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posted by Julia on March 1, 2010
Since Dusty and first had the idea for this blog, I’ve been taking pictures off and on, but I’ve never gotten around to actually uploading any of them, let alone incorporating them into a relevant post. The seedlings sprouting the basement finally inspired me to move all the pictures I’ve taken since February to the computer, so I thought I’d share a few now.
 First up: the flour mill. This is a Meadows 8″ Stone Burr Grain Mill, which came from Avatar’s. Dusty bought it from Siri Neel when the store closed, and then it sat in his warehouse for several years until we moved it over here and started using it. I was very skeptical at first — I mean, really, what’s wrong with pre-ground flour? Now I totally love it.
Here it is in action — when the motor’s on, the funnel moves back and forth to spill grain down between the stones. This is it as it comes out of the funnel.
 Not all the flour that comes out of the mill winds up as something yummy. Sometimes, in fact, things get really really gross. Here’s a sourdough starter that went horribly awry. At the time I thought it was because I hadn’t stirred it the day before, but now I think it’s because I used some of it to make bread and didn’t divide the remainder. It makes *no* sense to me that if you take some away you then need to take even more away, but disaster always strikes after I’ve removed a portion of the starter without dividing the remainder. If you can explain this, I would love to hear from you.
Dusty shoveling. Pretty self-explanatory, right? This was taken after the second big storm in February. The first one happened while Dusty was in State College at the PASA conference, so there was no one around to take pictures of me shoveling through the first incarnation of that bank. Admittedly, it was only about half as high.
I’m never a big winter fan, but with all the cold and the snow and the big difference between what Dusty and I each consider to be a reasonable thermostat temperature, I feel like this winter has been worse than normal. I might feel that way every winter, but since I lose all perspective when I’m cold, it’s hard to say.
Anyway, this feeling of utter desperation has been somewhat ameliorated by the seedlings growing in the basement. Spring must be just around the corner if it’s time to start planting stuff, right?
 To the right there is the basement setup as it is today. I think we’re going to have to find a new home for the milk crate of onions and the postal tray of garlic (where does he get this stuff?) behind those flats, but that seems like a task I can tackle even on the coldest winter day. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite warm enough in the basement for germination, so I put a little electric radiator next to the table. It’s definitely working — things are growing! — but I wish I could figure out a way to keep everything upstairs. On the other hand, it’s not very warm upstairs during the day, so maybe some extra heat would be warranted no matter where they were.
Below is a close up. The seeds we started last week are on the right, the ones I started today are on the left. Clockwise from the top right: kale, cabbage, cabbage, collards. Not pictured: More kale, more collards, parsley, romaine. I’ve never grown anything in my life, so even this tiny bit of growth is ridiculously exciting to me. And terrifying. It feels like a big responsibility, like I’m suddenly in charge of something fragile and valuable. This is a weird feeling, given that all this stuff is readily available in the grocery store, but there it is. I feel it with the sourdough starter, too, though to a lesser extent. It’s very easy to just buy kale at Giant (and I do, a lot), very easy to never even consider another way of going about it. But now that I have it in my head that it’s worth the time and effort to grow it myself, to know where it came from and what it was exposed to, well, my awareness of my willingness to make that commitment kind of makes it a Big Deal. A much bigger deal than the effort it takes to pick up a bunch from Giant makes it seem. Anyway. I’ll stop rambling now, and just show you the damn picture. Feels awfully anti-climactic now, doesn’t it?
posted by Julia on February 15, 2010 tagged with: gardening | So. We have ordered seeds. Twenty three kinds of them. Kale, zucchini, three kinds of beans, carrots, two kinds of tomatoes, etc, etc. We ordered them from High Mowing Organic Seeds, because I read The Town That Food Saved by Ben Hewitt (highly recommended, btw), which features High Mowing pretty prominently, and then Dusty came home from the PASA Conference with a High Mowing catalog. Sold.
High Mowing is based in Vermont, but uses test farmers all over the country. They provide instructions for how to save seeds from all of their (non-hybrid) crops. Sad that this seems almost revolutionary, but there it is.
Anyway. It’s looking more and more likely that we’ll stay here in Lemoyne for only a couple of years, and that it will be Dusty’s land in the city that will end up being “the homestead”. So, rather than tearing up the yard and wrestling with the soil here, we’re going to try the container gardening thing.
I’ve been reading Gayla Trail’s Grow Great Grub which, while not a comprehensive guide, is inspirational. Trail is all about small-space gardening, and especially container gardening, and especially about doing it on the (relatively) cheap. She’s got lots of cute ideas, like using toilet paper tubes to start seeds (bonus — they can go straight into the ground, making them a good option for seedlings that don’t like to be transplanted), and it’s got me thinking all the time about scavenging for stuff to grow veggies in.
Dusty, though, claims that he has in his warehouse nearly everything we’ll need. This is nice, I guess — makes it all a lot less daunting — but is also a little disappointing. I’d been thinking the scavenging would be part of the fun, especially over the next couple of months as we ramp up slowly. Of course, we haven’t actually gone over to the warehouse to scope it all out yet, so it may be that we’ll still be doing more scavenging than we’re anticipating. We’ll see.
For now, while we’re eagerly awaiting the arrival of the seeds, the challenges are to rig up a little grow lamp in the basement (and maybe figure out how to protect the seedlings from the cats?), and make up a planting calendar. Trail is helping with this part, too — there’s a spreadsheet on her website that’ll calculate planting dates if you enter your “Frost Free Date”. Our frost free date is May 2nd, which means that collards and kale can be started indoors as soon as February 21st. We better get to work!
posted by Julia on December 24, 2009 tagged with: sourdough | So….clearly we got this blog all setup and ready to go, and have done nothing with it. I guess I thought we’d be doing less homemaking and more writing about it! Anyway. This post isn’t a promise that there will be more posts, but I’ve had a couple of people ask recently about how to do the sourdough thing, so I got a little itch to share what I’ve learned so far.
