The Weekly Digs #75

The big project for this week was weeding, planting fall crops, and plowing a new area. It was cool, beautiful weather for several days. We loved every minute of the weather!

The kids wanted to plant pickling cucumbers again because I did not plant enough this year for making pickles. They spent a few hours weeding an area and then planting. 

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A happy result of the work they have been doing is they have been saying more and more that hard work feels good -at least when the weather is cool 🙂 And that they get to enjoy the food later on!

I thought about what the kids said as I was plowing a new area for our fall crops. This particular section of garden has been difficult to plow and get the soil loosened up- even with our BCS tractor. The dirt is very compacted and the bermuda grass is deep. 

I spent 3 hours in a light drizzle working this soil and just praying in my mind about many things but mostly that I could figure out how to get it done. Sometimes it seems like the soil is hard enough that I am plowing over top of rock! My hands were sporting huge blisters and my arms were so sore. 

After I took a break, I was ready to call it quits for the day. But I started to think about how not everyone is able to do this kind of work and how grateful I was for a healthy body and the land that surrounded me. It gave me the motivation I needed to work for another hour before it got dark. As my kids said, hard work feels good! But my body begs to differ and I’m feeling it today.

I also got some more salsa done this week. It was regular ol’ salsa, not the fire roasted kind 😉 I canned several jars of that and some pizza sauce. And I started a big batch of vegetable broth for canning (see pic below).

I should really be spending more time packing my house up but at the moment the garden harvest and work feels more pressing. I think my priorities will change really fast here as we get closer to moving. So many good and wonderful things ahead!

In the home garden:

• My summer squash is going crazy with production! It will be hard to give that up when we go but we sure enjoyed it while we had it this summer.
• We are harvesting lots of tomatoes, a few cucumbers, kale, basil, and peppers. I was hoping to be able to leave the new owners of our home and garden with more but I just haven’t had time to replant in areas where I normally would have done lots of fall crops.

In the farm garden:

• We are harvesting tomatoes and peppers. Winter squash, watermelon, and cantaloupe are almost ready.
• I pulled out most of the San Marzano tomatoes that had blossom end rot. I wasn’t able to correct the problem. They were taking up a lot of space and had very little productivity so they had to go.
• We moved around silage tarp to cover some pesky weeds. With this new garden that used to be a perennial field it has been really difficult to keep the grasses from coming back and weeds from going crazy with growth. 
• We planted carrots, cabbage, and chinese cabbage, cucumbers, and daikon radish.

In the kitchen:

• Canned 8 pints of salsa
• Canned 4 pints of pizza sauce