A Fowl of the Lawman

This week we culled all our adult chickens. They had been eating their own eggs for a while now, then they started eating the duck eggs. We thought we had the egg eaters eliminated, but apparently eating eggs is easier than eating bugs in the yard. Foraging is for suckas.
Lawman and "The Boy" teamed up to eliminate the chickens. Then later that day, five of our ducks got into the garden and started plowing through the cucumber/squash sections. We shooed them off and patched the holes in the fence, but an hour or so later, they were right back at it. This time they brought baby chickens in with them, who got a belly full of green tomatoes. This just wont do. We ran the ducks off again, but when they returned they joined the adult chickens in poultry heaven. We hope the baby birds start laying by October, buying store bought eggs if for suckas.
Other than bird drama, we picked green beans most of the week. We are up to our target number for quarts of beans to get us through the winter.

And before the birds ruined the cucumbers, Cupcake took a batch and made dill pickles. We like dill pickles in our half eggs, as "De-nephew" calls them.

We had a big ol batch of basil come in, and rather than waste it, Lawman hit on an idea. We have been out of sketti sauce for a while now. He took all the leftover jars of tomatoes from the pantry and cracked them open. Added fresh from the garden peppers, onions and garlic along with the fresh basil, and made over five gallons of sketti sauce.

We had a jar of sauce that was not quite full left over and we kept that one in the fridge. Saturday night Cupcake made a mini batch of baked sketti and homemade garlic biscuits for dinner.

One last food update, we had to break out our second 20lb box of bacon. Lawman sliced it up into weekend bags and froze it. Well, most of it. We eat a bit of bacon.

On the Dudley twins front, we had mischief one morning. They got the bright idea that the dozen or so chew toys we buy them just wouldn't do, and destroyed their outside bed.

That "we get a treat, right?" look on their face is for a good reason. During the warm months, they get a small cup of doggy ice cream after dinner.

A funny "ha-ha" this week. We have a little frog that waits by the garage door for us every night. Cupcake is convinced it just wants to touch her feet when she walks past. What ever the reason, it sure makes Lawman's night before bedtime.

We ended the week with wings, and preacher cookies

K&K

Got Mint?

If you're not making mint water, you're doing it wrong.

Peppermint

Chocolate mint

Spearmint 

Our corn tasseled this week, so we are soon to have corn to can. This makes us happy.

Mostly a garden update this week. We picked two five gallon buckets full of green beans that went straight into the jars. Except for a pot full, which we had for dinner one night.

Twenty more jars for the pantry 

Cupcake picked her first of many, green tomatoes to be fried. Fried green tomatoes are her all time favorite, unless we're talking about jalapeno jelly on a cream cheese cracker, because that changed her life.

We started getting tommy toe tomatoes as well. Nothing like a fresh salad picked right off the deck.

We canned up our last batch of lime pickles this week. And we still have mad cucumbers coming in, so if any local peeps are looking for some pickle cucumbers, holla.

Our cabbage that didn't go into the kraut bucket make a fresh coleslaw for dinner one night.

And that's about it for this week. Our guineas hatched a nest of keets and brought them out in the yard Sunday, but they were too far away to get a photograph of. We hope to get a shot for next week.
We ended the week with wings. And a nap.
K&K

How you doin?

The garden started paying off this week. We have a steady supply of cucumbers coming in, we got our first squash, and green and purple beans are a thing now. But we start off the update with the Dudley Twins.

We've been getting down to the dock at least once a day, and we take the twins with us so they can do what dogs do. This weekend, they forgot they were on a dock in the middle of the pond and got to rasslin. Augustus fell off the dock and into the pond. We always figured if he did fall in, he would take to swimming as well as Willow does. We were very wrong.
Gus had full blown panic in his eyes and instead of swimming, he tried to climb back on the dock, which he couldn't do alone. Lawman fished him out and he seemed grateful after he calmed down a bit.

Willow wears herself out by swimming, then rolling in mud, then swimming, and then rolling in mud. We make sure swimming is the last thing before we head home.

On to the garden portion of our report.
Last week we reported a batch of pickles in the crock. We canned those up Monday morning.

And right after we canned those, we picked a new batch of cucumbers. Biggest picking so far this year. It made eight pints.

We picked two buckets full of beans early Sunday morning and spent the rest of the morning stringing and breaking them. A quick wash and in to the jars they went. You cant get fresher beans unless you eat them raw off the bush.

We also picked five heads of cabbage. We used three to make a bucket full of kraut, Pop got one of the smaller ones, and we had one left over. We're thinking fried cabbage one night this week.

The four head we kept weighed in just a little over 35lbs. Duck poop is the key to big ol cabbage. You're welcome. We still have over a dozen more head to play with this year, so it may be a kraut for dinner twice a week kind of year.
So we canned up the green beans, we put them in pint jars for Pop.

And the purple beans we put in quart jars for us. In total we did eight pints of pickles, eight pints of green beans, eight quarts of purple beans, 27 pounds of kraut, and it wasnt even our whole day.

Two canners, no waiting

A couple of food related notes.
Our first squash came in, and Cupcake loves her some fried squash, so fried squash she got.

And we tried the survival S'mores on the grill. They worked out better than they did over the campfire from last week.

And we ended the week with wings.

K&K

Plum Tired

Busy week to report from The Acre.
Early in the week, our plums started coming in. They were really small, but we got a whole lot of them so we decided to give a batch of jelly a try.

We tossed them in to the steam juicer. This thing changed our lives.

It made lucky thirteen jars of jelly for us. We are very happy with the results. We also had enough come in after this picking to add to our Christmas jam this fall.
It was so good, Cupcake made French toast the next morning so we could sample it.

Next came pickles. We had been getting one or two cucumbers at a time, but this week we got enough for a crock full of pickles. Lime pickles.

Lime pickles take three days to soak in lime, then brine. By the time we got our pickles in the jars we picked another batch. Pickles in, pickles out. It's how we roll.

The garden is coming along nicely.

Later in the week, we began construction on our big project. We needed a dock for our pond since Augustus wont swim, we thought it would be easier to get him in and out of inner tubes from a dock. Not many dogs get their own dock, so color ours lucky.

About half way through construction, The Boy came home from work and rolled up his sleeves to help. Things really got rolling then.

After we got the dock boards down on the frame, we tried to pick it up and flip it over so we could attach the barrels to the bottom. That was a big ol NOPE. So, we hooked Deathstroke up to it and drove some rebar into the ground on the other side, thinking we could flip it that way. Nope.
We had no choice but to ask our neighbor Zach to help. He has a loader, which made quick work of flipping the dock over.

And he was kind enough to stick around and haul the dock down to the pond for us.

Zach got it in the water, no fuss, no muss.

The next morning we went down to tie the dock off, but found it out in the middle of the pond.

So Lawman took one of the kayak paddles and scaled down the bank onto the dock, and rowed it over to base camp.

Willow swam out to help, then Augustus got all jelly, so Lawman paddled over and got Gus while Willow swam around us.

Not long after, Willow got tired of swimming around us and wanted her own dock time.

The ducks didn't pay much attention to us, we were just in their way.

And a sneak peek at our next big project.

Stay tuned.
We ended the week with hot dogs roasted over a campfire while we floated on our new dock.
K&K