Favorite Tomatoes

We have discovered that our Golden Girl and Brandywine tomatoes are our favorites. We bought both plants from Jung. The Golden Girl produced very early and produced a lot of tomatoes (until it got the blight which will reduce it's yield, but that's another story). The Brandywine produces fewer tomatoes, but they are huge and amazingly delicious. We refuse to cook these because when they're cooked you don't taste that delicious sweet flavor that you notice when they're eaten raw. Next year we're definitely planting more of each and fewer paste tomatoes since we can just buy a big bulk box of paste tomatoes for canning from the farmers market. We saw a 25# box for $20 this past Saturday. This picture isn't actually one of our tomatoes, but ours look quite similar.

Homemade bread is delicious

We've come to love homemade bread, to the point where we very rarely buy store-bought bread (except for the occasional baguette which we haven't yet learned to make). I have a Better Homes & Gardens Breadmaker cookbook which has served us pretty well. We use part whole wheat flour and part white bread flour usually. I make the dough on the dough cycle in my breadmaker, then i take it out, put it in a bread pan that's been greased on the bottom, let it rise again (i use the "warm" cycle on our toaster oven with the door open), then bake at 375 for about 35 minutes. Here's a picture of some sage wheat bread i made last week. Yum! The process isn't hard, you just have to know you'll be home at various points over the course of a few hours.

Tomatoes with the Blight

Our tomato plants have the Blight. It's an agressive fungus that lives in the soil and causes the plant to die. In our case, the tomatoes are starting to fall off the vines before they're ripe. Sad.

Why won't they leave us alone?

Madison has been overrun by japanese beetles. This is a fairly recent phenomenon and it's wreaking havoc with various plants in our yard. Things these bugs like to eat: grape leaves, peas, our new cute pear trees, eggplant leaves, and our shasta daisies. Adam sprays an organic bug spray we got from Jung every few days, but the bugs keep coming back. It's very sad. Not quite as sad as the emerald ash borer's appearance in Wisconsin (it's not yet in Dane county), but still sad.