Bread and Soup

Last week King Arthur Flour came to my school and presented their Life Skills Bread Baking Program. Basically they come and show students how to bake bread. Then they send each kid home with most of the ingredients to bake the bread. The recipe makes enough for two loaves of bread. One loaf you keep at home and eat and the other loaf you bring back to school to donate to the town food shelf. I got to bring home a bag of the ingredients. So today Alexa was eager to bake our loaves in order for me to bring the loaf back to school on Tuesday.

They turned out quite well!

We also decided to harvest the last carrots in the garden today. Alexa set to cleaning them and I chopped some up to go into a soup to go with our bread for dinner tonight.

Late Summer Gardening

Alexa and I picked tomatoes today and baked pumpkin bread made with our own pumpkins. The tomato haul was amazing.

Chloe is at a slumber party (apparently when each of her friends turns 10 they want slumber parties). At any rate that leaves Alexa and I with the ability to create a dinner that we want. Since Chloe is a MUCH pickier eater it often limits the dinner options. We decided to use some of our fresh picked tomatoes to make a fresh pasta sauce. We added olives and I introduced Lex to capers. She found these to be very yummy.

Of course while it was cooking she was sneaking more tomatoes from the basket.

Alexa has a tomato addiction.

Summer Draws to an End

Here we are on Labor Day the day that has become known as the end of summer. Although we have a few weeks yet before it official changes over to fall. It feels like it is over. School has started again, the nights are getting cooler, and we harvested our pumpkins.

They were little ones this year. We cooked them up yesterday and have enough to make about four loaves of pumpkin bread. We toasted the seeds too. Although those are mostly gone now. This summer has been the season of the morning glories. Check them out...

They are climbing the birch tree that was stupid enough to bend close to them. We joke that you can't sit for long on the deck or they may close in on you. Even the ones Marty has planted next door have hopped the fence and are circling my sunflowers and humming bird feeder.

The other highlight of our summer has been this little guy.

Cabbie is tormented by him, but the rest of us have enjoyed him. We have even spotted a second one which has Chloe dreaming of a yard full of baby chipmunks next year.

Ladybugs

We have birch tree that I believe is infested with aphids. At least I think they are aphids based on my Internet research. So we decided to combat the problem with ladybugs. I ordered 1,500 ladybugs to be shipped to us. They arrived today. We followed the directions and placed them in the refrigerator as soon as they arrived. Apparently that helps them relax after their stressful travel. We prepared for an evening release by spraying the ground around the tree and the tree with water. The directions indicated that they would likely be thirsty and in need of a drink. Then after dinner we took them outside and let them go.

It was pretty funny to open the mesh bag and have them crawl all over the you.

Happy eating little guys. We hope our tree is bug free soon!

Only Child

Chloe is at her first slumber party tonight. She has gone to sleep over before but never a slumber party. There will be about five girls all "sleeping" in a tent in her friend Sami's backyard. I am under no expectations that she will be sleeping. I was under strict orders not to embarrass her at the drop off. I was allowed to take one photo prior to leaving and none when we got there.

A lot of rules. Alexa is very sad about not having Chloe home. She didn't want o do anything too special because then Chloe would miss it. So we settled on a movie night. We did pick our first lemon cucumber for dinner. Not having ever had or grown one before I wasn't completely sure when they were ready to be picked. It seemed ready though...

and it tasted yummy.

Carrot Cleaning

We picked and cleaned some carrots today. They are little as we really need to thin them to allow for some to get bigger, so we are eating our way to thinning them! Alexa was enjoying scrubbing them clean.

She scrubbed them till they shined!

Plum Planting

We were at the farmer's market on Saturday and were able to buy some of our favorite plums. They are, of course, from a local orchard and delicious. So delicious that the girls wanted to try to plant the pits and see if we could grow our own plum trees. They polished off the pound of plums we bought within two days... Alexa ate six in a row Saturday. They are small but that is still and impressive undertaking. Today we planted some of them.

We put them on the bulkhead which is slowly becoming another garden area.

Now we will wait and see what happens!

Garden Update

When you go away for a few days you miss the day to day changes of your garden. It is kind of fun to come back and see what has happened while you were gone. This only works, of course, if you are lucky enough to have neighbors that will kindly water for you while you are gone. Especially this year as we seem to go weeks without rain. We had some picking to do when we got back. Here is what we gathered from the peas and green beans.

We actually froze the green beans as we have too many coming in again to get them eaten fast enough.

We have the first morning glories blooming.

Our favorite morning view is the flowers on the pumpkins, and we found two little pumkins have started. Chloe is licking her lips for pumpkin bread already.

If you look closely you can see the start of a cucumber.

Quite a few green tomatoes. Alexa is hoping for a bumper crop as she wants us to try making our own ketchup. Not sure how that will turn out, but if we have enough tomatoes I will give it a try.

The flower boxes on the shed are almost at their summer height. They can grow high enough to cover half the windows.

Last year the roofers that worked on the neighbor's garage did in the honeysuckle. It has made a nice come back this year though and the birds couldn't happier.

4th Flowers

We decorated for the 4th for the first time this year. In our cleaning the other day I came across these small flags that the girls had been given. We added them to the flower boxes.

As you can see some of the summer blooms are coming along very nicely this year.

Green Bean Harvest

We harvested the first green beans today. Well, OK the other day we picked three, but today was the first harvest that would amount to enough for us to have with dinner.

We did end up with more than two!

She was determined to pick a couple peas too even though I told her to wait a few days before picking them again.

Alexa cleaned them dutifully then use the new salad spinner I bought for drying off garden veggies.

Garden Update

We had lettuce with our dinner tonight. Doesn't It look yummy? We have been picking it for the last week.

We picked our first 8 sugar snap peas today. We are hoping for lots more as there are plenty of blossoms and the plants have been taking over the carrots for weeks now. In another week or so we should pick our first green beans as we have lots of little ones.