Advances in Gardening Series: Thoughts on The Fan, and the problems of overabudance

The Fan late in the season, about to be pulled out. See earlier photos of The Fan here.

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Last fall we dug up a sort of feral herb bed and replaced it with a more formal, three-part bed that I call The Fan. The idea is to use this bed to plant annual herbs and flowers. While some of these plants are medicinal, it is also a bed dedicated more to aesthetics than the rest of our garden, so it's also a place where I particularly want to plant flowers and plants of strong visual interest.

The first crop, planted in November, consisted of Calendula, chamomile and poppies. All three grew wonderfully well and provided a nice focal point for the garden. The Fan is right outside our back door, so is what most people see first. It looked professional--like we actually know what we were doing.

The downside of this season's fan was in fact its abundance. It looked nice, but it provided too much plant material. In the case of both the chamomile and Calendula, I could have done with half the plants for my teas and salves. The poppies looked gorgeous and fed the bees, which is all I care about. I'm not complaining about those. Oh no. Wait. I will. Early in the season, thinning on a big bed of poppies was a real pain. I had to do it over and over again. It was worth it in the end, but next time I'll not sow seed so thickly.

All in all, the result of this overplanting is that it became a make-work scenario. When I wasn't thinning poppies, I had to be out there constantly, deadheading the chamomile and Calendula just to keep up with it all. Deadheading (chopping off the spent flowers) encourages more flower production, which is important if you want a continual harvest. It also collects seed, to keep it from spreading everywhere. Despite my efforts, I know a ton of seed fell, and when the rains come next year, I'll be pulling Calendula and chamomile volunteers.

Moral is, know what you need, and plant no more than that. Unless you've got the time and energy to maintain larger, more flashy beds. I'm all about making it easy on myself, so next year I'll plant less. Of course, it takes experiences like this to learn exactly what our needs are. This is just how it goes.

 What's next:

The next round of plants in the fan have to be able to stand our hot, dry summer. This is a bit of headscratcher for me. Most of the plants I'm interested in grow best during our cool season. So what's going in there next is sort of eccentric. One section will be an Echinacea patch. Another will be black cumin, which has historical medical uses, and the other is broom sorghum, because it looks to be gorgeous, and I want to make a broom. You'll hear more about all these in future posts.

Thinking is common to all

Root Simple welcomes guest Tweeter Heraclitus. We've turned over our Twitter feed to our favorite Greek philosopher for the rest of the week. Don't do the tweetin'? You can download H's complete fragments here.

Mr. H is the "why?" in our "what," so to speak.

It's not really bragging...

It's more of a public service announcement when we say, once again, that home raised eggs are the best things in the world. I mean, look--even the whites are perky.

Remember, it's easier to keep hens than it is to keep a dog...

Mosaics

Above is a table the Kelly and I made many years ago with glass mosaic tile. We copied a portion of an ancient Roman mosaic depicting sea life. It took about 40 hours of painstaking work.

We still have a box of glass tile sitting in the garage and I'm thinking about breaking up the ugly concrete patio in the back yard and doing some mosaics. Kelly is less than enthused about this for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it will take me away from more pressing matters such as a back door that doesn't open and a non-functioning computer network.

Nevertheless I was inspired to return to mosaic work after seeing the stunning garden designs of Portland, Oregon based pebble mosaic master Jeffrey Bale.

A pebble mosaic from Jeffrey Bale's blog

You can view Bale's work on his blog and read a great how-to article Bale wrote for Fine Gardening Magazine.

Our squid table was made by gluing the tiles directly to the wood and grouting once all the tiles were in place. This would not work for exterior mosaics. Instead, for my patio I would glue the tiles to a piece of paper and then set them into a mortar mix in place (the indirect method).

Using pebbles as opposed to glass mosaic tile, by the way, cuts costs way down. Should I get permission to do the back patio I'm thinking of combining pebbles with small areas of glass tile. In fact, I may just stop answering emails so that I'll have the time to do this!

