The Modern Victory Garden

Spent a large part of the day in the house doing some cooking and baking.   Among other things, I made a large batch of whole-wheat dinner rolls.   I have not made any kneaded yeast breads in quite a while, but despite the lack of practice they turned out beautiful - light and soft textured.   Enjoyed some of them with dinner tonight but the rest are destined to be frozen in small batches for fast weekday meals.   I also baked a peach pie today using one of the two packages of frozen peach slices.                      

I did get into the garden for a bit today.   In fact, this afternoon I harvested the last big head of Steins Late Flat Dutch cabbage and some carrots.            

Half the head of cabbage and all of the carrots were used to make a vegetable side dish for tonight’s dinner.   Not sure what I will eventually end up doing with the remaining half a head of cabbage – but it keeps very well in the fridge so there is no rush to use it.                            

While outside I took a picture of the broccoli patch.  It is getting close to being done for the season.   There is at least one more harvest of side shoots to be made before pulling the plants up and composting them.            

I have been harvesting from these broccoli plants for several months now, so I definitely got good utility out of the mid-summer planting.   You can probably tell from this photo that we have been getting a lot of rain and wind over the last several days.   The garden and yard are both littered with leaves, evergreen needles, and small branches and everything is thoroughly soaked.   If it ever dries out a bit, I will need to do some raking and clean up work.   For now though, the weather encourages more time inside the house and a little less time outside in the garden.                           

However, despite the rainy, cold, and wet weather, our hardy fuchsia bushes are still blooming prolifically.                                   

You can see the red ones in the background, but these dark and light pink ones are really very exotic.   I love these bushes because they grow reliably year after year and have such showy blooms from the late summer well into late fall.   At some point we will get our first hard frost or freeze and these will be knocked down.   Until then I intend to enjoy them.                        

All in all it was not a very exciting Saturday, but enjoyable nonetheless because it was slow paced and yet productive too.   Sometimes it is nice to just putter in the kitchen for a large part of the day.