The Weekly Digs #204

Hi friends! It’s been another very busy weekend. I don’t like getting off my usual posting schedule but I am so tired, I don’t have it in me to update tonight. I’ll come back on Monday for a full rundown of this week. We started a new project, did some preserving, and gardening!

Just wanted to leave a quick note so no one is worried I had a baby or anything 🙂 I still have 8 weeks until my due date. Hugs to you all! – Becky

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Monday Update:

New Project!

We started on a really big project this week! It’s mostly going to be a bunch of work from Cam making it happen, but we are hoping to have it done before the baby comes. It’s going to be so amazing for saving time in the garden!

I have to keep it hush, hush for now, since we are working with a brand partner. The plan is for it to be finished and shared on Youtube at the end of May. I hope to share it here on the blog too!

Preserving

Another thing I have been working on is cleaning out our pantry and getting it ready for the next season. We have apples that are going soft, onions that are sprouting, and all the cans need to be organized and inventoried. 

I made some apple juice with the soft apples, it was my first time ever doing that with our steam juicer. It wasn’t super sweet, but I’m assuming some of that is due to them being older apples. 

I also started to turn the last of the pumpkins into pumpkin puree. I froze twelve, two cup portions. I’ve been kind of tired of preserving as I mentioned last week, but once I actually got into it, it felt really good to get some of those things done that I’ve been putting off for so long. 

I will be working on it more this week, since we are expecting rain everyday! I’m not going to be able to do much of anything outside with the rain.

A few days later we had a little scare when we realized a freezer tripped its breaker and all the stuff on the top was thawed! Luckily we have deep freezers (this is why I love them) and the food was still cold on the top and everything below was still semi-frozen. It had probably been not working for a few days based on how much thawing occurred.

Back in January, we bought a bunch of freezer sensors that can tell us the temperature from an app and alert us as to a problem. I wanted to make sure everything was working when we went on our trip across the country in January. It was nice to have  peace of mind.

In between then and now, the kids had unplugged and then plugged back in the wifi connector and we hadn’t noticed. Once that happened all the sensors were “offline” which is why it didn’t alert us.

Needless to say, it’s all hooked back up now. I’m so glad all the food was still in good shape.

In the Garden

I had the most awesome delivery come to my door from a follower and new friend! She had some extra raspberries that moved into a garden area where they shouldn’t be and offered them to me. They came all the way from the west coast.

Since my raspberries in one spot died, I had a lot of room for them and was so grateful! It was a very sweet gift. I got them all planted on Saturday.

She also sent a few other goodies like garlic and bulbs. I’m hoping to get them all planted today before the rain comes tomorrow.

We’ve also been potting up plants. And now that we are past the danger zone of frosts (as far as I can see from the weather right now) it looks like we’ll be transplanting soon! The kids have a lot of cucumber starts and watermelon they moved to the big 4×4 soil blocks that they will plant soon.

I’d love to get everything planted by mid-May so that we have the big stuff done before the baby comes. 

I had an ultrasound today and so far everything is looking good with the baby, he is big but it usually works out just fine since I’ve never gone full term before.

We are still trying to decide on a name too! We are experts at putting it off until we are literally sitting in the hospital and need to fill out the form. We spent a lot of time on Sunday as we were relaxing after church going over options so at least we have a top ten we both like to choose from. 

• Harvesting lettuce, arugula, asparagus, and mesclun mix.

Chicks and Turkeys

Our chicks and turkeys came this week. It was kind of crazy because we weren’t quite ready but luckily we had most of the supplies, we just needed to put everything together like the brooder boxes.

We have been breeding our White Holland turkeys, but since it’s been a few years I wanted to introduce some new genes into the flock. Turkeys are the worst to have shipped to you. They always look active and healthy, but then slowly die off over a week. Last time 50% of what we received died and this time we have had better results but still some losses.

For the chicks, I got 5 black Australorps and 10 Whiting True Green.