Seed savers

I heard that there's a new seed store in Petaluma and that the owners (among other things, presumably) take one trip a year to a new place, go to farmers markets, eat good food and save the seeds to bring back. I would definitely be willing to do that for money.

I suppose antique dealers get to go on fun trips too, but I like the tie in with farmers markets, food and encouraging biodiversity. Granted there could be some concerns around invasive species not to mention import laws, but, still, one could do worse things for a living.

The art of brewing kombucha

Kombucha is tea fermented by a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast that looks kind of like a mushroom top and feels like rubber. Not everyone is a fan of kombucha. It smells like vinegar and can taste just as sour, but the more cultured (ha) of us love it. If you are one of these, you have noticed how quickly the money drains from your wallet when you buy it bottled in the store.

I can't corroborate the health claims that kombucha energizes, detoxifies, supports a healthy digestive and immune system, has anti-aging properties, promotes tissue and blood alkalinity, or normalizes homeostasis throughout the body, but it does make me feel good in a healthy, clean way, and I actually like the taste when it's done right.

So, here's how I make it. Or, in other words, how to do it right.

Preparation.
First, you will have acquired a large glass jar. Glass - not plastic, not metal. (See above). The bigger, the better, I say. My jar holds about 2L. This is a good size to sate the needs of one regular kombucha drinker. Ikea used to have such jars. You can also likely find such things at Costco, although there you will have needed first to eat an obscene amount of something prior to the jar's being available for kombucha brewing.

Next, you will have befriended someone who is already brewing kombucha and can give you a culture. I recommend myself for this. Once you express your interest in brewing kombucha, you friend will deliver to you a culture in a (likely smaller) glass jar of its own. It will be living in its fermented tea. If you have completed this step prior to step one, you may store your new pet in the refrigerator for a few days until such time as you are able to progress with your brewing.

Brewing.
You can think of your kombucha culture as an acid-loving goldfish whose water you like to drink. Your culture is alive. It is your new pet. Your kombucha mushroom pet does not like to share its tea with chlorine or other microbes. Therefore, you will take the pot in which you will brew your tea and fill it with water ONE DAY BEFORE you intend to start the actual tea brewing (2L water for 2L tea). You will leave this pot of water on the counter UNCOVERED for the next 24 hours. This will allow chlorine and various other minerals dissolved in your tap water to evaporate.

The next day, you will relocate your pot of water (now with less chlorine) to the stove where you will bring it to a boil, also UNCOVERED. Boiling kills any living things residing in your water as well as encouraging more of those minerals to evaporate. It also heats up your water for the tea brewing. Yes, it will take longer to boil. When the water starts to bubble, you will dissolve in it about 1/2 cup granulated white sugar (1/2c sugar for 2L tea - or 1c sugar per gallon). Not honey, not brown sugar - your kombucha wants to eat glucose, not molasses, not fructose and whatever other acids are in honey. When your sugar is fully dissolved in a nice rolling boil, turn off the heat.

You will now choose three to four bags of tea to steep in your 2L sugar water (6 bags for 1G tea) and add them to the pot. (Yes, some water will have evaporated during boiling. This is art, not science). You will use black, green or white tea. You will not use herbal tea. Your kombucha is interested in the caffeine and has no interest in exposing itself to the mystery of herbal tea. I recommend floral black/green/white teas. Jasmine green tea is a personal favorite. I have also done well with rose black tea or a peony white tea, &c., for example. You will be tempted to try Earl Grey tea because you have it in your cupboard. Luckily, I have already attempted this and can inform you that the kombucha tea you brew will taste foul. Earl Grey kombucha is available commercially; it tastes similarly foul. Oil of Bergamot is not a flavour that sits well with vinegary kombucha. That is the definitive truth.

You will now allow your kombucha to come to room temperature. Would you put your goldfish in boiling water? You would not. Do not cook your kombucha culture. You will wait for the tea to come to room temperature. This will take hours. Find something to do. If you must, you may steep your tea in the refrigerator. It will cool faster, but it will still take hours. It is ok if your tea is colder than room temperature.

Fermentation.
And now, the coup de grâce. You will rinse out your large glass jar. You will pour your sweet tea into the jar. Then, you will pour some of the liquid your kombucha baby has been living in into the jar, add the culture itself, and then pour a little more of its old tea on top. This is to keep some of the acidic environment it is used to.

