The Weekly Digs #226

In the Garden

When the frost came, we went into garden clean up mode. I cleaned out my shed and reorganized the tools. Then we started clearing the garden by removing the spent bean plants.

Instead of pulling all the beans off the trellises beforehand, we took out the trellises with the bean vines attached. 

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We stacked them along the garden fence. Then the kids raked and cleaned out the residue, put compost down, and today we finally planted the garlic!

They did most of the garlic row prep and planting, because between baby, homeschool, and editing the new Youtube video this week, I hardly had time to get outside! 

The new cover crop is popping up because we had a very warm week. One day my thermometer read 85 degrees! I had all the tunnels open and row covers off so the plants didn’t swelter.

There is a lot more work to do out there but getting at least that much done felt like an accomplishment.

Preserving

Now that the garden is down to mostly leafy greens and root crops, I’ve switched to preserving some of the foods that I don’t grow.

If you saw my Instagram this week, you already saw I was working on mushrooms. These will be stored in vacuum sealed jars after they are finished. 

In January, my plan is to do a pantry challenge. I’ve never formally participated in one because I feel like we do a pantry challenge all the time, haha! 

It’s been almost five years since we started to grow and preserve all our own vegetables year-round so it’s second nature to cook meals based on what we have available. 

All that being said, we definitely do grocery shop locally for other things like oils, spices, butter, vinegar, etc. We also buy our bulk foods from Azure Standard. 

My sister Amy inspired me to try and do the hard core no shopping version again. She doesn’t shop for 5-6 months a year! 

Amy uses what they grow and preserve and was telling me when she was here that they go to the Amish discount store a few hours away and load up with the rest of what they need for their no shopping time. 

I’m going to try for 2 months starting January 1st and have one exception of allowing myself to buy fruit. We love pomegranates and citrus and my body craves it in the winter so I’m not giving that up 🙂

If I had a lot of homegrown fruit, I might be more inclined not to buy any at all but we still don’t have very much of our own.

Anyways, that was a long way of saying that the mushrooms are for the no shopping months. I need to do a big Azure stock up, I’m thinking of sharing that on Youtube if there is interest.

House Projects

When we first built our house I had this pinterest picture saved of a white farmhouse like ours and it has a bright red door. I LOVED it. 

But when it came time to paint ours, I painted on a red and a green sample. I liked them both, but ended up painting it a muted green because I chickened out!

After having the guts to paint my shed door red and being happy with the result, I decided it was time to tackle our front door. 

We used Benjamin Moore’s Heritage Red color and I love the change. I don’t have an after picture yet, but I’ll try and remember to share it next week!