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.

Kohlrabi = aliens?

In our CSA box last week we received a kohlrabi. The funny thing was, in the description for it (our CSA puts a sheet in the box with descriptions and cooking suggestions for each item), she called it the "vegetable that looks like an alien with stems coming out of it." Now I've spent my entire life eating kohlrabi, so i am quite familiar with this particular vegetable and I've never noticed that it kind of does look like the little rubber alien guys from Toy Story.

We've started picking our own kohlrabi from the garden and they're delicious. We're also eating lots of peas and we picked our first golden girl tomato. Yum.

More Prairie Plants

Yesterday we planted our latest batch of prairie plants that we bought from Jung on Friday (it was "dollar days" where you can use all these Jung dollars we'd earned from previous purchases). We planted Prairie Smoke (first picture), Blazing Star (second picture), Blue Flag Iris, False Indigo (third picture), Purple Prairie Clover, and Prairie Dropseed grass. All those plants are native to Wisconsin which is cool. And our parents hadn't heard of some of them which was even cooler and leads me to believe we've now moved to a new level of garden expertise.

Perennials for your garden

Last night we went to a garden walk/class about perennials at the UW-Madison demonstration gardens on Mineral Point Rd. It was free and we got a lot of good information. At first, Adam and I were worried because the gardener started out by saying "I'd like to talk about some of the plants about which we get the most questions: clematis and peonies." Now - there is nothing wrong with clematis and peonies, but that is definitely not the type of plant that we came to hear about. We were hoping for native perennials and more unusual plants. Fortunately, after she talked about those for a little while, we actually started going around the gardens and talking about a wide variety of plants. One plant that we really liked (and is native too) is blue false indigo. It's more of a shrub. I think we're going to get one of those for our back landscaping bed. We also saw some cool sedums. I know, usually those are rather boring, but the ones we saw were purple and blue and were almost ground cover. They had some unusual kinds of lavender (and assured us they could grow here) that we liked. The prairie area was somewhat of a disappointment because nothing had labels, the plants were all smushed together so it was hard to see anything, and the gardener didn't take us over there during the tour to explain anything. We did confirm that we want some prairie dropseed grass. It's fairly short and puffy. All in all, a worthwhile evening. They have these walks every few weeks, and the gardens are open to the public all the time. Most plant have nice lables with both the common name and the scientific name and there are brochures all over that list out which plants are in each area.

Mulch Time

Last Thursday we ordered some mulch. Adam had done a rough estimate on how much we needed based on pacing off the back yard. He added an extra yard so that we'd have enough to mulch all the small side beds. That came out to 7 yards. Turns out, 7 yards is quite a bit! The mulch company dropped it off on the driveway while we were at work and that evening Adam started spreading it out. He only made a tiny dent in it (I like to think that's because he didn't have my help!). On Friday night, the two of us worked together to spread it all out. We ended up with a little more than we needed, but we just laid it on a little thicker in the back yard. Since we have very few plants in our back yard after the demolition we started with Adam's parents, it was easy to spread it out. I'm sure it will never be this easy again. So now we have a nice mulched area in the back with almost nothing in it. So far we have 1 purple butterfly bush (on which I have yet to see flowers), 1 small orange-flowered butterfly weed, 3 arborvitae, shasta daisies, buttercups (that's what Adam's mom called them, but i'm not sure that's right), 1 Russian sage plant, an upright juniper, and 3 feather reed grass clumps. In our adjacent prairie area we have purple coneflowers, a couple little bluestem clumps, and black-eyed Susans. I read somewhere that one mistake new gardeners make is to plant things too close because they look good right away, but then in a few years you really regret it because it's way too many plants. I can assure you that we are not making that mistake!