You will cover the top of your jar with a paper towel and secure it with a rubber band or length of string. You can find something else to use your cheese cloth for. Use a paper towel. Cheese cloth lets too much through. Do not seal the jar - your kombucha needs to breathe.

Find a nice cool spot out of the sun and away from plant debris, living things, or whatever else you have in your kitchen and let your tea ferment until it tastes good to you. The longer you wait, the stronger it will get as your culture consumes the sugar in the tea, but if you wait too long, it will start to turn bitter. I like the way mine tastes after about 8 or 9 days, but this will vary with temperature and personal preference. I would say 7-12 days is normal, though.

Carbonation.
When you were acquiring your large glass jar in which to brew you kombucha, you will also have acquired some sealable glass bottles like this --->

Pour the kombucha tea into your sealable glass bottle(s), keeping enough liquid in your original jar to cover the kombucha culture (~2-3" of liquid). Most of your kombucha yeast-bacteria will live in its mushroom colony, but some will be floating about at the top and bottom of the jar. Try to get as little of this in the bottle as possible. Some will get in. This can be a good thing. 2L tea usually produces ~750mL bottled tea with some left over, which you can seal in a smaller bottle if you like.

You will have noticed at the grocery store that the better brands of kombucha have fruity flavours and you will want to make fruity flavoured kombucha yourself. If you feel compelled to make fruit flavoured kombucha, you will add fruit juice to your bottle now, as you will have left some extra space when decanting the tea into your bottle. You will under no circumstances add fruit juice to the jar with your kombucha mushroom. Would you pour juice into your goldfish bowl? You would not. Stroll the grocery store for kombucha juice flavour ideas. I like to use pomegranate or pomegranate-lime juice because it's nice and thin. It will not even occur to you to use a thick, pulpy juice because the thought of mixing it with your kombucha disgusts you.

To get a nice fizz, you will leave your bottled tea out on the counter for another week while you brew the next batch of kombucha. (Now is a good time to start again with your next batch). Keeping the bottled tea at room temperature encourages whatever strands of kombucha escaped into your bottle to consume any additional sugar in the tea. However, because the bottle is sealed, the gas produced will carbonate your tea.

Chilling.
Kombucha undeniably tastes better cold, so you will move your bottle of carbonated tea to the refrigerator once it's had a chance to work up a good bit of carbonation out on the counter. It will still carbonate further in the refrigerator, but much more slowly. Better to give it a kick start out on the counter.

Enjoy.

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Q&A, mostly A
Yes, you should move your culture and its remaining tea to a glass bowl and rinse the jar with water prior to pouring in your second batch of room temperature sweet tea.
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No, mold on your kombucha culture is not a good. Kombucha is not cheese; it should not have mold. Compost or toss out your baby. Your friend undoubtedly has another kombucha baby you can have. Or, if you've made a few batches you may well have a spare baby yourself.
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Your kombucha baby is getting particularly thick and sort of splitting into two disks because it has grown too big to live as a single colony. Half-ish of your culture has decided to strike out on its own and form a new colony, not unlike the ways bees form a new hive when their colony is too populous. Get used to this. Your baby will reproduce just about every two weeks. Keep the fresher, whiter colony for brewing your tea and compost or save your spare older colonies in the refrigerator. You will of course cover any saved cultures in their tea and keep them in a jar covered with paper towel. Every once in a blue moon your friends will ask you for one of these cultures so that they can start brewing tea of their own. You will be grateful. You will be even more grateful when they kill a few yeast babies getting started so that you can offload more than one.
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Yes, you can store your kombucha culture in its jar in the refrigerator while you go on vacation. The cooler temperature will slow its metabolism down, but make it a fresh batch of sugar tea first so that it doesn't starve.

Personal quandary

When I was in elementary school, my dad had a black Oldsmobile with a personalized license plate that read - PHD FMLY. He bought it when he and my mom finished their doctoral dissertations in Computer Science at UCLA. I'd compiled a pictoral dissertation in smelly marker myself on the floor of the computer lab while my parents worked on the weekends. Come to think of it, I grew up at UCLA. I don't remember what I said when kids would see my dad's car in the pick up line at school and ask if I had a PhD, but I always assumed I would have one. Because that is what you do.

