And we're off!

We're sitting here at the Madison airport, waiting for the first leg of our 4 leg journey to start. Just to prove what total dorks we are, we took a photo of ourselves while we're still happy and wide awake. Adam had to prop the camera on a suitcase on the heat register to get this shot.

3...2...1...Blastoff!

Tomorrow we leave for New Zealand! This trip is sure to be full of adventure. We fly out of Madison at 3pm and arrive in Christchurch sometime on Saturday (after crossing the date line). We're hoping to post updates and pictures of what we're doing every few days. In the meantime, here are some final pictures of our produce from this summer.

Kohlrabi, a golden tomato, and Sugar Ann snap peas. Our kohlrabi harvest was fantastic (there are still a bunch in the fridge).

Various carrot varieties (most of our carrots are still in the garden under a layer of leaf mulch).

My giant zinnias. I got the seeds from Erin's baby shower and planted them in the completely dry, sandy soil that is right against our porch. Somehow they decided they would grow anyway. I'm definitely planting zinnias again next year!

Our pies at the recent Fab 5 pie party. I made a pumpkin pie from a whole pumpkin (that's a pumpkin cutout on top) and Adam made a chocolate mousse pie. Good thing i talked him out of attempting the sugar penguins, because he won the "Most Creative" award anyway. Unfortunately, several of the pie party attendees don't like pumpkin pie because my pie lost. :( I thought it was good!

Madeline Island 2009

We had an amazing time on Madeline Island as usual. This is our fourth year in a row going up there to celebrate our anniversary. Activities included wine tasting at Mission Hill Coffee Shop, watching the kids' parade (pretty small this year), dinner at Lotta's, hiking the public trail down to the water, and trips to the state and town parks. We also eyed up some real estate. Since about a third of the island is for sale at any given time, it's really hard not to be tempted to own our own piece of this paradise.

A beautiful sunset as viewed from our condo balcony. The sailboats were a convenient addition to the picture.

Northshore Road. It was really the peak of fall.

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.