Good and the Bad

We like to do positive posts here at The Acre, and looking back you can see most of them are upbeat and positive. This week we have a "swing and a miss" post, well, part of it anyway. We made a big deal over our potato boxes this summer. All they hype said one hundred pounds of potatoes per box, and we did two boxes, so we planned on a starch fueled winter. Well, not so much.
We emptied out the red potato box a few weeks ago, and only got about six potatoes, all from the bottom of the box. It seemed like the vines did not produce the shoots as we added dirt. We thought maybe it was just a red potato trait, and had higher hopes for the white potato box. We found potatoes right on top as we started...

But as we went along, we only found one or two on each level. This was the whole box when we finished.

The thought on the failure seems to be that maybe we added the dirt too quick. Next year we will wait until the fines are bigger before we add dirt. 
On a potato related note, Cupcake had several pots of sweet potato vines around the house this summer, and the latest frost put an end to those. As we were pulling the vines out of the pots, we found sweet potatoes in the pots. We thought the vines were only decorative, so this was an unexpected surprise.

We may have better luck with sweet potatoes next year.
With it being Fall, we did outside Fall things this weekend. We gathered up about a half bushel of black walnuts. We have about a dozen walnut trees here on the property, but this is the first year we've picked any up. We started cracking a few of the dried ones, but most of these will have to wait a week or two before we start on them.

And as we get on to the food part of the blog, we start off with a walnut related item. Apple cake. Big Man is a pie making somebody, but for some reason we've never tried cake. Cupcake had an old high school friend and his family stop by The Acre this weekend, so we did a meal up right, with cake for dessert. Big Man made a batch of his soon to be world famous cream cheese icing, and it really turned out well, but next cake (probably this weekend) we are going to make another one using black walnuts instead of pecans. We think it will really make the cake "pop".

And of course, we smoked meat. Brisket

We were so focused on the meal prep, we didn't think about taking the usual step by step pics, these were more of an afterthought, as you can tell by the amount of food in the pics. We will do better next time.  We ended the week with chicken wing Sunday, because it's how we roll.
K&K