1) I had a conversation with my landlady yesterday about how we might not have any more conflict about the garden. We agreed that I can plant anywhere that I want to, so long as a) I put a border around my garden, and b) I do not use the fence as a trellis again this year.

2) The hops are budding aggressively, so I am now thinking about what sort of trellis they might like this year. I have a few weeks before I have to decide.

3) Today I planted mustard greens and sage around the hops, as well as a few perennial wildflowers.

I’ve been asked for pictures, so here they are, using a gatorade bottle as an example:

Materials:

Tools for the plastic bottle planters

I used four tools that I had lying around to make the planters:

• A pair of scissors
• An X-acto knife–I wouldn’t use one with a metal handle!)
• An old, 15-watt soldering iron.  A higher-power soldering pen or wood-burning iron would work better
• A small, hand-held butane torch.  This produces a 2400º flame and is powered by an ordinary cigarette lighter.  It makes me happy.

If you have a wood-burning pen with a hot knife tip, you can dispense with the knife and torch.  Alternatively, you could use a gas stove to heat the knife.  If you don’t have a gas stove, a torch, or a wood-burning pen, you can do this with a pair of scissors and a ball-point pen as your ownly tools.  It will just be less elegant.

Besides the tools, you will need a 1-litre or bigger plastic bottle, some soil, and something to plant in it.

Technique:

First, remove the label.  Hot water inside the bottle will dissolve the adhesive so it’ll come right off.  Just don’t put boiling water in a soda bottle–you will shink the bottle and possibly burn yourself!

First cut the plastic bottle.  For the gatorade bottle the picture shows where to make the cut.  If you are using a soda bottle, Inside Urban Green has tips on where to cut.  This is where the hot knife comes in–it’s easier to make the first incision with heat, but you could do it with an unheated knife and some brute force.

Cut Bottle

Click on the photo for a bigger copy–it’s cut right below the curvy bit.  The gist is that the curvy bit, upside-down, should fit in the other bit so that the lip of the bottle just touches the bottom.

Next, it’s time to poke some holes in the curvy bit.  These holes allow the soil to drain excess moisture, and there’s some suggestion that humid aeration is good for the roots.

Here I used the 15-watt soldering iron.  This is an old iron that barely gets hot anymore (I think there’s some corrosion impeding thermal conductivity), but a better-working or hotter iron would do the trick.

Finally, the planter needs a wick–this will irrigate the soil by capillary action from below.  Or in simpler terms, it will suck water up into the soil!  A scrap of fabric from an old pair of jeans works marvelously!

That’s it–I just scooped some potting mix into the planter and added a few mustard seeds–they should germinate in 4-10 days.

Turns out, it’s easy.

Eqipment:

1 wide-mouth quart mason jar
1 pint mason jar
Spare change, pebbles, or something else heavy.

Ingredients:

Six limes
1 garlic bulb
1 hand of ginger
Lots of kosher or pickling salt
3 ounces of hot chili peppers (that’s a lot)
Methi (fenugreek) seeds (they’re not in the spice section of your local grocery; they’re in the ‘foreign’ or ‘ethnic’ section).
Mustard seeds
Ground turmeric

Method:

Cut limes into thin wedges over a bowl, catching the juice.  Put wedges in bowl and salt liberally. Cut tops off the hot peppers, slice down the side, throw in bowl with limes and salt liberally.  Slice garlic and ginger thin, put in bowl, and salt liberally.  Mix.  Violently.  The mixture should smell very limey.  Toss in methi and mustard seeds.

Pack the mixture into your quart mason jar.  I emphasize pack.  The items should not be loosely tossed in, but squished with all of your might, so as to remove any air pockets and thoroughly juice the limes.  Fill your pint jar with spare change and use it to really ram the vegetables down into the quart jar.  Then leave it in place to hold everything under the lime juice.  If the lime juice does not fully cover the vegetables, squish more.  If it still isn’t enough, go buy some lime juice and squirt it in until they’re covered.

Wait a week or three.  Refrigerate.  Eat.

Update: One of my two quarts is now done after ten days, and very tasty.  Could use some more fermenting, but I’m gonna call it good.  The other, which is wetter due to more added lime juice, still tastes fresher.  So I’m leaving it out longer.

The cranberry kombucha is all gone.  It was lovely, but it tasted so unlike tea that I tended to foget there was caffeine in it.  I think next time I will not use black tea for this.

Meanwhile, I have a new 3-quart batch of rose hips kombucha that’s looking close to ready!

Below the cut, Weinkraut and Sourdough

Weinkraut

My parents got me a Harsch Crock for Christmas, so Adrienne and I put it to work last week.  I bought 15 pounds of cabbage for 10 liters of kraut, that was about 2.5 times as much as I needed.  We packed about 6 pounds of shredded cabbage into the crock with a head of lightly-smashed garlic and a few caraway seeds.  The cabbage was apparently quite dry, it took about 3 litres of bugundy wine to fill all of the interstices and cover the weights.  It has been fermenting for four days now; the Gospel According to Katz suggests it should be done in about a week.

I have never had weinkraut before, but I hear it is a German tradition and I look forward to trying it.  Then again, all of the (non-fermented) recipes I’ve seen online use white sauerkraut and white wine; I’m using Rotkohl (red cabbage) and red wine.

