Last week after my disastrous baking fail with the focaccia, I was determined to redeem myself with a total baking win. I decided to make one of our favorite breads. When Linda and I first met, we were obsessed with the Great Harvest Bread Company bread. The only problem was that we didn't have a Great Harvest store in Lumberton. There was one in Fayetteville, however, so every time we went there we had to go to Great Harvest and get a loaf of Dakota bread. Fast forward to when we moved to Yakima and discovered there isn't a Great Harvest store here, either. If we wanted Dakota bread, we would have to make our own. The other day I found a recipe here on the Cup of Sugar Pinch of Salt website. Although it took me almost an entire afternoon to make (there was a lot of rising time), it was well worth it! Linda and I can both testify that if you make this bread, you will eat the entire loaf in less than a week...we did. And it is a huge, 10-inch round loaf. It really wasn't all that hard to make, except for the fact that I had to hand knead it for 10 minutes. That is not an easy thing to do for a person of my age. But I persevered and was amply rewarded. I really need (knead?) to get a stand mixer! Anyway, here is a picture below of my loaf of Dakota bread. Needless to say, it was totally delicious. Hmm, this looks almost exactly the same as the picture on the website, but I swear this is my loaf!
Yummy Dakota bread
PLANTING THE GARDEN
Since this past week was Memorial Day weekend, I started planting my garden. In Yakima, we have to wait until there is absolutely no chance of frost before planting. We have found from experience that Memorial Day is a pretty safe time. This year the high temperatures during this weekend were in the mid 90's, so it was very hot. Every year it seems to be a bigger challenge to get everything planted then. Of course, there is nothing saying I have to get everything in on that particular weekend, but it's what I like to do. However, this past weekend I wasn't able to quite get it all planted. The reason may be that we had 20 seed potatoes to plant and about 100 onions. On Friday I decided to get a head start on things by planting my Butterfly Bush and also some of my August Beauty Sunflower seeds. I also moved the volunteer Tomatillo plant from the middle of the garden over to the edge by the fence.
"Buzz Purple" Butterfly Bush
Tomatilla Verde
On Saturday, I planted the large patch of onions and one row of the potatoes, as well as the Cherokee Carbon tomato. It takes considerable time to plant seed potatoes because you have to dig an eight-inch deep hole for each potato. Two more smaller patches of onions and two rows of potatoes went into the ground on Sunday. Linda was a huge help in making all this happen because she dug up a large area of weeds that were encroaching on the garden. This enabled me to plant the seeds for our Yellow Crookneck Squash, Black Beauty Zucchini Squash, and Honey Boat Delicata Squash. It definitely takes two of us to get this done. Monday, I planted the pepper plants and put the Sun Sugar tomato plant I had bought into a large pot. There may be a Sun Sugar volunteer out in the garden, but we will have to wait and see. Both of us worked on getting the Basil plants into pots on Monday as well. Below are a couple of short videos showing what the garden looks like right now. The second video shows a planting area that is outside of the garden proper.
Sun Sugar Tomato
Take into account that about 10:00 it starts to get blazing hot out in the sun. When that sun starts blaring down on you, then you know you only have about an hour left to work before it will to too hot. So now all I have left to plant is a Black Vernissage Cherry Tomato into a pot, the Zavory Habanero out in the garden when it gets big enough, and another pepper (I haven't decided which one) into a pot. Oh, and I almost forgot the six cucumber plants that will go out into the garden. Then, after everything is planted, I will place my soaker hoses around and then cover all the ground with straw. Hopefully I can get all that done before I write my next blog.
BUTTERFLY
I saw a butterfly while I was sitting under the tree in my lounge chair, taking a break from garden work. It was a Western Tiger Swallowtail. This butterfly is the one we usually see going to our butterfly bush. This year he will not have one to go to unless the bush I just planted gets bigger pretty soon. Our other butterfly bush died this past winter. Butterfly bushes usually only last about two years here in Yakima and then they die during the winter. We have planted about 5 or 6 butterfly bushes since we moved here and they all died. The bees just love them and so do the hummingbirds. Below is a picture of a Western Tiger Swallowtail that I took a couple years ago. I didn't have my camera with me on Friday when I was sitting outside, but the one I saw looked just like this one below.
Western Tiger Swallowtail
BIRDS & BEES
I was glad to see the return of our beautiful American Goldfinches. They are here in our area pretty much year round, but they only have their gorgeous breeding colors during the spring. I had my finch seed sock hung out for a week or so before I saw any of the brilliant yellow male Goldfinches come to it. It doesn't take them long to empty the little sock feeder, so I need to get a bag of seed to go into our Goldfinch feeder. The American Goldfinch is the state bird of Washington.
American Goldfinch
Linda and I were sitting outside under the tree the other day when all of a sudden I heard this loud buzzing sound. I looked up towards the sky and saw a huge swarm of bees flying over our house. It looked like they might have been following the queen bee. They converged on the large Catalpa tree next door. There used to be a nest of bees in that tree a few years ago, but the man that owned the house at the time killed the entire colony by spraying expanding foam into the hole where they had their nest. We just couldn't believe he did that! You can see the foam in the video below, it looks like a large orange mass. Now it seems they may have come back. Linda and I do everything we can to support bees because we need them to pollinate our flowers and vegetable crops. We plant bee-friendly flowers in our yard and we do not use any chemical pesticides or herbicides of any kind in our yard. When I saw the bees I ran into the house and grabbed my camcorder and shot this video below out of our office window.
PARTING SHOT
We've reached the end of this week's blog, so that means you get to see what the Summer Girl has been up to. I snapped this picture of her working hard while Linda and I were busy planting the garden. That's all for now, see you next week!
No comments:
Post a Comment