The Weekly Digs #235

Farm and Garden Reading

Over our vacation and throughout the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading a few books. One I just finished is Farmacology by Daphne Miller MD. It is about how our health is related to the health of the farm. The book doesn’t quite make my favorites list, but it was definitely an interesting read!

Daphne talks about how our health is directly related to the quality of the food we eat. 

Since she is a doctor, she has several instances in the book of relating a lesson from the farm to our own bodies. For one, a holistic farm considers interconnected relationships in order to have a thriving ecosystem. For example, if you kill all the rattlesnakes on the farm, then you’ll soon have gophers overrunning the place and causing issues. 

Similarly, a holistic approach is how we should be healing our bodies since we are also a very complex system. A simple “take this pill” approach doesn’t always work because of that. A modern doctors approach is take a pill for an ailment, check for side effects. If you have a side effect, now take another pill to fix that side effect ,and so on. She points out that we need more of a preventative and dynamic approach to human health.

She doesn’t dismiss pharmaceuticals because they can be beneficial and in some cases are necessary. But does say pills are definitely over prescribed. I listened to the audio version of the book and you can find it HERE.

In the Garden

I am still wrapping up my garden plan for the summer. I shared my spring garden plan a few weeks ago HERE, and will share the summer one with you next week.

Wheat is popping up! Here’s a picture of one week ago vs. today:

We started a few more seeds this week. You’ll notice some of the same seeds from last week. I made more soil mix and did another batch. 

• Sweet alyssum
• Giant hybrid mix dahlia
• Opopeo Amaranth
• Greek Oregano
• Thyme
• Delfino cilantro

I have been working on prepping an area in the high tunnel for planting. To do that I needed to remove some of the crops that were there over the winter.

I had cabbage, fennel, and kohlrabi that were in that spot but most of it had heavy frost damage. So I tossed all the really bad ones to the chickens and kept the rest for us. 

The goal for this year is to get ⅓ of the garden in cover crops and a significant amount of the open spaces in the fruit rows covered in low growing flowers. 

Cam made more soil block trays, yay! I shared about that in our most recent Youtube video. He made 13 before he ran out of material for the bases. I used all 13 trays already! 

It is a huge blessing to be able to have the space to start a lot of seeds this year! 

I am doing more transplants because it helps me to stay ahead of the weeds. My time is more limited than ever. When Riggs was little, he slept a bunch and I had enough time to garden.

This year he is now very active and awake most of the day. I bring him out with me sometimes and also work in the garden during his nap. Some days I have only an hour, other days I can manage 3 or 4 hours. 

That is also the reason why I am sheet composting and mulching a good portion of the garden as we go along with our planting. I don’t have time for weeding and I’m trying super hard to avoid using plastic ground cover as an easy fix.