Reunion Week Again

This week snuck up on us. We did our usual stuff, had a boil for dinner, Thor's red meat day offerings and usual chicken drama. The picture portion of this weeks update is mostly reunion stuff. Every year we try to think of new things to take, some are hits, some are misses. We are narrowing down what the people want, and this year we decided what the people want is buttermilk pie. We experimented this week with three pies, buttermilk, strawberry rhubarb and chocolate. The only pie that didn't come home with us was buttermilk. Next year we will be the buttermilk pie people.
We start the pictures with strawberry rhubarb. We have quite the rhubarb patch this year and we picked a handful Saturday. We diced it up with just enough strawberries from the garden to make a pie.

Cupcake did the chopping

Fresh from the garden

Adding the sugar/flour mix

Egg white wash

Then we made a chocolate pie. And it's not any of the "crazy granny" jello from a box chocolate pie either, this is from scratch all the way.

And then the big hit, buttermilk pie.

The reunion is always a big time, lots of great food and everyone leaves with a full belly. Unlike Cupcake's family reunions, there are no fistfights and the arrival of police does not signal the end of the reunion.

Our cousins Bill and Francis, Bill Jr and Betty stopped by the house on their way home, we loaded them up with a pie of their very own, some pickles and soap. We always look forward to a visit from our family from the big city.
Other than the fresh rhubarb we picked this week, we did pick a mess of collards from the garden and had them on Thor's day.

And we're trying a new thing with our Thor's day red meat offerings. We spotted a whole sirloin at the local Wade's store and it was under thirty dollars. We bought said sirloin, and brought it home. Big Man sliced it up into eight steaks, then we prepped it up with the baking soda and garlic powder, packaged them up and have them in the fridge. We figure we saved around fifty dollars by doing the steaks this way. We look forward to reporting on how they turn out.

We still had our belly full after the reunion, so we skipped wings this week. Chickens breathe a sigh of relief.
K&K

Foiling Preditors

This week we had births and deaths in the farm game. We had two more guinea birds hatch, thanks to Boomer, and we had a racoon kill about half of our new birds. Boomer has been on the nest for over a month now and has managed to hatch three guinea eggs. We had a guinea bird on the nest and she managed to hatch three eggs, but as soon as the eggs hatched she kicked the keets out of the nest. Big Man found two dead, and found one newly hatched keet that had just been kicked out of the nest. He got it to the heat lamp in time and appears to be doing fine. Our lead off picture this week is Boomers last hatch. Big Man stopped in the coop deville mid day and found one of the last of Boomers eggs cracked. BM carried it to the heat lamp cage and ran to grab the camera, but by the time he got back to the cage the keet had already broke free.

We also have been hand feeding the keets sugar water, they came up with a case of pasty butt, and this helps keep things moving in the right direction.

We put the new arrival birds into the starter coop this week. We've been using it for almost four years now and never had a problem with woodland creatures interfering with the birds. That streak ended Thursday. A racoon dug under a plywood cover between the two coops and killed about half of our young chicks. We figured it would come back Friday night for the second half so we scrambled for a solution. Our usual go to response would have been foot traps to catch the critter, but Jake had not brought the traps back to the house yet, so we rigged up a deterrent instead. We screwed in plastic insulators and ran a hot wire around the base of the two coops. We placed a cinder block in front of the hole so the racoon would have to get on top of the wire to re dig the hole, then we ran a line from the electric fence to the hot wire. We've had no more digging under the coop, so we're chalking this up as a win.

We got the two hog wire pieces up for the cucumbers to run up.

And we have a before and after picture of the sucker tomatoes that we pulled off and replanted. We are very pleased with this technique.

Cupcake got to use her new lawn mower this week when she helped BM mow the lawn. We didn't get a picture of it because Cupcake is the usual photog. Just visualize her mowing here.....
One food related updates, we start off with last week's wings. Just as we got the wings fried up the power went out. We didn't let that slow us down any, we lit the oil lamps and chowed down.

Cupcake wanted a soon to be world famous buttermilk pie this week, so BM whipped one up. This week instead of using the rolling pin to roll out the crust, BM used just his fingers to spread the crust until it got to the right size to fill the pie plate.

We raided pop's garden one night and made a huge batch of scalded lettuce for Thor's night of red meat offerings.

We got one last picking of cherries, this time from the tree in the back yard. We made another batch of jelly.

And we made another batch of laundry detergent.

We end the weeks update with a hijacked picture from The Dutchess. A picture of the happy couple

We ended the week with wings.
K&K

It's all Lyes

We had another busy week at The Acre this week. It started off like any other week, we puttered around doing busy work. Mid week we had an appointment for new tires on the Big Blue Bus so we drove to Roanoke but Sam's had no tires in stock. So we had to go back on Friday, and Friday morning as we were leaving the house we got a call from the post office to let us know that we had a package that was "chirping".
We had special ordered forty chicks in late February, but they never came so we requested our money back the first of June. We figured that would have been the end of this years chicken raising, until the phone rang. We picked the package up and sure enough, forty new hatched chicks. These birds all lay chocolate brown eggs, so we're excited to have them added to the family.
Then on Sunday afternoon we popped in the coop deville to check on our broody girls, and we found our first guinea egg had hatched under our lavender amerucana "Boomer".

