Gee, I would have said you had more gardening room than most of us, but maybe it isn't suitable for watermelons or too exposed to the local animals.
I sprinkled a packet of dill and a handful of dill seeds from last year in part of my garden and raked it in a little, now I've got a lovely dill forest going. (That's how my mother always grew dill.)
We have 3 days of 100+ weather in the forecast, kicking off summer with a sizzle.
Probably won't be doing a lot of baking those days. I might try making a batch of sumac muffins tonight, though.
Probably more of a local supply chain issue, I've not seen any signs of a nationwide banana shortage yet. There is a fungal disease (a strain of fusarium wilt labeledTR4, also called Panama Disease) that will eventually wipe out most of the Cavendish banana plants, like an earlier strain, TR1, did with the Gros Michel in the 50's, but it will likely take another 10-20 years. I don't know if they've settled on a new variety to replace it, and it takes something like 5-10 years for a banana plantation to get fully productive banana plants from new stock.
There may be better mitigation efforts in place than in the 50's, since Gros Michel was wiped out quite quickly once TR1 was widespread, though TR4 has been around for over 30 years already. I've seen some reports of trying to breed fungal resistance into Cavendish, but since banana plants are mainly reproduced by cloning, that's not a very simple or quick strategy. Cloning is also the reason TR4 is a world-wide problem, just like it was for the Gros Michel.
About two years ago I read an article about using gene splicing to add fusarium resistance to the Cavendish banana from fusarium resistant tomatoes, but the anti-GMO folks were quick to pick up on that and I don't know if that project is still ongoing.
The 1920's Broadway tune "Yes we have no bananas" was written about banana shortages from the early years of the TR1 plague on the Gros Michel banana.
Our cat is VERY glad we're home, he's been on my lap most of the last two days.
I also brought back 50 pounds of Ardent Mills pastry flour. For $26, couldn't really pass that up. I also got 3 more 16x22 (2/3 size) sheet pans and a few smallware items.
The car was REALLY full for the trip home!
For our first night back after 10 nights on the road, we went with a rotisserie chicken from Sams.
Tomorrow we will be having Chicago hot dogs (with Vienna hot dogs and buns bought in Illinois) for lunch and Italian Beef Sandwiches (for me) for supper, with a kit we bought at a Portillo's location on the way home. Also bought some Rocky Mountain chocolates and some chocolates from a local store in Galena Il. (Rocky Mountain chocolates are always good, the ones from the local store ranged from OK to pretty good.)
Came back with 4 full coolers: One with 16.5 pounds of Callebaut semi-sweet chocolate callets and other chocolates, another with the meat, one with about 25 bottles of wine from various wineries in Illinois and Pennsylvania and the 4th one was beverages and snack foods for the road.
Last Sunday we had a graduation celebration brunch with a number of Kelita's classmates and friends and their parents. The restaurant (Casbah) served some breakfast pastries that included a sumac mini-muffin, sweet but not overpoweringly so. I bought some ground sumac berries at Penzey's in Pittsburgh and am going to see if I can come up with a recipe for them. I'm guessing there was some buttermilk in them, and there are recipes for buttermilk sumac muffins online.
Dinner tonight was a salad plus cookies eaten for quality control purposes.
I made 2 batches of oatmeal crisp cookies with chocolate chips and one batch with M&M's, a total of about 200 cookies.
Divided then up into 5 containers, one for each of my brothers, one for my son & family, one for us as road food and one for the guys who will be house-sitting for us while we're out of town.
We had salads and I had a salami sandwich.
I'm putting in two more hybridized American chestnut trees in the front yard, one of the two I put in several years ago is doing poorly and may not survive. The main leader looks dead and the side leader might not be in great shape.
The new ones are pretty small, less than a foot tall. So they've got a lot of growing to do.
We had more NY Strip steak for supper, with a baked potato and some strawberry ice cream with hot fudge sauce.
We had a horde of earwigs in our mailbox, some diatomaceous earth got them scrambling to leave in a hurry. But be careful not to inhale it.
I will be making several batches of oatmeal crisp chocolate chip cookies, probably over the weekend, in anticipation of our trip to visit my brothers and attend our granddaughter's HS graduation. Some will be traveling food, most will be to give to my brothers, son and granddaughter.
I did bake more honey wheat bread today.
We had tacos/taco salad tonight.
