Why I Oughta...

For the past few weeks, we've heard rumors of a Bleeding Heart Baker y coming to downtown Elmhurst.  It almost sounded too good to be true.  But then last week, the folks from BHB actually came out and said just what we were hearing:  they are, indeed, coming to town.  With a big menu, too . So...today on the walk home from Church Nat and I walked by the purported location and guess what?  It sure looks like they're moving along pretty fast.  The sign in the window calls out the name of the bakery and the mural on the wall is unmistakeable.  Great news for downtown and a real statement about the south side of the tracks.  With MOST of the new development going on down there, there's a real shift in the balance of power.  Charlies, Pints, the new Pizza joint and now Bleeding Heart Bakery.  It will be interesting to see how things shake out.

Yes...it is still July.  (almost August, though!)  But I *am* already thinking/planning on a few Christmas projects - specifically for a set of gifts.  The reason for the early planning is that some of the items that I need to use for the project are seasonal in nature - including these:  fence pickets! They're currently on sale (at least I think they're on sale) at Home Depot so I have to get busy estimating how many I'll be using later this fall.  This is a hard one because CLEARLY I'll need to get the estimate right (or high, I suppose) because finding a 6' fence picket made of cedar might be tough come December 10th. 

While our Opalkas are the first tomato to ripen on the vine in our garden, they're NOT the only one bearing fruit.  I planted a bunch of varieties of Romas and just about all of them are going nuts.  And that's just one section of the plant.  They're producing a crazy amount of fruit at this point.  In fact, the cages that some of them were in toppled over from the weight, so I had to go buy some posts to reinforce them and keep them upright.  After seeing this photo (and not just staring at the actual plant!), I now realize that I have to start planning now for our canning operation.  The onslaught isn't too far away.

I decided to put down a set of Sweet Pea seeds in the garden this year as a way (mostly) to rotate some crops around and introduce some new items to the garden.  I didn't have a lot of expectations for these, but I'm starting to come around on them.  The plant has sprung up A LOT of pea pods and as they begin to 'uncurl' and fill out the peas, I'm starting to see some promise in them.  One big upside of these is that they're coming in early enough that I'll be able to (possibly) replace them with a later early autumn crop like some beets, a lettuce or two or maybe even something like broccoli.  Nat has to figure out something to make with these guys - probably one of her go-to recipes that is a Trader Joe's stir fry.  This time, we'll be able to supply the pea pods.

On Tuesday night, I had a long list of tasks to get done outside.  Cut the lawn.  Re-stake my tomato cages.  Then...time for pest removal/reduction.  After I took care of a hornets nest I finally got busy tending to my garden.  With the temperatures lower than they have been in the past 10 days, last night was a good night to catch up on some neglect.  And I was greeted with some good news: A partial harvest came in last night from my New Potato plants.  The plants are starting to die back, so I began digging.  Here's what I turned up a nice amount of spuds.  I'd say that this is likely going to be about 1/5th of the total harvest based on the area I dug up.  About 10 potatoes that look like this of various sizes: Some of them are really quite big, too.  Here's one next to a champagne cork to demonstrate the size: I know next year I'll be doing A LOT more potatoes earlier in the spring.  I'll have to find some Fingerling ...

Our Oplaka plant was the first to fruit and not suprisingly it is also the first plant to produce ripe tomatoes.  The point remained in tact as it grew and is a bit weird looking - almost like a pepper of some sort. 

People shop at local independent bookstores because there's some emotion involved.  There's a sense of loyalty that comes along with shopping at a place that is less convenient and (often times) more expensive than the faceless behemoth online.  One of the most successful indie bookstores around is Anderson's Bookshop in Downtown Naperville. I worked on a project today called the "Google eBooks Petting Zoo" that was aiming to educate Anderson's customers that they didn't need to *just* buy their physical books at Anderson's and their digital books from folks like Amazon or iTunes.  In fact, you could buy directly from Andersonbookshop.com via Google books.  Pretty neat stuff.  You buy on their site and consume the books on devices you already own.  Have an iPad?  Install the Google eBooks app , go to Anderson's site and start buying books.  Viola!  They'll show up on your ipad. Disclaimer:  I work at Google. You knew that, right? ...