Sourdough

I had about a cup of leftover cooked rice getting stale on my kitchen counter, so I took a suggestion from Katz and mixed it up with a cup of whole wheat flour and two cups of water to make a sourdough starter.  He quite correctly points out that the yeasties will eat the rice carbs just as happily as the flour carbs, and by the time I go to make a loaf out of it, the original grains that I put in the starter will be fermented beyond recognition.  What a fabulous way to recyle stale rice!

*This post is tagged “locavoracious” even though none of the food involved was locally-sourced, because next season I hope to be fermenting my very own home-grown cabbages.  Eventually I’d like to be gowing my own wheat, too.

Ingredients:

Cranberry Kombucha!

1 bottle store-bought Kombucha, any flavor (buy it at whole foods or your local health-food store).
1 cup sugar (cane, beet, corn, maple, whatever)
4 tea bags (your choice) or equivalent amount of loose tea
1 gallon-size crock pot (or scale up)
5 fluid ounces cranberry cocktail concentrate (with real sugar, not HFCS.  You could use straight up cranberry juice to similar effect)

Protocol:

Brew tea.  Very strong.  In crock pot.
Add sugar
Cool to room temperature
Add half bottle of store-bought Kombucha.  Drink the rest.  If you drink too much, add whatever’s left.
Cover your crock pot with a towel (NOT the lid–this is supposed to be an aerobic fermentation!), and set aside in a place where it won’t be disturbed for a few weeks.

Let sit completely undisturbed for at least a month.  I mean don’t even move it across your counter.  If you do move it, it’s not the end of the world, but it will screw up the structural integrity of your Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast (SCOBY).

After your month is up there should be a mushroomy-looking film on top of your Kombucha.  This is the SCOBY.  It is good.  Take a teaspoon (well-washed) and taste the product.  If it is sour and tasty, you did it right.  If it smells repulsive or otherwise “off,” do not taste it–either throw it out or at least get a second opinion from somebody who knows Kombucha.  If there are bits of mold growing on top of the SCOBY your Kombucha may be fine, but you will not be able to use that SCOBY again.  If everything is shiny on top of the SCOBY, then gently lift it onto a plate, bottle your Kombucha (mason jars work fine), leaving a cup or two in the crockpot. This is where I add the cranberry.  I used a cranberry cocktail concentrate with added cane sugar to cut the tartness and make it fizzy.   Make a new batch of tea and start again, putting your new SCOBY on top.  Just be sure to cool the tea before you mix it with the old batch or put the SCOBY on, lest you kill your culture.

Solution: Put bits on sandwich.  Details below, along with suggested substitutions.

Bits:

1 Uglyripe Tomato
1/2 White Onion
1 bucket mixed weird salad greens
1/2 tub baby bellas
1 link Tofurkey brand Italian Sausage substitute.  Consider any German, Italian, or Polish sausage (cooked), or the veggie-sausage of your choice.  Breakfast sausages not recommended.
1 jar Irish Stout Mustard (consider any good honey mustard, brown mustard, or condiment-of-choice)

Garlic salt
Black pepper
Asiago cheese (consider parmesan, cheddar, or fresh mozzarella)
Slightly sweet kaiser-ish rolls
Made-from-food organic ketchup
Dill pickles

Protocol:

Toast roll over low heat on skillet until insides are lightly burnt and outside is soft and mushy.  While that’s going:

Slice sausage into bits (or crumbles).  Slice up appropriate amount of shrooms and onion for number of sandwiches (in my case: 1).  Mix in bowl and douse in garlic salt.  I then sauteed all of that and a heap of shredded asiago in a cast iron skillet over medium heat with canola oil.  I would not put the cheese in next time.  If you are using cheddar put the cheese on top of the rest at the very end when everything is cooked, then cover until the cheese melts.  With asiago, parma, or romano I would go ahead and shred the cheese right onto the sammich after hot veggies are added.  With mozzarella I would put a nice briney slice of fresh, raw mozz right on the sandwich without any use of heat on the cheese.

Put stuff on sammich.  Eat.  Drink pumpkin ale.  Be merry.

Because I’m a big nerd, I also picked up a soil sample at the garden and brought it home to my soil test kit, which told me that it’s good on Potassium, and Phosphorus, but low on Nitrogen.  It also tested VERY  alkaline (pH 8.0).  I thought at first that the result was just confounded by alkaline tap water, but my tap water came up at between pH 6 and 7.  Time to take samples from a wider area of the garden, and if they’re all this alkaline, to spread some Melanterite (FeSO4*7H20).  Or maybe just manure.  The internet tells me that manure is generally neutral and buffered, so maybe that would do?  Does anybody have experience with alkalne soil and could make a recommendation?

Other vegetables in the pipeline: I’ve got two jalapeños, six habaneros, and six bell peppers growing as seedlings on my roof.  I’ve got a potato plant that’s doing quite well, five tomato seedlings, and just yesterday seeded basil, oregano, and summer squash.  I have seeds for radish, spinach, and broccoli to go straight into the ground.

Peppers in front, seeds back right, potato back left.

Today’s project: work five gallons of Cayuga Compost and some manure into the soil, and install my rain gauge.  Plant radishes, spinach, and broccoli.