The Weekly Digs #94
I will be honest with you, after the summer and fall of 2020, I felt so burnt out. We took on a ton this year with having two gardens, finishing remodeling our old house, putting our house for sale, selling our house, moving, setting up a new garden and fencing, preserving, and watering our entire 10,000 square foot garden by hand.Â
It was definitely fun but I was so tired. I ended up taking a step back from social media sharing this winter too because I needed it. It’s been so good for me to relax a little more, get some sleep, and recharge my batteries. I feel ready to start a new year and excited to get in the garden again!
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In the Garden
Over Christmas I ordered seeds. Surprisingly, I didn’t need to order much. I’ve been saving some seeds and I also have quite a few seeds left from last year. So when the new seeds came in the mail, I felt compelled to organize everything.
In years past, I organized by plant type and in alphabetical order. This can be effective but it just wasn’t working for me. I kept forgetting to plant certain things on time.

This year, I put sticky notes on the seed packs with the dates of when to plant. Each sticky note says whether to start that seed indoors or outdoors. Then I put everything in calendar order. I’m so excited I’ve found a solution that is going to work for me!
I am just a week away from starting my first seeds indoors. I have scraped by with shop lights every year for indoor lighting but I think I might invest in some nice seed starting lights this year.
Also, in lieu of seed starting next week, I am making some of my homemade seed starting soil mix. You can find out how I do this HERE and on the blog post there is a link to the actual recipe.

House Progress
Our roof got started and is really close to being done! Hallelujah! No progress inside can happen until the roof is finished.

Cows
After Christmas our cows decided that the electric fence was no match for them. The calves kept plowing through it and because cows are herd animals the rest would follow.
Cameron got so frustrated because we would go up to check on the cows everyday and each day they were out wandering on our land somewhere.
We assumed when we got the cows that they were used to electric fencing since they had it in the early spring at the friend’s land we bought them from. After a little reading we learned that cows can sometimes forget to respect electric fencing if it’s been a while.
Electric is very effective but it is a psychological barrier more than a physical barrier. Our cows didn’t have a fear of getting shocked. The solution to this is to train the cows to electric fencing.
What we did was we got some metal cattle panels and set them up in a circle. Through the middle of the circle you string electric fencing about three quarters of the way through. Then on one side of the corrall you place the water and on the other side you place hay.

They have a way to walk around the electric fence without getting shocked but most of the time will see the water or food and try to walk straight through. Once they get shocked a few times they learn they don’t like it and will avoid the fence and walk around.
We had our cows in the makeshift corral for about two days. The first day they knocked down the electric fence entirely so it didn’t work. The second day, we set everything back up and they were definitely challenging the fence at first.
Twenty four hours later our friend who we had borrowed some cattle panels from needed them back so we went up to check on them to see if we could take them out. They didn’t get anywhere near the electric fence and we saw the calves walk all the way around.
Cameron and the kids put them back into the pasture they stayed inside the fence the entire time, no escape artists! It’s been a week and a half and it has worked incredibly well. This was an exciting win for us.