Gem of a Week

Busy week around The Acre this week once again. We were in harvest mode this week, picking grapes, squash, salsa fixings and gem corn. Our regular two or three followers know that two years ago we bought a pack of twelve seeds off the interwebs of gem corn. We planted them in a pot on our deck to keep it from cross pollination with our eating corn and we managed two small ears of corn to show for our troubles. On the plus side, the two small ears we got yielded enough seed corn for a whole row of gem corn this year. Pop donated a row in his garden, to avoid eating corn cross pollination again. It made it's self this week, so now we have it drying on the porch.

We picked about three or four dozen ears, so we will have plenty of decorations this year and will probably use the prettiest of the bunch for seed next year. We may have to plant two rows if space will allow.
During the shucking frenzy that went on when we got back to the house, Fraidy Mutt had to be in the middle of the action. Here she is looking less than impressed at the mess we made.

And on the decoration front, we bought a few mums to plant soon. It's beginning to look a lot like fall.

And our pumpkins are getting huge. The anti blight spray is keeping the vines alive, most of our neighbors plants have long died off, ours are still going strong. We count over two dozen pumpkins so far, but we figure that number should double once we can see under the foliage later in the season.

Our second harvest item this week was butternut squash. This is a new item here at The Acre. We only planted three vines but we picked over a dozen squash from them. We plan on using some to decorate with and keeping about a half dozen or so in the basement. Word is they will keep six months if kept cool and dark. We will advise on shelf life.
The rest we cubed up and canned.

We considered this a trial run. Depending on flavor and recipes we try this winter, we will add to the count next year or move on to something new. Again, we will keep y'all in the loop.
Next was salsa. We still get a picking of tomatoes about once a week, and the hot peppers are steady coming in. We have already made two strings of red peppers to decorate with, and still put a bunch of them into the salsa. It's a bit warm, but Cupcake has taken to eating the jalapeno peppers straight from the jar now. She has been ruined.

We are keeping our yellow squash alive with the anti blight spray. we are into September now and still getting squash at least once a week. The tender ones we fry up for Cupcake, the older tougher squash we boil and make casserole with. We are very pleased to have kept squash around this long into the season. Not many people still have it this late, we know we are blessed.

We managed to pick about a half of a basket of grapes from our vine this year. The guinea birds got most of the grapes just as they were turning. Lawman picked a couple here, a couple there and managed enough for a cooking of jelly. Just barely.

And after we mentioned on the Faceplace that we had struck out with grapes this year, Mom Sowers came to our rescue. Brother Kevin and his wife Susan inquired if she had any extra grapes at her house, and it turns out she did. We were invited out to get as many as we wanted, and learned the vine was more than likely in the one hundred year old age bracket. On top of that, they were dead ripe and sweet as sugar. We picked one bucket full and about a half of another bucket. It would have been more, but we ate a healthy number as we went along, and more the next day as we prepped them for the wine kit.

We got three gallons of mash out of these, so maybe we can manage a couple of gallons of finished product? We are three weeks away from knowing for sure, so stay tuned for that. It seems like something we would update.
On Friday we usually go to town for a bite to eat, but we had been on the go all week and decided to take a breather. We stayed in and made a pizza from scratch and had Pop over for a family pizza night. We're really getting this pizza making thing down pat.

And last on our list of things to share this week. We have a pee pee light. Living in the country is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but one of the side perks is it's all kinds of dark at night time. Cupcake can't sleep with a night light visible to the bedroom, so the master bath is dark as "the blackest night" in the Green Lantern's oath. This makes for an eventful standing pee trip. Cupcake found a motion sensor toilet light on the interwebs, and we could even set the color of the light. Of course we settled on "lawman blue" and have a thirty second window to make the bladder gladder in the darkest of nights.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K