Never Rub Another Man's Rhubarb

This week was Halloween. We pay homage to Jack Nicholson's Joker because of the above line. Every time we go to the garden to harvest rhubarb, Big Man rattles off that line. It's his second favorite line from the Joker in that movie, second only to "How does a man, dressed as a bat, get all my press?"
 This week, it was all rhubarb all the time.

First thing we had to do, was dig up the sod from our new rhubarb patch. We decided on a patch behind the new garden. It's flat, and it's near an electric pole, which was awkward to mow around in the summer. After getting the sod up, we had to dig up the roots from our established rhubarb.  The hippies that write about such things say every four years, one should dig up and split the root mass to keep them healthy. So we dug up our roots. We had a couple of good hard freezes recently, so the roots should have gone dormant.

We found years ago that old school post diggers was the best way to plant rhubarb root. After we split our bulb bunches, we had ten new sets. We got them all planted in the new bed, so we had to insulate them for the winter. First step was chicken poop. We had been putting off cleaning the coop out until we could get the rhubarb planted. We scooped the poop and old hay, and topped the roots.

After we spread the poop, we covered the bed with peat moss. And because we have chickens, and it is their nature to scratch a bed like this clean, we covered the whole thing with chicken wire. Damn birds.

Last but not least, we replaced the hay in the coop with fresh hay. Our girls are now fresh insulated for the winter. A big thank you goes out to Jake, who made the trip to town for our hay and peat moss.

One other project, if you can call it a project. We have jelly making down to something we can do within an hour. This one was no exception. Cranberries have shown up in local markets so that means cranberry sauce. And lucky for us, our cousins Bill and Francis sent a large collection of canning jars to us. We promised to put them to good use, so that's what we did.

Free jars? Yes please

We go whole berry

And we have to have a food post. This week it was deer chili. Jake got his deer meat from the meat processing plant, and Big Man went to work making his soon to be world famous deer chili.

We know at least two pints have been consumed in Afghanistan, that's world wide?

We had chili for dinner, then canned the rest. It made three gallons (12 quarts) so we should be all set for chili this winter. It turned out a bit more spicy than usual, and we're OK with that.
We ended the week with wings.
K&K