The Weekly Digs #229

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It’s getting close to garden season and I’m starting up the Weekly Digs again! I miss writing and sharing in this way!

Sometimes I feel like the Weekly Digs are a little bit of a repeat of what I share on Youtube and Instagram. But in this space I am able to dive deeper and even talk about moments where the camera wasn’t out. 

That was the case for this week. I didn’t film much of our garden happenings because it’s mostly just maintenance.

The post contains affiliate links. Full disclosure can be found here.

In the Garden

It was warmer than average this week and it felt like heaven. I spent everyday outside at least for some portion of the day, soaking up the sun. 

Here’s what I got done:

Planted 25 raspberries- variety is “Double Gold”

I haven’t tried this variety yet. My current raspberry rows are looking a little pathetic. We are on the edge of being too hot of an area to grow raspberries so not all varieties thrive. I have patches of bushy large raspberry canes and other areas that completely died back.

In the bare areas, I planted the new kind and I’m also spreading out and replanting raspberry plants that we already have. 

Burned areas of the garden and berry rows. 

There is something oddly satisfying about burning grasses and plants. It’s sort of like an instant clean up and fresh start for the year. 

Leveled out the area where I will start my seeds.

Over in the tunnel, I had covered the ground to make a seed starting area but at the time it had all kinds of weeds on it. Now all weeds are gone so I took off the ground cover and was able to level out the land.

We took a shovel and scooped off high spots of dirt and then put them on the low spots, then raked it all out. 

It’s not completely level because I do want the excess water to drain off, so I followed the slope and tried to make the middle a little higher so the water would drain out. 

Mostly Finished our Irrigation in the High Tunnel

I have a video of this to share that I hope I can get out on Youtube next week. We have a few little things to button up and film. Below is an image of the drip irrigation as we were setting it up.

The row to the far left had broccoli, but I pulled them out today because most had severe frost damage.

The Pantry Challenge

We are one month into our pantry challenge and so far we are doing well 🙂 I am feeling good and excited about it, the kids and Cam are along for the ride. On that note, I can confidently say they aren’t quite as enthusiastic as me.

I made a list of meals we are cooking HERE.

One unexpected thing that has come out of the pantry challenge is Dax decided he really likes to cook/bake and do videography of the process.

I thought he would lose interest but so far he has made a new snack or meal just about every day. He is editing them himself and posting them on Youtube. 

Above is the first video he made, I think it turned out so good (I’m super biased of course)! They are short and sweet videos!

My First Ever Live Class/Webinar

As a little girl, I hardly talked. My siblings always joked that my older sister Sara would talk for me. Sara was outgoing and talkative (still is) and I was quiet and did not say much.

Honestly, not much has changed for me either. I’m definitely introverted but somewhere along the line realized I also was dealing with some amount of social anxiety too. It’s not fun but I try not to dwell on it too much. 

And even though it is a weakness, there have been some good things that have come out of it. For example, because I’m perfectly fine spending lots of time at home and not socializing, that also means I get a lot done on the homestead and was able to set aside time to start this blog and a Youtube channel.

I’m not a big talker, and I avoid public speaking as best I can because it makes me nervous. So you can imagine my feelings when my friend asked me if I would be willing to do a little class for Seedtime a few months ago.

I believe I’ve talked about it here before, but if you haven’t heard of it, Seedtime is a computer garden planning program. 

Seedtime is still in development so it’s not perfect at everything but has some really cool features like automatically planning days to maturity of a crop, and now you can visually plan the garden layout and see succession plantings. 

I use Seedtime and really like it. I also hoped to help some fellow gardeners, so I said yes to being a guest speaker.

Even though I am pretty confident with being on video now, participating in a live setting in front of people whether it be a computer or in person gives me a ton of trepidation. 

I took several days to prepare and surprisingly was able to sleep the night before just fine. I prayed a whole bunch that it would go ok.

It went well, but a few words came out not as I intended. I also was so nervous I think I said um about a thousand times 🙂  I tried not to think about it afterwards but my mind just kept dwelling on the few very tiny mess ups, even though the rest went great! 

I’ve always wondered why our brains do that to us sometimes. Why does a 1% negative thing seem to outweigh a 99% positive experience? 

Thankfully, the feedback overall was very good and I don’t really think anyone else noticed or cared. I would like to get better at that sort of thing but my emotions surrounding the experience need a while to recover before I do anything like that again.

If you wanted to see the class but didn’t get a chance, you can check out the replay HERE. If I were to put together a video course or e-book to sell it would have some of this same information on exactly HOW we grow and plan a year’s supply of food. I don’t think I’ve really talked about it anywhere else.

Hope you all had a great holiday season! It’s time to start gardening again soon, yay!