The Weekly Digs #243

One year ago this week, Riggs was born! It doesn’t feel like it was that long ago.  I honestly don’t know how I had a baby last year and managed to plant out our year’s supply of food. I’ve been thinking about that because we have been pretty swamped with planting and preparing the garden over the last couple of weeks.

Cam did have 12 weeks of paternity leave over last summer and that really made all the difference! 

Garden Job Shadowing

On Tuesday of this week, my neighbor Lucy came over and helped in the garden. She needed to job shadow someone for a class in school. 

We made soil blocks and planted seeds. She was a good helper and learned fast! I also wanted to show her the video aspect of the job so we took the camera around with us and recorded. You’ll see what we did on an upcoming Youtube video!

I think something eye-opening for her was how much time and extra work it takes to make a video. We were working for two hours in the garden and then came inside and I showed her how to edit it. When all was said and done we had about two minutes of finished video.

That is a pretty accurate estimate of time from real life to video form. When a 16 minute video comes out usually that is about 16 hours of work that we did outside. I’m sure that’s not accurate for everyone that makes videos but I’m more of a doer than a talker so it requires a little more work.

In the Garden 

• Lucy planted Trifecta melon and PMR Delicious 51 Melon. The latter melon was a late add on to my seed choices for the year. She also planted Bouquet Dill.
• We potted up 50 Roma tomatoes to the 4 inch soil blocks. They were in the trays way too long and were looking sad! But now that they are potted up they are looking good already and it’s only been a few days. 
• I also started to pot up sweet peppers. If all goes well, we’ll remove tarps this week and plant both the tomatoes and the peppers.

On Friday we removed collards going to seed in the back of the garden. I was really trying to let them grow long enough that I could save seed and they were so close! But the plants were being attacked by harlequin bugs and I really needed to reclaim that area to plant my corn.

Saturday has become our family gardening time. We all go out and get a big project done, usually something that would take me forever to do by myself. 

This week it was prepping the area for planting corn. We added compost first, then weed paper over that, then wood chip mulch in the walkways to hold down the paper. 

By the time we finished the first part, it was time to go in for lunch. After a long lunch and getting some to-do’s done around the house, then going out to visit friends, we went back outside. This time it was getting close to dark so it was much more pleasant. Earlier in the day it was 85ºF and very humid. 

Noelle and I transplanted some sweet corn. I started the seeds in soil blocks this year so that I actually get my spacing right. 

We started about 250 plants, not all the seeds sprouted though. So we got about 50 plants in the ground and called it quits for the night. Cam is actually outside as I type this trying to get a couple more trays of corn seedlings transplanted!

In the Kitchen

It felt good to do a little bit of canning this week. I had cranberries in my freezer I got in bulk in the fall but had not used them all.

I made them into jellied cranberry sauce and it was super yummy! I added some orange zest and used apple juice instead of water. Both are safe changes to make because apple juice is also acidic. I will type out the recipe and share it soon!