Coffee Cake, Plums, Sweeties and Turnips!!

It's Sunday and I didn't have to work at either of my jobs as I did the past three Sundays, so it was a treat to sleep in a bit, make a couple of apple crumb coffee cakes, and go for a jog while they baked so I could come back and eat a quarter of one guilt free.

We then planted the two plums pictured above.  I 've always wanted plum trees, they are one of the few stone fruits that seem to do well in our climate.  We do have one of those saturn peaches that are shaped kind of like a donut, and 5 apple trees, the blueberries, strawberries, brambles and fig, but I still wanted plums.  Now I've got them.  Both are Japanese, one called Methley, which is purple inside and out and  Ozark Premier, that will be yellow fleshed.  It'll be a few years before they bear many fruit but the roots looked good and so did the trees.

After getting the trees watered and mulched we headed out to the veg patch to dig the sweet potatoes.  They were smaller than we had hoped and led us to believe we did not plant them early enough, next year, we'll start them a bit sooner and plant them in a slightly sunnier spot I think.  You can see from the photo, the smaller tray holds a lot of fingerlings, hopefully they can be roasted and maybe eaten with skins on?  Not sure, we'll find out.  We won't be wanting for sweet potatoes all the same, and there are all those winter squash...

Which brings me to the final activity of the day, making an awesome dinner with all kinds of garden goodies.

Roasted butternut squash with tiny beets, rosemary, garlic and olive oil*.  Turnip and mizuna greens simmered together with onion*, red pepper flake and a touch of bacon grease*. And the main course; turnip, radish and potato gratin (yes- I had some huge radishes so cooked them up with the turnips and they were lovely). The roots were combined with our neighbors sweet milk and cream, red pepper, dill, onion*,  diced ham*, and topped with swiss*.  Wow was that a tasty repast and almost all from right here.  Only items with an * were not home grown.  Life is good.