How the Cow Ate the Cabbage

I have been on hiatus for a few days with a toothache.  OUCH!  I wasn't feeling worth a hoot and didn't feel like doing anything but swishing out my mouth with warm salt water.  Hopefully, I'll be better soon.  Anyway, good to be back.

Have you ever heard the saying, "I'm gonna tell him how the cow ate the cabbage?"  What it means is that you're going to tell the whole truth regardless of the consequences.  It may hurt someone's feelings, but it needs to be said.  I often wonder how these sayings came to be.  Apparently, according to THIS LINK it originates from an old (somewhat gross) joke:

A circus came to a small town, and one of the elephants escaped. The elephant moseyed over to an elderly lady's garden.  The lady's eyesight wasn't quite up to snuff.  The elephant got into the garden and began pulling up her cabbage with its  trunk and eating them.  The old lady called the police, and said, “Officer, there’s a big cow in my garden pulling up my cabbages with its tail!” “What’s the cow doing with them?” he asked, to which the woman replied, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you!”

Sometimes, like in today's post, the translation is literal!  We are at the end of the fall garden and have been harvesting the last of the kale, carrots, and cabbage in order to make room for the spring garden.  We've picked some nice-sized cabbage, but the ones remaining are small - most are the size of softballs.  Cabbage, at this time of the season, gets bug damage, particularly snails and slugs, though.  It was time to pull them up.

Tricia and I began clipping them off the stem, removing the outer damaged leaves, and putting the heads in a crate.  We'll eat them!

When we finished the job of salvaging the 'runts' of the cabbage crop, here's what we had:

They don't look bad.  They're just about 1/3 the size of a regular cabbage.  We make use of everything!  And hey, they're bigger than brussel sprouts!

Honey, I shrunk the cabbage

But we weren't finished with the crop.  Rosie came sauntering up to the garden fence, begging and we obliged, tossing over all of the outer cabbage leaves we had removed.  What we don't eat - the cows and goats finish off happily.

Rosie showed us how the cow ate the cabbage.  She put them in her mouth!