staying up late to get everything done in the garden, along with all the other responsibilities I have, and yesterday it finally caught up with me and I started to feel a little burnt out. 

It’s rainy today and that is good because I feel like I need some rest time so I can have more enthusiasm again 🙂 

We are harvesting lots of strawberries now which is very exciting! I think we have eaten 4-5lbs a day the last two days. 

I hope that eventually we can set some aside to freeze, freeze dry, and can some jam for later.

Also in the garden… shelling peas are getting close.

And garlic scapes are ready for picking. They are my favorite sautéed with a little salt and pepper.

Preserving

We freeze dried a batch of the mushrooms and they turned out great! Or at least they look great, I haven’t actually tried them yet rehydrated. 

We got 3 quarts 1 pint freeze dried mushrooms.

I also got around to canning some jam today, 9 half pints worth.

Turkeys

We have one momma hen, one full grown tom, and now ten poults. Five of the poults have been hanging out in an electric fence all day but slowly they have been escaping their fencing more and more. 

Thursday I came home and found five poults and one Tom almost a half mile away from where they were supposed to be. Thankfully, they were still on our property. 

We herded them back to their proper place only to have them continually pop out. This same  thing happened last year. The solution was we bought a 8x8ft caged chicken pen that we moved everyday. 

It worked, but was a little one the small side and now that we have more turkeys than last year’s six, we decided we needed to upgrade. 

Cam has been working on converting an old carport we had into a mobile turkey shelter. It’s going to be lots of trial and error to see if we can get it working well. It will get some large tires so it can be easily wheeled around, or at least that is the hope! Cam is good at building things and if it has a problem he is also good at figuring out ways to resolve it. 

The carport is 10x20ft so there will be plenty of space for all the turkeys.