We Hear the Choppers Hovering

We had a flashback this week at The Acre. Lawman did anyway. We were in the house, minding our own business, when we heard a chopper fly over the house then hover about. It circled around long enough we had time to grab a camera and walk out on the deck to snap a photo or two.

With the crew actions  we can only assume this was a crop spotter, but this is only a guess. No ground crew responded so this may just be NSA prepping for the black choppers to land at a later date. We will keep ya'll posted.
After the government did their flyby, we got back to regular goings on. First of the week, Lawman did some foxgrape picking. We had such high hopes this year, the vines were weighted down with green grapes. As the season went along, we can only assume that woodland creatures found the vines because we barely picked enough for a batch of jelly. Wine will have to wait a year.

Speaking of woodland creatures, they started pulling down our gem corn this week. We set some traps to slow down the corn thievery, but we took a few ears to start drying.

Glass beads?

We are almost ready for fall

And while we were in jelly mode, we made a batch of apple jelly. This is new this year. We have an apple tree in the yard that we've always heard the apples referred to as "cow apples", only fit to feed to a cow. The chickens love them, they rush out of the coop deville each morning to grab some apple for breakfast, and the deer enjoy them in the evening. This year we wanted a piece of the action (ST:TOS reference for non-nurds). We picked a few up off the ground that were worm free and juiced them down then used our standard jelly recipe.

We made a trial run and all initial reports are good. We will probably make a whole lot more of this in the near future. This batch inspired us to purchase a juicer machine. All of our jelly starts off with juice, and this apple batch was labor intensive. We strive to work smarter, not harder.
We picked a basket full of tomatoes and peppers and made another round of salsa. After we posted our first batch on the Faceplace we got quite a few requests for a jar. And being addicted to the stuff as we are, we thought we might want to make a little more.

It was also peach season around The Acre this week. We bought two baskets full of white peaches at the local produce market, and went to work.

It's a shame "The Outlaw" is batshit crazy, because we had some classic country music playing, eating salsa and talking about all things Bugs Bunny while we worked to can em up.

We had to run two canners at a time

39 quarts of peaches, that should hold us a while

The one food related picture we had this week came from a request for pies. Pop was attending a couple of functions this weekend and needed some pie. Lawman made two buttermilk pies with buttermilk crust.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K

Pumpkin Time

We got our first pumpkin from the patch this week. It was the largest pumpkin we had to date, and the vine died off from it, so we went ahead and brought it up to the house to keep it from falling prey to chickens or bugs.

Everything that grows on a vine is living much longer this year than they ever have. Each season we plant a bunch of cucumbers, squash and melons. Each year the vines produce a few of each, then die off by the end of July. This year we started spraying our vines with a baking soda and water mixture, and the vines are still going strong at the end of August. We may be on to something here?

This includes the volunteer gourd vine that came up by the wood pile this spring. We thought we would let it live and we could have two or three gourds to decorate with. After we kept the spray on it, we probably have two or three dozen gourds on the one vine, and it has completely taken over the wood pile.

We use the spray on our tomato vines as well, and they have continued to produce fruit. The only thing we don't have to spray is our pepper plants. We guess nothing would dare grow on these things. Saturday we went our and picked a basket full of peppers, and a couple dozen tomatoes and spent the day making salsa and "lawman candy".

We started out making salsa. We chopped up our tomatoes and a few peppers, onions and fresh herbs. We slow cooked it while we made the lawman candy.

Then we sliced up what turned out to be around fifteen pounds of jalapeno peppers. We cooked them down in a spicy syrup, then canned them along with the salsa.

The tree jars on the left that are yellow is left over spicy syrup. Cupcake likes to pour the syrup on her tacos on taco night. Nothing goes to waste around The Acre.
Prior to the weekend marathon, Lawman picked a basket full of tomatoes, onion and peppers and made a canning of fresh from the garden spaghetti sauce.

The one cooking related picture we took this week, we didn't actually cook. Lawman was called upon to whip up a batch of cookie dough for a scout bake sale this week. It only takes about ten minutes to make a bag full of cookie dough, so it's an easy donation to make.

We were down to our last pack of steaks that we bought and cut ourselves from Wades a couple of months ago. Wades came through this weekend with another special on whole sirloins. We bought three whole sirloins and cut them and treated them with baking soda. We will let them marinate for a week before we freeze them and have them ready for Thor's night red meat offerings. Tune in next week for the documentation.
We ended the week with wings, and a homemade pizza for Jake.
K&K

Back to School

This week, school started. The Duchess began her junior year and received her class ring this week. This week was also the hottest week we've had this year. It was almost too hot to do much of anything outside. We managed to break two lawnmowers the same way on the same day, sort of.
We start off with The Duchess selfie just before she started back to school.

We assume she's just that excited to be going back?
On the first day of school it was cloudy and threatened rain, so we decided it would be a good day to do some lawn mower blade sharpening. Big Man took each mower over to Pop's garage to take the blades off and sharpen them with the grinder. When he took the blades off of Cupcake's new mower he found one of the blades had been bent, which would explain why it wasn't mowing correctly. When the blade came off, the spindle was rounded as well.
We ordered new spindles and blades for her mower, the blades came first so we installed the blades and gave it a try. It mowed well enough that we finished the yard, but we will need to replace the spindle in the coming week.
Big Man took the zero turn mower over and sharpened the blades on it. When he returned the blades to the mower deck, he always takes a pass in the grass on the way home. He noticed that one side/blade was mowing lower than the other. He thought he may have put the blade on upside down, so he took it back off, put it back on, and tried it again. Still mowed lower. By this time pop had joined the team, and we gauged the tires up. Still mowed low on one side. So we changed the blades from one side to the other to see if one blade was bent. Still mowed lower on the same side, so we adjusted the deck until it mowed level. Five minutes in to mowing, it began to "dig potatoes" . We took the mower back to the shop and upon closer inspection, two of the bolts that hold the spindle in place had broken off. So another order for spindles were placed. The coming week will be all mower maintenance all the time.
One day Cupcake wanted spaghetti for dinner, so we made a trip to the garden for fresh ingredients.

We took everything for the sauce fresh from the vine and put it straight in the pot.

We cooked it down until everything softened, then smoothed it out and added fresh herbs from Cupcake's herb garden on the deck.

We cooked it low and slow all day, letting the moisture cook off until it got thick and happy. The only store bought items we put in this meal was mushrooms and meatballs.

When it got too hot to do anything outside, Big Man picked two batches of rhubarb on two different days and made jelly.

We fixed salmon for dinner one night. We have proof that we can eat healthy, we just choose not to.

We again used fresh herbs from the deck planter. We don't know why everyone doesn't have an herb garden. We had fresh from the garden corn with the meal.

On a heat related note, we have a maple tree in the back yard that is starting to turn colors. We hope fall is just around the corner.

And on a tree related note, we noticed that all the pine trees in the area have heavy pine cones on them this year, but only in the tops. This is folklore of a sign of a heavy snow coming.

And on a karma related note, Cupcake wanted this to be added for documentation. Big Man pokes quite a bit of fun at Cupcake for getting distracted (shiny squirrel syndrome) but this week the Big Man was rinsing out the breading do-hicky we use to bread the squash when we fry squash for dinner, which is most nights.
Anyway, the Big Man went back to his squash frying duties and left the water running in the sink.

We ended the week with wings
K&K