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