Tomatoes are Hard

 

If you get it, you're our people.

Seriously, we got our first big picking of tomatoes this week. Between deer and groundhogs, we felt lucky to get these. Lawman says these are earmarked for tomato soup.

We picked another big batch of blackberries this week, and one rainy day was put to good use.

We've got enough blackberry jelly, we think?

Cupcake found a recipe for pecan pie cookies and wanted to try them. And what Cupcake wants, Cupcake gets.

The rest of the week goings on was geared toward predators. If that offends you, stop reading here. You've been warned.

Lawman put a game camera in the yard with a little dab of coyote lure. The first night, we got activity.

Lawman set up a sniper nest the next night and waited. 

He got one half of the above pictures 

The night after that, he got the mate. They were a little loud smelling, but now we don't have to sweat the DT's getting sprayed again. As they say, you gotta break some eggs to make omelettes 

The following night, he got the other half of the pictures.

And the day after that, he got the mate to this one. It ran down in a brushy part of the Acre, and wasn't worth the work to get a picture, but the foxes haven't been on camera since the last one got got. Problem solved, problem staying solved. We started this spring with 100 chickens, our last count we had just over three dozen. Lawman says the foxxes are lucky he could only kill them once.

We ended the week with a couple of naps and a predator free yard.

K&K

The New Line-Up

 It's been hot as balls around the Acre this week, probably at your house too? We don't know.

We still managed to get out a little, early in the morning to do some garden stuff. But before we get to the garden pics, we wanted to show off our new obsession in the way of food seasoning.

We put this stuff on errthing. We really like the pecan rub, we used that on a rack of ribs this past week. For some reason, when it's 100* outside, Lawman gets a hankering to smoke meat. We smoked a rack, but only two of us eating, we had a lot of leftover meat. So Cupcake picked the bones and saved the meat. We chopped up some of it and made taco meat out of it. More like fajita meat. And as Melquita likes to say "if it feeds you twice, it's worth the price."

We had a couple of country summertime meals. Meatless. It's the "Outlaw's" favorite summer meal, too bad he's batshit crazy.

Its nice walking out to the garden and picking dinner. We got a small picking of green beans this week, just enough for a meal. We do constant battle with deer over the green beans. Lawman uses the hellfire sauce spray, and that keeps them away until it rains. As soon as the rain washes the spray off, they mow down the beans. We spray, the beans grow back, it rains, they mow them down. We had a dry spell for a couple of weeks, so these beans made it.

We had home made chicken tenders with the beans.

The day the big heatwave rolled in, Lawman got out early and picked a bowl full of blackberries. After the heat hit, he stayed inside and made another batch of jelly. It only made two cooks, and we had to use the pulp in the second batch, so it's more of a jam. The jelly is seedless, another favorite of The Outlaw and Lawman both. 

A couple of non food related updates.

First, it was bath time for the DT's. We used the outdoor shower on Serendipity to scrub them down. The rolls were reversed this time. Augustus, who has no love for water, enjoyed his bath. Willow, who loves the water, wasn't having anything to do with being scrubbed on. 

After it was over and they both dried off, Willow forgave us, after we rubbed her belly.

Augustus crawled up in his bed with his sleep baby and took a nap.

And we're still losing birds to predators. Normally by now, Lawman would have caught them sneaking in the yard and taken care of bidness, but these guys are smarter than the average predator. Lawman has a friend up in the people's republic of Maryland who feeds a family of fox. This friend posts pictures of the fox family leisurely wandering around the yard. This got Lawman to thinking, maybe he could use trap lure in the yard, put a camera on the lure and see what time foxxy comes around. He did, and foxxy rolled in around 2130hrs. This is before our bedtime, so Lawman set up on the front porch, and at 2130, here comes foxxy. Lawman cranked off a round at him but missed. He waited a few minutes and then a coyote blundered in. The fox came back and the two were working out who was going to pee on the lure first while Lawman looked on in wonder. As soon as they took a break from the pissing contest, Lawman got off another shot. Missing again. 

So, thinking his aim was not what it used to be, he moved the lure spot closer to the front porch to use a shotgun. The next night, Lawman goes out with his trusty shotgun and finds a raccoon around the lure. Our neighbor has lost a lot of his birds to raccoons, so this one had to go. But, Lawman wasn't going to waste a coyote round on a raccoon, so he grabbed the rifle and took a shot, and missed again.

Next morning, Lawman set up his zero range and tested the scope. It was shooting a foot low and eight inches left. We're guessing the rifle got dropped? 

Anyway, the scope is back to zero and foxxy and Wiley Coyote's days are numbered.

We ended the week with naps.

K&K

OK, We may have a Problem

 We did something new this week. We bought more chickens. We're beginning to think we may have a slight chicken addiction?

We have a coyote picking off our adult guinea birds. We're guessing he's smarter than the average coyote since he's taking out our early warning system. So we bought a baker's dozen of keets to raise up with our new chicks. We also threw in a half dozen ringneck pheasants. This will be our first attempt at pheasants.

We did some repair work this week also. First off, Brother Kevin had a couple of his scouts over at the garage working on his race car project. We took our trailer over to have the youngsters do some welding for us. The trailer had a sag in the rear of the trailer where the lawn mower tires rest.

Denise Haley wasn't going to be outdone. She suited up and threw a pro bead on the trailer.

Then a couple of days later, Lawman noticed a puddle of oil under the 4 wheeler. Closer examination found a busted oil line. A trip to the hose house in town got us up and running in a couple of hours.

The Boy and the Girl-in-Law went out to Sinkland farms to see the sunflowers this week, but the sunflowers hadn't bloomed yet. They could have saved their money and just walked over to the barn. Ours are wide open.

They're quite the cute couple. They even bought matching shoes.

Garden things are jumping off. Our cucumbers are coming in pretty steady now and that means it's pickle season.

Three batches of sweet pickles and one batch of dill pickles are now hidden somewhere in the house. And while we're taking about hiding jars of food, we also picked a big bowl of blackberries. They went straight from the vine to the jelly jar.

Cupcake has threatened bodily harm if a jar goes missing. We'll probably pick another batch and make some more jelly this coming week, just to save injuries. 

We used some of the early picked blackberries when we didn't have enough for jelly, and added in some fresh picked rhubarb to make a blackberry/rhubarb pie.

Two new dishes this week.

First, we saw Captain Christopher Pike using a cast iron skillet to make a pasta dish called 'sketti momma' and it looked pretty simple, so we tried it. 

Cupcake found a recipe for a quiche, but she needed a pie crust. Lucky for us, Lawman has mastered pie crust.

And since he was making a pie crust, and the rhubarb/blackberry pie was gone, he went ahead and made another pie crust and whipped up a pecan pie for the coming week.

And last but not least, it's Cupcake's favorite time of the year. Fried green tomato season.

We ended the week with full bellies and naps.

K&K