Yeast and Sour Dough Starters

I recently got lucky enough to be given an Amish Friendship Bread starter.  The bread is easy to make and the kids love it.  It makes a sweet dessert bread and we’ve made cinnamon, banana, and chocolate chip varieties just by adding different ingredients on baking day.  The directions refer to the starter as a sour dough starter and that got me to wondering about making actual sour dough bread.   I’ve scoured the internet looking for sour dough starter recipes (since no one has given me one), and they all look about the same.  You need flour, water, yeast, time, and patience.  Here’s where the fun part comes in though – you don’t actually have to add yeast, you can allow it to gather in your starter from the air around you.  You can also add ingredients that will spur the creation of yeast and add a bit of a particular flavor if you like something specific. 

I will admit that although I have baked bread for years, I had no real idea where the yeast came from – other than the grocery store.  I always imagined it as kind of like pollen.  I could picture myself getting some cheesecloth and going outside to harvest it.  Wrong!!  It’s a single cell fungi that is all around us.  It will naturally gather in your starter and get to work.  Quite a while ago, people learned how to cultivate yeast from certain sources to produce a variety of flavors.  These help create unique tastes for wines and other spirits, but can also alter the taste of true sour dough bread.  I recently read that grape peels are a very good source for a sour dough starter.  Juniper berries can also be used.  My grape vines aren’t producing grapes yet, but we have a slew of juniper berries around here.  (At this point, you can see the wheels inside my head turning, and you know that I have to give this a try).

Here are a couple of links to sour dough starters.  If you’re feeling adventurous, you might want to give it a try.  There is also a link to a forum discussing the various successes and failures of the process.  Of particular interest to me is the one about the juniper berry yeast starter.  That’s my kind of experiment!

Here is one that collects the yeast from the air around you:  

http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/sour.htm

Here is one that has you add a package of yeast: 

http://www.food.com/recipe/sourdough-bread-starter-13750?layout=desktop

And here is the fun juniper berry yeast starter experiment:

http://forums.egullet.org/topic/105634-juniper-berry-bread-starter/

Enjoy – and good luck!

Growing Mushrooms Indoors

I saw a link floating around online a couple of months ago about growing mushrooms indoors.  You just needed a five gallon bucket, enough coffee grounds to fill it up, and a starter kit.  Ok.  I like mushrooms and like to try new things, so why not.

I did a little research, read a few reviews, and ended up ordering this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000E7L2M4/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The instructions left a little to be desired, but they did include a phone number to call if you weren’t sure about things.   I filled the bucket with a lot of help from the good people at the local Starbucks and got busy.  Look what I ended up with!

Yes, that is a quarter sitting on the mushroom.  It is there for size reference.  I think I was actually supposed to eat these monsters before they got this big, but I couldn’t resist letting them grow a bit.  My plan is to eat most of them but leave one or two to dry and go to spore.  The idea is that I can then start again and have a regular supply.  Economically speaking, these would be expensive mushrooms if you only got one batch.  Fun either way, but not cost effective.

So there you have it.  You can grow mushrooms indoors without much trouble.  You just need a source to get started.  I remember going mushroom hunting with my parents many years ago.   We’d occasionally come across button mushrooms that had dried out.  If you stomped on one, you could see the spore burst out into the air.   If you know your mushrooms and know of a place to find wild ones, maybe you could gather your spore naturally.   I can see a hike in the woods with my mushroom field guide in the near future!

Continual Sowing: Beets, Turnips & Radishes

Do you sow a little beet seed each week? How about your turnips and radishes? If you're not, you certainly should. Remember that you only get one root per seed planted. If you plant some seed every week, not only will you get more harvest, but it will be staggered through the season, instead of a glut of roots and then nothing.
One exception to this is if you intend to can your harvest. In that case one large harvest is preferred, though you can always stagger sow a lesser amount for fresh eating.
Let a few go to seed, so you can collect them for next year!

