The Weekly Digs #228

Break from Weekly Digs

Usually in December and sometimes January I take a break from writing the weekly digs each week. The garden is not growing, I’m not preserving much, and things generally slow way down around here.

After writing this post today and how short it is, haha, I will do my same December hiatus from weekly digs. So no weekly digs in December but I will have a new blog post for you each week instead 🙂 So keep stopping by the blog if you have time!

I am trying to share more of our daily activities on Instagram stories, and you can keep up with me on there if you have that platform. HERE is the link to my Instagram.

Pantry Tour

This is my 4th annual pantry tour and I share our freezer foods as well. It was a good year for the garden.

Free Apples

Earlier this week, I had a friend call me and say, “Did you hear that there are apples being given away?” I had heard about the apples (this was through our church) but we didn’t have time to go get them on a Saturday. My friend also mentioned that they were getting picked over and there were several bad ones left. 

This is perfect for us because our pigs and chickens will eat them! I told Cam about all this and he was able to call the person who had the overabundance of apples, they live about an hour away. 

Cam and the kids were able to get the apples on Monday night. They loaded up the truck bed about ¾ of the way full with apples! 

When he brought them home, I tasted one and they were really good! We sorted out the good ones for us and the bad ones for the pigs. 

Right away I got to work making some applesauce and apple juice. 

It’s always more work than I envision but by the second day I had 7 quarts of applesauce and 7 quarts of juice.  

On the 3rd day we started to freeze dry some apples and got 4 of the XL trays done. 

In the Garden

The cover crop I planted late is sprouting but very slowly. That is to be expected this time of year. 

Everything else is holding now that we are below 10 hours of light a day. The plants don’t like it, and I don’t like it either, haha! 

Thanksgiving

This is the first year in about three years that we have not hosted Thanksgiving. Party hosting and planning is not my thing at all, so it was really nice to go to a friend’s house instead.

Cam smoked one of our pasture raised turkeys. The turkey juice dripped a bunch and the smoker lit on fire! It was crazy! Cam ran out to save the turkey and was able to get most of it without too much damage. 

Unfortunately the smoker fan melted and became useless so we cooked the turkey the rest of the way in the oven. Turkey still tasted good though. Nice and smoky, haha.

I made some sourdough rolls for the first time ever. They were really good. I found the recipe HERE.