The Weekly Digs #239

Hi friends. Thank you so much for your comments last week. They were so thoughtful and really touched me! Also, it was enlightening because I didn’t consider that some of you don’t read email newsletters. I still haven’t really made a decision as to how to move forward yet. For now, as long as I have people reading, I will keep writing.

High Tunnel #2

This week, our high tunnel arrived. It is our second high tunnel, the one we got a NRCS Grant for. We pay for upfront and they reimburse us after it is after it is built and approved.

So that means we’re gonna get started on it quickly and hopefully finish it quickly. The reason for that being so that we can get growing in it but also get reimbursed for the funds that we used to purchase it.

Our local and NRCS representative is really awesome and offered to have some of the people their from their office come and help us put it up. He says there are a some new employees that would love to learn!

So we are probably gonna take advantage of that offer once we get the ground posts in. That way we’ll have everything kind of set up. We hope to have them help us put up the bows and see how far we get with that. 

Cam is going to take a day off of work this Friday to go and get some compost and we will rent a dump trailer for that. Then in a week or two he will take another day off of work to get started on this high tunnel.

Homesteading Conference

Another interesting thing from this week is Cam and I went to a local homesteading conference and we were on a question-and-answer panel. Some of the questions were about we turned a hobby into a business. And also how we bring in revenue from our businesses.

There were several other people on the panel. One of them was a preschool farm school that was that is based out of Kansas City. It was really cool to learn about their preschool age farm school and something I never thought of before. I think they said they have about 50 kids enrolled and a waitlist of 200 kids! They teach preschool age kids through hands on learning out on the farm. But also do some activities indoors.

The other people on the panel were our friends from Tuckaway Farm. They run market garden and have just started their business last year. In addition to the market garden, they also plan on making their place a wedding venue and event center, having cabins there, and a farm to table restaurant to bring in revenue.

It was really fun to look at all of the different types of ways you can bring in revenue from farming and homesteading. For us, we are teaching through the blog and youtube. So we make revenue through ads, affiliate sales, and sponsors. We are still really hoping to get to a place where Cam can quit his day job and work full-time here at our Homestead. It is a dream that we hope to make a reality someday.

Part of the reason behind the job shift is Cam is really struggling with his current job but taking it day by day. Some days are ok but other days comes home so frustrated and discouraged which is so against his nature. He is very much a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Luckily, he has a few good friends at his office that help make bad days better.

We are praying that the pieces fall into place so he can do more of what he loves and find more joy in his vocation.

In the Garden

In the garden, I ran out of trays to make soil blocks so I had to plant a bunch of the seedlings that I had already started. Mostly the flowers are the ones that I had not put out yet so we planted some sweet alyssum, calendula, and also cilantro into the garden.

I also potted up Cams hatch chili peppers.

In the Kitchen

In the kitchen, I spent some time making preserved lemons this week. We ran out of our preserved lemons that we had made several months ago when we did our three months of no grocery shopping, so it was definitely time to make another batch. 

Another thing that I made this week that I never made before was sourdough pancakes and they were super delicious. But I decided I may tweak several things in them and try and come up with my own recipe because they had coconut oil and it was an overpowering flavor. Usually I don’t mind it but for some reason in the pancakes it was extra strong.

So I was going to try some different formulations of sourdough pancakes in the future and maybe get a recipe on the blog for you guys soon.

Next week I have a day in the life video coming out, so I show making the sourdough pancakes in it and how I made the preserved lemons and some of the meals we made that day. Life has changed since having a baby, the last time I did a day in the life video was almost 2 years ago. So our family dynamic is quite different now and I share a little bit more of some of the behind-the-scenes thing that nobody usually sees.

Well, that’s all I have for now. I wrote this post slightly differently than I usually do. I decided to do voice to text and it’s actually been a lot faster to get this out and written. So perhaps this is a sustainable way to keep doing the weekly digs! If you see typos that is why! I did reread this and tried to fix most of the errors 🙂 Thanks for visiting and hanging out with me today!