Baby guinea and Oswald

And we noticed one of the birds had curled feet. We checked with the interwebs, and found it is a common problem for new hatched chicks with a simple fix. We took band-aids and cut the pad out of the middle then used the two sticky sides and put them on the opened feet of the bird. The band-aid kept the toes pointed out straight. After one full day we took the band-aid off and the bird was running and jumping and playing like little birds do.

Say hello to Oswald Cobblepot

Prior to all the bird excitement we made two more batches of homemade lye soap. We used lavender from Cupcake's herb garden to flavor the soap, and it really smells great. We made a second batch and used store bought eucalyptus oil. We understand it's good to use when one has a cold. So we are all set for about six months worth of soap bars now.

Fresh lavender for soap scent

We got fancy and bought soap bar molds

Basket full of soap

Another project this week was a new batch of dill pickles. We found pickle cucumbers at Sam's while we were waiting for our tires, so we bought enough for a batch. We did chips and spears.

Fresh dill from the herb garden

Huge fresh garlic, thin sliced and added to each jar

We use the low heat long can method. Extra crispy

 We picked another batch of bush cherries and made a few more jars of jelly

And one food related picture, we smoked a pork shoulder and made pulled pork BBQ.

Our last picture this week is courtesy of the Alphageek family. We got a message there was a riding mower they needed gone. We swapped a few dozen eggs for the mower, and with a little TLC and a couple of hours on a battery charger, we got the mower running like a top. Now Cupcake has a mower of her very own.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K

Saturday Bath

Back in the day, Saturday nights were bath nights. Way back in the day families would use a wash tub, and the same bath water. The batting order was men, boys, wife, daughters then the baby. By the time the baby got washed, the water was pretty murky. This is where the phrase "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" was born.
The point to the story is, this week we made our very first batch of home made lye soap like they used back in those days. And we gave Fraidy Mutt a bath in a wash tub. Actually, it was a huge storage bin we use for new hatched chicks, but it got double use this week. We did not use the lye soap on the mutt, she got oatmeal soap and warm water. Somebody spoils the dog.

After we got the mutt squared away, we started on our lye soap. We ordered the lye online, we had all the other fixings on hand already.

The odd thing about making lye soap is it's ingredients are mixed by weight instead of volume. Even the water had to be weighed out. But once we got the ingredients weighed out, the process was simple.

Digital scale for ingredients

Mixing the lye and water. Stuff gets crazy hot

Oil, lye and water mixed up and ready to cook

45 minutes into the cook, we're ready to add the mint

We don't know if folks back in the day used anything to scent their soap, we know our grandparents lye soap was plain, and while the soap was cooking, it brought back fond memories of old time soap. We decided for our first batch we would use clippings from our mint patch to give the soap a minty scent.

 About fifteen minutes before the soap was done cooking, we added the mint to the mix. We pulled the mint out when the time was up, then poured the soap into a wax paper lined bread pan and let it cool. After it cooled and firmed up, we cut it into twelve bars of soap.

We cut one bar out for Pops, one went straight to the shower and one by the sink to wash hands with. The soap has a great lather and the mint smell is pretty loud, we really like this recipe. We have already made plans to make our next batch with lavender that Cupcake has growing on the porch. We don't know why everyone don't make their own soap.
Our second big project this week was jelly. We had already planned on making plum jelly this weekend because it was calling for rain and we knew we couldn't get outside. Sunday morning when we walked down to open up the coop deville, we noticed our bush cherries had ripened up so we picked a large bowl full and made two batches of jelly. First off, bush cherries.

After we got the cherry jelly in to the water bath canner, we made the plum jelly.

The funny thing is, we had a case of jelly jars gifted to us from our cousins Wayne and Betsy a few months ago, and we decided to use them today. When we took them out, we found they had been used by them for plum jelly. How weird is that?

Finished products

Before we get to random pictures from this week, another funny story. We think it's funny, you might not.
Friday Big Man was busying around the house doing shack bitch things while Cupcake had "The Dutchess" in town doing some back to school shopping. The house was quiet until a sudden thud on the roof, and what sounded like someone walking on the roof. Big Man's first thought was Santa was way off course and stopped for directions. He walked outside to see what was the matter, and found a guinea bird looking down at him.

It turns out that the guineas have discovered that if they start from our roof, they can glide off the roof and down past the coop deville into the woods. We we guess we have a guinea amusement park open now. It's a small price to pay for tick and snake removal.
Other bird news, Team Arrow has been free ranging for a couple of weeks now. This week they found the front of the house. They are big birds now. We will probably be moving them to the coop deville soon because we have a big bunch of guinea eggs due to hatch by the end of the month, and we will need the room.

Random pictures this week, we start off with Granny Arlee's peonies in full bloom.

We have green tomatoes both in the garden and on the back porch.

We are still getting sugar snap peas from the deck planter.

Our only food picture this week was taken on Thor's Day of red meat offerings. Cupcake made her soon to be world famous grilled s'mores.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K