Except that I don't have a PhD. I'm not sure if I want one because I'm actually interested in pursuing the careers it would open to me, or if I just need the encouragement of a piece of paper on the wall stating that I've done something with myself. Probably both. Nevertheless, I feel wildly jealous of everyone in graduate programs and with graduate degrees.

I think I've seen two measures of success: 1. Graduate school and 2. Producing offspring. I don't think I've done nothing all these years, but I don't seem to have gotten anywhere with either of those two. I'd like to think of my goal as Love/Happiness - because if you've found those, what does it matter how you got there or what it looks like? - but it's hard to know I'm on the right track or on the track at all.

Perhaps I should try this...

Half-thought on GMOs

I've never been a fan of genetically modified anything on principle. My instincts tell me to let nature run its course and propagate polycultures of heirloom crops, rather than fuel the industrial agriculture beast by buying Bigger, Better crops for a premium.

...But I was listening to the radio* the other night, and there was a guy talking about Africa, the green revolution, and ending world hunger, and he mentioned that he'd be in favor of offering small scale African farmers GM crops as long as they were beneficial to the farmers (as opposed to something that just made your corn a prettier shade of yellow for end consumers). I am leaving out the bulk of his argument, but the gist was that these guys need all the help they can get.

I am torn. On the one hand, I'm still concerned about selecting for unkillable pests, but plant diseases (as I'm learning) can be more than a handful, and I'm not sure I'd begrudge a small farmer disease resistant crops if it meant he could use fewer pesticide sprays (that a lot of these guys administer themselves by hand - chemicals on one shoulder, and a kid on the other) and possibly saved him and his family from hunger in a bum year.

Is there really such a big difference between natural evolution and human-assisted mutation? Maybe it really is a pipe dream to think we could feed the world's hungry without disease resistant varietals. At some point I should properly look into this sort of thing and weigh the pro's and con's. I'd be more willing to give GMOs a chance if you could take the big business aspect out.

In any case, I still maintain that polyculture never hurt anyone...


*(Broadcast of The Forces Behind Famine - Roger Thurlow speaking at the World Affairs Council on 8/11/2009)

Composting 101: Dealing with flies

My worm bin has always been on the wet side, with most of the finished compost dripping through the wide grating at the bottom of my Wriggly Wranch, which hasn't really bothered me because there are enough worms swimming around in the lower level to suggest that it hasn't become too anaerobic (lacking the oxygen worms and other organisms need to do their decomposing), but it's also been more fly-prone than usual lately, which needless to say isn't my favorite thing about composting.

With all that life going on, it was nice that we had a little composting refresher in my Permaculture class the other day to help sort things out. Here are some helpful tidbits of info, should you find yourself with a worm bin:

1. The kind of little flies or other insects that tend to come with worm composting generally have about a 14 day life cycle. So, if you ever have a serious problem, make sure to stop adding food to your bin for at least 14 days to wait out the current cycle.

2. Flies need a moist environment to lay their eggs and produce the next generation of their kind, so you want to keep your bin as dry as possible. Wetness in and of itself isn't a problem, but it provides a happy environment for fly larvae and makes your finished compost a little messier than you might like, whereas drier compost would be less likely to drip through the grate at the bottom of your bin. Other advantages of relatively dry compost are that the anaerobic liquid also being produced during the decomposition process can leak to the bottom (which is what that spout is there to release, if you have one) without contaminating your compost and that harvesting might not be quite as messy.

Some simple ways to dissuade flies from colonizing your bin include:

Adding more newspaper to the top.
Leave as much as 6" of newspaper strips over your foodscraps. For more serious fly problems, you can also lay a few sheets of whole newspaper over the top to create more of a barrier. More newspaper can also help with odor problems.

Use drier foodscraps.
Worms (and the other decomposers) love to eat the vegetables left over from making vegetable stock, but these are really wet. To dry out stock left overs, I've started leaving them out on the stove once I've poured off the stock I'll be using and allowing them to air dry or turning the heat back on under my pot to further dry the scraps out.

Always add food scraps UNDERNEATH newspaper.
The harder it is to get to food scraps, the less likely flies will discover and gorge themselves on them. Tossing your food scraps on top makes it easy for pests to find them and harder for your worms. Scraps on top will take longer to decompose, which can lead to rotting, which means bad smells and probably more flies.

