Busy Week, No Head

We had a busy week around The Acre this past week. The one thing we were looking forward to, was harvesting our first head of cabbage from the garden. We took a stroll out to the garden on July 4th, with plans of celebrating the holiday with fresh coleslaw, and found our chickens had acquired a taste for fresh cabbage. This struck us odd, because when we first started raising chickens, all the advice we got was to put a head of cabbage in the run for your birds, they will play with it and eat it to keep them occupied. Our birds did none of this. The cabbage rotted, untouched. So, losing our first heads to the birds was unexpected.
We spent one day fixing chicken wire over the row of cabbage to try and save what we have left.

And while we had all our tools out, we decided to go ahead and knock out a project we have been planning. Deck boxes for planting our salad fixings.

We will have to wait until next week for finished product pictures. There is a large patch of catnip under one of the deck boxes, and they were full of honey bees when we got the boxes finished. We decided to let them do their thing and hang the boxes at dusk, after they head home.
We also have a large patch of black eye susans for our honey bee friends. Cupcake is very happy with the patch.

While we were busy working on wood projects, Kattie Grace wanted to do some baking. She made a batch of cupcakes, all by herself.

And that was not the only kitchen time KG got this week. She was invited to a 4th of July party, and wanted to make a dish. She made a batch of patriotic strawberries, dipped in white chocolate. Having a strawberry patch has it's perks.

Chef has to sample

Jake stood guard while she was working with the oven. Cause he's fireman like that.

Then we move to the week in food. First things first, we made our first batch of pickles this week. No "yellow pickles" this year. This year, it's all dill pickles, all the time. Cupcake has been raising fresh dill in her herb garden, and there is a special feeling when you clip dill right off the garden, and drop it into the mix for dill pickles. We know everyone is tired of hearing ours are better than anything you can buy, so we won't say it again. (but they are)

And for the something new item, Big Man made fried peach pies for dessert one night. We had two peaches left over from canning the peaches, so he chopped them up, mixed up a pie filling, and used the extra pie crust we had leftover. We will be adding these to the lineup again.

Filling mix was just right

Cupcake made one of her favorite dishes one night, fried chicken.

Not to be out done, Big Man fried up some squash. Pop has been getting squash on a regular basis, and he has been supplying us for a couple of weeks now.

Then we moved to Cupcake's obsession, fried green tomatoes. We got our first two tomatoes from the garden this week.

We part this week with a few pictures from the garden. Everything is growing right along, we added a flag to the new fence, and our giant sunflowers are coming along.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K