Saturday busy buzzing

Saturday was way busy around our home and garden. At the edge of the garden there is a utility pole, and early morning I heard the sound of too many trucks on the road for our quiet neighbourhood. There were three or four truck from the electric company, and they proceeded to set up to adjust the tension in the power cables. They first installed bridging cables, when there was some buzzing as the connections were made, when the air became tainted by the smell of electrical burn, weld. Then the cables were cut, shortened and connectors fitted, with the cables reconnected, and the bridging wires removed. It took them 6 hours to achieve all of this for four cables. Here is a photo of them working with the bridging cables.

Bread baking

On Saturday we baked a batch of bread in the wood fired oven. This turned out quite nicely as the photo on the left suggests. Unfortunately photos do not capture the music of the bread as it cools, crackling crusts, nor the aroma that filled the garden as it cooked and then the house, or the flavours as we ate them.
This bread was made from type 55 French flour, salt, a little sugar, some polish starter dough, and 60% hydration of water only. We shared some of the bread with neighbours and friends.

Fennel and... companions

Companion gardening wisdom is that fennel is a no no for growing along with other plants. As luck had it, some carrots appeared in the midst of my recently planted fennel bed. The fennels are mature enough to be approaching their second harvesting. The image to the left shows a carrot harvested on Saturday that was growing cheek by jowl with a couple of fennel plants, there are others still sitting there. The coin next to it for scale purposes is a 5 yen, which is 2.2 cm in diameter, sorry I forgot to measure the carrot and it was eaten on the day of harvest, delicious. The only problem was, as can be seen, some splitting, which is the result of uneven watering, i.e., a dry spell followed by lots of rain. I will harvest more carrots soon...

5 yen coin:
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