Henry’s SugarTown Watermelons

08/01/2026

Visiting with my friends this morning😊

08/01/2026

07/30/2026

🎄🦆 Christmas in July is almost here! 🦆🎄

Come meet Jayden Bellard, the 13-year-old founder of Mud, Moss & Mallards, at our very first pop up event!

📍 Cajun’s Event Center
📅 Saturday, July 18
⏰ 9 AM - 2 PM

Shop our latest hats and apparel, hear the story behind the brand, and enter for a chance to win a Mud, Moss & Mallards hat of your choice!

✅ Check in on Facebook at our booth to enter the giveaway
✅ Can’t find your size or favorite color? We’ll gladly take custom orders at the event.

We can’t wait to meet everyone and share what we’ve been working so hard to build!

👉 Tag a friend who loves the outdoors and share this post to help spread the word about Jayden’s first pop up event! 🦆🎄🌾

🌾 Born in the Marsh. Raised Outdoors.™

07/25/2026

I know I’ve said it on post and some threads, but I’m still getting questions about melons 🍉 we are done for the season, it was a tough one short season with some of the crops not producing or rotting in the field because of inconsistent weather, not making much money “ I know y’all think we’re selling melons on the side of the road to retire rich “ 🤣😂🤪 but fuel and melon prices rose by $2.50 a gal and melon plus time and expenses, I’m not greedy it did help . I just hope next year is better! I WANT TO THANK EACH AND EVERY CUSTOMER THAT HELPED ME PAY MY BILLS !!! Have a BLESSED REST OF THE YEAR and hope to see you next year !!! Henry’s SugarTown Watermelons

07/21/2026

The oldest apartment buildings in America still stand on Jackson Square, and they were built by a woman who survived being shot four times by her own father in law. ⚜️

Micaela Almonester, the Baroness de Pontalba, was born in New Orleans in 1795 into great wealth, the daughter of the Spanish nobleman who had rebuilt the St Louis Cathedral. She was married off young into a French noble family, and her father in law became obsessed with controlling her fortune. In 1834, in a fit of rage in France, he shot her at close range, leaving her with wounds to her hands and chest, then turned the gun on himself. She survived. He did not. 🌙

Rather than let that horror define her, Micaela came home to New Orleans in the late 1840s and set out to transform the very heart of the city. She financed and designed the long, elegant red brick row buildings that frame both sides of Jackson Square, with their famous cast iron galleries woven with her family's initials, A and P. She reshaped the square itself, turning a dusty parade ground into the beautiful public garden we know today.

The Pontalba Buildings have been continuously lived in ever since, making them among the oldest apartment houses in the country. Every day visitors walk beneath her ironwork without knowing the fierce, brilliant woman who put it there.

She was nearly murdered by a man who wanted to erase her. Instead she built one of the most beautiful and enduring corners of New Orleans, and signed it with her own initials for the whole world to see. That is how you answer a man who tried to make you disappear.

07/21/2026

Before there were freezers in Cajun country, there was the boucherie, and it was less a chore than a holy day. 🔥

On a cold morning in the dead of winter, when the weather was finally chill enough to keep meat from spoiling, whole families and neighbors would gather at one farm before the sun was fully up. A single hog, raised all year for this day, would feed not one household but many. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was wasted. The meat became roasts and chops, the fat was rendered into lard and crackling gratons, the blood went into boudin rouge, the head and feet into hogshead cheese, and the scraps and rice into the sausage that Cajun country is still famous for. 🌾

But the boucherie was never really about the hog. It was about the hands. Men broke down the animal, women worked the pots, children ran errands and stole warm cracklins when no one was looking, and the old people sat close to the fire directing all of it with the authority of experience. By the end of the day every family went home with meat, and every family owed and was owed a return of the favor. That was the real economy of the prairie. You survived because your neighbors did.

It was survival dressed up as a party, work turned into fellowship, a whole community feeding itself through the lean months with nothing but a pig, a fire, and each other.

We have freezers now, and grocery stores on every corner. What we lost was the reason to all stand around the same fire before dawn. Some things were never really about the food.

07/21/2026

A little bottle from a salt dome in Iberia Parish ended up on tables in almost every country on earth. 🌶️

After the Civil War, Edmund McIlhenny was broke and back on Avery Island, which is not really an island but a dome of solid rock salt pushing up through the marsh. He had peppers growing there, and he had something most people did not: an enormous supply of salt right under his feet. He crushed the ripe peppers, mixed them with that Avery Island salt, aged the mash, blended it with vinegar, and strained it.

He bottled the first batches around 1868 in used cologne bottles, because that is what he could get, and shipped them out to grocers. 🧂 The sprinkler fitting and the little cap came later, once he realized people were pouring far too much at once.

The company has stayed in the family, the mash still ages in white oak barrels under a layer of Avery Island salt, and the peppers still get picked by hand against a red baton to check the color. Same salt dome. Same island. Well over 150 years later.