Growing Wild

Look at some of the gorgeous wild plants growing along the roadsides! Just beautiful, and growing up lush and healthy with no help from humans. Is it any wonder why Michele and I search to find out which of them are edible?

Companion Planting - Strawberries and Onions

For years, I have planted in rows - a row of this next to a row of that.  This is the first year that I’m trying my hand at companion planting in beds.  Even with the raised beds, I would usually dedicate one for asparagus, one for blackberries, etc.  Having the good luck to have a couple of onion sets to plant one day while Jennifer was visiting, I am now a firm believer in companion planting.  I had just planted strawberries in a raised bed and she pointed to it and said that we should plant the onions in with them.   Realizing that I’m not too old to learn a new trick, I agreed to give it a try.

Wow, look at those happy plants!  Honestly, I’ve struggled to keep strawberries happy in the past.  The leaves have stayed small and the berries have also.  I’ve had very few runners and by mid-summer they had just given up.  If these plants were any more enthused about growing right now, they’d be taking over the other beds as well.  The onions are doing super too.  They really do like each other!  The onions will keep the bugs away from the strawberries.  There are other plants, such as borage and thyme, that will do that as well, but that’s not what I had on hand.

It is early in the year and the weather has been cool, but I have high hopes of keeping these plants healthy throughout the summer.    Next year, I’ll make sure to plant some friends in with them again and maybe I’ll finally get a strawberry patch going. 

Companion planting might not work for every plant, or every person.  That’s ok.  If you haven’t tried it yet, you might be surprised at the difference it makes in your garden.  There are loads of online references to plants that like and dislike each other.  Just be careful what you put together and give it a try!

Hay vs Straw

Although for the most part, I use the terms hay and straw interchangeably, I do know that there is a difference.  This was brought to the forefront of my mind the other day when I was getting garden mulch.  Since we have baby chicks, I figured to use the hay/straw as bedding for the chicks as well as mulch for the garden.  The good folks at the feed store suggested straw for our fine feathered friends since it was cheaper and the birds wouldn’t care either way.  When I asked if it was as good as hay for garden mulch, they didn’t know.  I bought the straw and then did some research.  It turns out that there is no consensus on the matter. 

Hay comes from cut grass and is purported to litter your garden with grass seeds, potentially making weeding a nightmare for the foreseeable future.  Straw, on the other hand, comes from cut grains stalks, with the seeds (grain tops) mostly removed.   Hay is often used for feeding animals, thus is more expensive in most areas than straw.  So far, it seems like straw is the winner in this debate – but wait, there’s more! 

It turns out that hay contains more minerals than straw and will add nutrients to the soil as it decomposes (http://learningandyearning.com/2012/04/02/using-hay-vs-straw-in-the-garden/).  Several pages I scoured (including the link referenced above) suggested leaving the hay sit for a season before using it.  Buying year old hay from nearby farmers or just planning ahead can help with that.  It was also suggested that the hay be used as bedding for chickens, before being added to your garden.  That way, the chickens eat the seeds and supply a little extra fertilizer. 

Then there were the practical pages that suggested you use whatever was the cheapest.  Either will help with moisture content and controlling soil temperature.  One page even suggested that if your hay sprouts, add more hay to choke those seeds out!  So there you have it.  If you’re mulching on a budget, straw is most likely the way to go.  If you’re mulching to keep the weeds at bay, straw is most likely the way to go.  If you want to add more nutrients back to your soil and have either chickens or time, you may want to go with hay.

Plums vs Frost - update!

Isn't that a pretty picture?  A baby plum!  It seems that the late frost didn't wipe out this year's crop.  Our two trees have a scattering of little plums.  A lot of them are still quite small, so I haven't determined if the crop yield will be as great as some years, but barring any future problems, we should at least have some.  I don't know if it was the lights we strung up for those two cold nights or the tree's natural hardy nature, or maybe a combination of both that helped the blossoms survive.  Either way, I'm not complaining!

I hope your fruit/nut trees handled the frost as well.