The Weekly Digs #187

Good News in the Garden

Our vole problem is definitely under control now, Cam and I have been checking traps and the numbers are getting fewer. The broccoli looks better now too, and most is in really good shape.

In the garden we are working on a lot of cleanup right now. It’s pretty unexciting but is a necessary step towards having everything ready for next season. We pulled Tposts out where the tomatoes were growing this year, then brought them all to the barn for winter storage.

This post contains affiliate links. Here is the full disclosure.

We harvested tons of mesclun mix, had a taste of the broccoli (it was so tender!), and have been doing daily harvests of carrots to eat with preserved lemon hummus. We also have tatsoi and other asian greens galore. 

I actually planted too many greens. We have been having lots of stir fry and fried rice to use it over the last month and now I feel tired of eating asian cuisine, which doesn’t normally happen!

Front Landscaping

We have lived in our house over a year, and one area that has been severely neglected is the landscaping around our house. Being a gardener, I opted to do our own landscaping and save a little money doing it myself.

However, with all the more practical food gardening happening, I put my focus on the vegetable garden this spring and summer instead of the plants around the house. 

One thing I learned after watching our home being built is that I can’t put any food producing shrubs and plants around the house. The reason for this being I watched as painters rinsed buckets of paint in the front, and other various contractors did the same dump of any water soluble chemical. So it’s only going to be ornamental plants.

Now that the craziness of the garden season has slowed way down, I’ve been able to turn my attention back to the landscaping and plants around our home. A few days ago, I stopped by Home Depot to get some landscaping pins and I noticed all the outdoor shrubs and perennials were 50% off! The selection was limited but I was able to get some things that I know will do well in our area like dwarf hollies and knockout roses. 

I also got tickseed flowers which is a perennial that I’ve never heard of or grown before but seems like it’s an appropriate fit for our growing zone and easy to grow. 

Cam helped me get a few of them planted, it’ll take another day to get it all finished. I’m definitely nowhere near finished with the landscaping. The area is huge- 12 feet out from the house and maybe 80 feet long. It’s going to be a multiyear project since the amount of plants it would take to fill that up would be so expensive if purchased all at once.

Even though it won’t all get planted right away, I’ll cover all that ground cover with mulch so it looks a little better. I’ll also probably grow some extra perennial flowers from seed this year so I can plant them in the front and save some money while I’m at it. 

I’m generally not a huge fan of landscaping ground cover and try to avoid it where I have food growing. However, since this is all ornamental plants and I can’t keep up with another area that is subject to weeds, I’m calling it worth the use. 

We still need to lay down some additional gravel on our walkway, and straighten out the ground cover. We got some strong storms this week and the nice smooth base I had for the gravel on the pathway isn’t so smooth anymore. I’m going to line it with some sort of stone or brick on the edges. It’s all definitely a work in progress, haha, I know it looks terrible as it is. Once we finish adding the gravel, mulch, and edging, it will be looking a lot better.

Preserving

We’ve been working on freeze drying more apples this week. In addition, we did a batch of dehydrated apples since we have a lot of apples and freeze drying takes a long time.

For some fruits, like peaches for example, the difference in fresh flavor between freeze drying and dehydration is very noticeable, freeze dried peaches are so much better. 

But for apples I like them both ways so that’s why we are preserving them with both dehydration and freeze drying. 

Chickens and Coops

Another new coop was finished this week and filled with 60 meat birds. It works for now, but we need to split them up into two coops soon. The plan is to butcher the other set of heritage meat birds we raised within the next week or two. They are about 4 weeks overdue for freezer camp so it’s time and that will open up the availability of another coop.

We are up to five of the chicken tractors now.