Sourdough starts with a starter, but before that it starts with flour and water. It seems like a miracle when you pull a loaf out of the oven and think that it really really did just start with flour and water sitting on the counter. My first couple of attempts at starting a starter failed — putridly — but now I’ve got two going strong and it’s pretty exciting. It’s also way less difficult to produce a successful loaf than I imagined it could be — everyone talks about baking as such a science, and I’m sure there are scientific ways to approach it, but working by “feel” and just paying attention to what’s going on and thinking about what I’d want to eat seems to be working out pretty well.
I took initial advice on starting the starter from Andrew Whitley’s Bread Matters and Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation . The two men offer very different ideas about how to go about it — I mean, other than the part where both tell you that the basic ingredients are flour and water sitting in a warm place. Whitley gives a very detailed directions for how much flour and water to add each day, while Katz says to mix equal parts flour and water and stir and feed it every so often.
I started with a method closer to Katz’s, along with a similarly, but I guess I didn’t stir or feed it often enough, and it got NASTY. Now I’m stirring several times a day, and feeding it a few tablespoons of flour (along with an approximately equal amount of water) nearly every day. I also added a tablespoon or so of whey to get it started, but I’m not sure that had a lot to do with the success — if I manage to kill one of the current starters, I’ll definitely try again without whey. Anyway.
After a few days of stirring and feeding, there should be something happening, and it won’t be pretty. Mine gets a nasty looking layer of grey water over the top, with a few holes in the surface actively bubbling. It really doesn’t look good to eat, and it doesn’t smell too fantastic, either. (There does, by the way, seem to be a fine line between the smell of an active starter and that of a putrid starter. The active starter won’t fill your kitchen with an unholy stench, but a putrid starter will.)
Once the starter is alive, it’s time to make a sponge, or, as Whitley calls it, a “production leaven”. I’m not sure what the point of this step is, but everyone recommends it, so I do it. Maybe to give the little buggies in there a head start before totally dousing them with flour? Dunno. Anyway.
Mix about 2 cups of flour with enough water to make a firm dough. I think how much water it takes depends a lot on the kind of flour you’re using — our home-ground whole wheat seems to require a lot more water than recipes usually call for — but it’s good to start slow and add it gradually. If you’re in a little bit of a hurry to get some bread made, heat the water to around 100 or 110 degrees before adding it. Once that mix is all, well, mixed, add about 2/3 cup of the starter and mix or knead it until it’s all blended.
The consistency of the sponge doesn’t seem to be crucial — Dusty says that the reading he’s done indicates the wetter the sponge, the more lactobacillus will grow, while a drier sponge will foster more yeast. We baked two loaves side by side, one from a pretty wet sponge and one from a pretty dry sponge, and both rose beautifully.
Let the production leaven sit for however long is convenient, at least a few hours. If you know it’s going to be there for a while, I recommend starting it off wetter than otherwise. I haven’t experimented much with this, but I suspect that if your timing requires at least one very long rise, this is the time to do it. Letting dough go too long doesn’t seem to hurt the rise, but it does often get a hard shell over the top, which I can’t imagine is good. Flipping it over from time to time helps a lot, if you can remember to do it.
When you’re ready to make the dough, knead in more flour and water and some salt — don’t forget the salt! — until the consistency seems “right”. With normal bread I’d say “until it doesn’t stick to everything”, but the sourdough seems much stickier than regular bread, and won’t stop sticking to everything until after a fair amount of the kneading is done. I think it’s better to start out with a dough that feels too wet, make a sticky mess while you knead for a while, and then add more flour if it really seems like it won’t be strong enough to hold its shape as it rises.
Let it rise for a few more hours (a wet dish towel over both risings seems to help keep the top from drying out if it’s going to be more than a few hours).
Shape the loaves however you want, and proof ‘em for at least 20 or 30 minutes in a relatively warm place. Bake for 10 minutes or so at 425 or 450, then reduce to 400 for 20 or 30 more. Eat! 
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First up: the flour mill. This is a Meadows 8″ Stone Burr Grain Mill, which came from Avatar’s. Dusty bought it from Siri Neel when the store closed, and then it sat in his warehouse for several years until we moved it over here and started using it. I was very skeptical at first — I mean, really, what’s wrong with pre-ground flour? Now I totally love it.
Not all the flour that comes out of the mill winds up as something yummy. Sometimes, in fact, things get really really gross. Here’s a sourdough starter that went horribly awry. At the time I thought it was because I hadn’t stirred it the day before, but now I think it’s because I used some of it to make bread and didn’t divide the remainder. It makes *no* sense to me that if you take some away you then need to take even more away, but disaster always strikes after I’ve removed a portion of the starter without dividing the remainder. If you can explain this, I would love to hear from you.
To the right there is the basement setup as it is today. I think we’re going to have to find a new home for the milk crate of onions and the postal tray of garlic (where does he get this stuff?) behind those flats, but that seems like a task I can tackle even on the coldest winter day. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite warm enough in the basement for germination, so I put a little electric radiator next to the table. It’s definitely working — things are growing! — but I wish I could figure out a way to keep everything upstairs. On the other hand, it’s not very warm upstairs during the day, so maybe some extra heat would be warranted no matter where they were.
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