Cracks and flashes

Woke up at five to thunder and lightning and rain, which is one of my favorite ways to wake up. It feels special, and I've been missing special.

Were you aware of it? vol. 20: Good news in Texas

The NYT reported recently on Dan Phillips and his new construction company, Phoenix Commotion, based in Huntsville, TX. With NPR reporting on our continued adventures with the housing crisis, this man is doing some really awesome stuff for his community.

Phoenix Commotion is building low income housing for the Huntsville community by acquiring lots inexpensively and building houses entirely out of salvaged materials. The finished product may not look like the other houses on the block, but they're well designed, totally up to code, and pretty dang good looking.

See for yourself:

Roof made of old shingles.
Osage Orange wood countertop - abundant locally.
Ceiling made of old frame samples.
Cattle bone backed chair.

Phillips insists that future owners help with construction à la Habitat for Humanity, but Phoenix Commotion isn't a nonprofit. Phillips keeps profit margins relatively slim, but he wants to prove that low income housing is viable as a business model. In the process his efforts have helped Huntsville organize channels for the collection and dispersal of salvageable/salvaged building materials.

Even if some of the 15 original owners have been booted out of their homes by the financial crisis (moving the homes into middle class hands), it's a noble effort, and I'm glad to see someone taking on good looking, low income housing.

See the original article.

New life, day 8: Regulating

Dude, I should have been a scientist. I am kicking school's butt so far. Granted I'm taking classes at community college after getting hard core on myself at Berkeley, but still. I was pleased that even coming into Soil Management in the third week, it took about 15 minutes before I was taking charge of the lab and explaining how to do the calculations to my group. I have a good group of folks - don't get me wrong - but I was jazzed to be able to soak up this new stuff so quickly.

I expect school to be easy. Busy, but easy. Even if my classes are geared more for future gardeners than future Ecology PhDs, It feels good to be getting my feet wet. It feels good to be surrounded by plants.

I am feeling mostly good these days. Inspired to be super social, and so far, so good. I was a chatty Cathy at the Botanical Garden on Saturday shoveling with Ilie and the gang. Not even the guys shoveled the whole time. I think I was the only one, but it felt good being outside, doing manual labour.

I even made a potential new pal/bus buddy in Permaculture on Friday. We'll see. I think he's in Soil Management too, which reminds me I still have oodles of reading to do, but I'm looking forward to it. And there was the other Russian girl from Soil Management who was also super sweet. Soon enough I'll be able to tell you all about how to prune your fruit tree and why. Or I will be able to do a textural analysis of your soil and measure your field capacity. Or grow food. Or identify plant diseases. In short, I will be cool.

And today: Labour Day Garden Party! Quelle success! So good to see everyone, even R&C, who I feel like I see almost every day now (and am loving every minute of it - way to move closer, guys!). So many people, such a good time! Yay for parties. May there be many more of them.

la fille au verre d'eau

Today would be a good day to have a man-friend, I am realizing as I am strategizing how to transport a party's worth of food, three instruments, three cameras, a croquet set, picnic blanket, and the various and sundry down the street to the park, where my party will begin to take place as soon as I manage to get there.

Were you aware of it? vol. 19: Sierra Beauty apples

Discovered these at Berkeley Bowl when a man turns to his son and says, "These are the best apples you'll ever have." It's true.


Large, handsome apple with thin green and yellow skin, striped or blushed red. A favorite apple from Boonville, CA. Juicy, very crisp, rich, tart, sprightly flavor. A good seller in farm markets and an excellent keeper.

Generally late blooming. Need full sun, well-drained soil, and moderate fertility. The tree is compact. Unpruned, semi-dwarf trees reach 85% of standard (about 15—25'), but by pruning you can keep your tree to any desired height. Thin fruit to maximize quality and size. Susceptible to codling moth, apple scab, powdery mildew, and gophers. Generally cross-fertile, which means that the variety is not pollinated by itself, but by a different variety of the same fruit. Three or more varieties are best. Harvest 3rd year.

Bloom: Midseason
USDA Zone: 6,7,8,9
Pollination: Self-fertile
Fruit Storage: Excellent
Mature Size: Medium
Ripens: Very Late
Uses: Fresh eating/ dessert, cooking (puree, applesauce, apple butter), baking
Rootstock: Semidwarf

Order an heirloom apple tree.