The Weekly Digs #199

Compost bin

I can’t believe how cold it’s been here, 37ºF was the high temperature today. We bundled up and all went outside to start a new project. For a long time, I’ve been wanting a compost bin that was in close proximity to the house.

I have some piles around the garden that are convenient for plant material needing to be cleared there. But there is still a lot of food waste that comes after we chop something up indoors.

Sometimes the chickens will eat the scraps but there is a lot of it, like onion, garlic, orange peels that they won’t eat and needs to be composted. We also give our scraps to the pigs too, but we only have pigs about 6 months out of the year. 

So we worked today on building a couple compost bins right off our back deck. This will make it really nice for me to walk back with a bucket of compost without needing to even put shoes on.

Cam still had quite a few of the bark strips from the saw mill that we used to make it. They are going to work great! Cam and the kids had trouble getting it all put together because the wood was still slightly wet, and it was white and red oak, making it really difficult to screw into. 

I think they had 4 broken drill bits by the time they were all finished!

New Calf

One of our best cow mamma’s gave birth this weekend. It is a very healthy and playful calf! It’s so nice when everything with the birth goes as it should and one day you go out and there is a surprise of a baby. 

In the Garden

• The kids and I transplanted green onions and kale this week. 
• I worked on moving strawberry plants around. We have one row that was the variety Jewel, and the other was Flavorfest. Flavorfest is so much more robust and prolific in our garden. I moved a bunch of the Flavorfest strawberries to the row with the Jewel to fill it in. I think it will naturally replace it.
• Planted 5000 square feet of new garden space to a yellow sweet clover/ oat cover crop mix.

Cam’s build Project

We finished the project Cam has been working on for weeks! It’s a new shelving unit in our kitchen. I love it! It’s fun to finally get a project done that we had planned on doing right after we moved in!

Actually, I had originally intended on putting up a few pot racks with copper pots on them, but decided against it for a couple reasons. One is that I don’t own any copper pots.

The second reason is that even though they are beautiful, I found out from a little research that cooking in copper pots is not that great for you to use health wise. I’m sure if you’re using them every so often it’s fine, but I didn’t want to have to buy a whole bunch of copper pots just for decor.

A pot rack for my cast iron pans would be the alternative, but I also decided against that due to the weight and risk of a heavy cast iron pot falling onto a countertop and chipping it.

I’m happy we went with the shelves instead!

Here is the video we did about them:

Next week has a couple warm days, but the rest we will get rain. I’m late getting my peas in the ground, but honestly, the weather hasn’t really permitted it. Hopefully by next week we’ll make it happen.