The Weekly Digs #190

Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving! We enjoyed the time together with family. It’s always fun to have a Thanksgiving meal where you feel true gratitude for it all. When you raise something from seed to harvest, or from poults to full grown turkey, there is an extra measure of thankfulness because it took a lot of hard work to get there! But it also sure tastes delicious!

We got a lot of little projects checked off this week amid all the cooking before Thanksgiving. 

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• Got more gravel for our front walkway. The front landscaping has been in project mode for too long. Cam’s Dad was here and had a dump trailer and got us enough to cover the whole walkway plus a little more. It’s nice to see some progress on this!
• All the guys at our house helped to fell dead trees, chop them up, then bring them to our wood area to use for heating our house in the winter. Cam has a hard time keeping up with getting enough so we were very grateful for help from his family!
• In our house, we have a little shelf in the boys bathroom that the builders never finished. They “ran out of wood” and Cam just said he would finish it himself. One and a half years later, I reminded him and he fixed it! Now just for priming and paint.

In the garden

I finally got my garlic rows all prepped and ready for planting! On Wednesday, the weather was nice and Cam and I took to fixing the drainage problem in the garden by taking the soil from the walkways and mounding it on top of the planting area, creating a raised or mounded row.

We started out with mounded rows like that, but over time they settled. I’m glad to have the problem fixed! We still need to do other areas of the garden but for now, it’s good progress.

After we mounded the beds, we quit for the day. Then we came back to it on Friday and we added lots of compost over the top. It was a good way to get some exercise and work off all the extra pie we ate the day before 🙂

Cam almost went out and made all the holes for the garlic on Friday night but I told him to wait since it was going to rain all Saturday and the holes would fill back in. It did rain a lot today, so I’m glad he waited. We’ll make it a family project to finish on Monday or Tuesday since the weather will be better.

Preserving

We did three preserving projects this week.

The first was making and canning vegetable stock. I set aside some of it for canning project #2, but also canned 9 quarts and one pint of just regular ol’ vegetable stock.

The second preserving project was making ham and bean soup. I reserved the vegetable stock for making this soup! I canned it and followed the recipe in THIS BOOK. I love this book but her yield amounts for some of the recipes are way off. I tripled the recipes and it was supposed to make 18 quarts but I got 13. 

The third preserving project was chopping, blanching, and freezing our broccoli harvest. 

Well that’s all from me this week. Seed catalogs and plant magazines are arriving in the mail everyday now and I’m loving flipping through them in my spare time. I am really soaking up this time of rest, I needed it so much. I can never really fully sit still but we are definitely at a slower pace than summer and it’s been amazing.