Friday Quiz Answer

The answer to our "Freaky Friday Fungal Quiz": slime mold. And I should not have used "fungal" in the title. Slime molds are no longer classified as fungi. But I'll stick with "freaky." According to UC Berkeley, slime molds fall into three categories,

Plasmodial slime molds, like Physarum . . ., are basically enormous single cells with thousands of nuclei. They are formed when individual flagellated cells swarm together and fuse. The result is one large bag of cytoplasm with many diploid nuclei. These "giant cells" have been extremely useful in studies of cytoplasmic streaming (the movement of cell contents) because it is possible to see this happening even under relatively low magnification. In addition, the large size of the slime mold "cell" makes them easier to manipulate than most cells.

A second group, the cellular slime molds, spend most of their lives as separate single-celled amoeboid protists, but upon the release of a chemical signal, the individual cells aggregate into a great swarm. Cellular slime molds are thus of great interest to cell and developmental biologists, because they provide a comparatively simple and easily manipulated system for understanding how cells interact to generate a multicellular organism. There are two groups of cellular slime molds, the Dictyostelida and the Acrasida, which may not be closely related to each other.

A third group, the Labyrinthulomycota or slime nets, are also called "slime molds", but appear to be more closely related to the Chromista, and not relatives of the other "slime mold" groups.

Friday Freaky Fungus Quiz

I spotted this strange blobby thing attached to a step just below our porch. Measuring about an inch and a half, it has not changed much in the week since I first noticed it. I suspect that it's some sort of fungus, but I'm not absolutely sure. I ate about a teaspoon of it and developed an alternative to my usual lecture appearances. Just kidding.

But seriously, what the heck is this thing? Leave  a comment!

Processing and Winnowing Flax

We grew a five foot circle of flax this winter in the center of our yard. When it came time to harvest said flax I pondered creating the world's smallest piece of linen. Lacking the time for that process, I opted to simply harvest the seeds.

I used a block of coconut coir to smash the seed heads against a piece of newspaper.

Next came time for winnowing the flax. I used a fan and had to winnow multiple times to get the chaff out.

Alas, there was still quite a bit of chaff. Remembering that I had some 1/8 inch hardware cloth in the garage, I used it to screen out most of the last chaffy bits. You can buy expensive screens for processing seeds, but the amortization on that equipment would take years for our tiny garden.

A huge mess was made. Good thing Kelly is off camping.

In the end I managed to harvest nine ounces of flax seeds. Plans for a flax oil pressing fest were canceled.

Meanwhile, as yet unnamed new kitten ponders the absurdity of the world's smallest flax seed harvest from her pillow perch.

Elderly and Barefoot--that's how I plan to be

See, even Plato was rockin' the barefoot look

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Erik is the Thoughtstylist™ in this house, but I'm going to step up on the Stylin' Platform for a change. As regular readers know, Erik is into barefoot running. I barefoot walk, and am working my way into barefoot running.

Our neighborhood is full of long, steep staircases devoid of handrails. I go up and down these on my walks. When I'm in running shoes, I feel insecure on these staircases--I really watch my step, lest I end up sprawled on the bottom like an Aztec sacrifice. No matter what I do, I always feel like I'm about to pitch forward on my face.

Contrast that to doing the stairs barefoot. When I'm barefoot I feel completely safe. On the way down, my toes grab the edge of each stair, automatically. Going up, I'm high on the ball of my feet, and don't worry about catching a toe and tripping.

This led me to realize, on a visceral level, that when you're barefoot, you're very surefooted. Your foot is conforming to the terrain, and the nerves in your foot are sending a constant flow of feedback to your brain. You walk more lightly--not more hesitantly, but with more awareness.

Surefootedness becomes more important to me now that I'm past 40 and staring down the gullet of my elder years. I also have older family members, and I'm sure most of you do. We all know that one of the biggest threat to the elderly are falls. And falls happen because as we get older, and less active, we lose coordination, strength, and balance.

My thoughtstyling, in a nutshell, was that older folks should spend more time barefoot. Being barefoot really wakes up your senses and trains you to be surefooted.

Of course it can be hard for elderly people to care for their feet, so they need to take time to build up callouses that will protect their feet from cuts. That process can happen in a shorter period time, with work, but it's easier if we've been going barefoot all our life...or at least since our 40's.

No one may agree with me, but I for one plan to be a barefooted elder. And I'm going to start leaning on my mother about it, too.

I was pleased to find my thoughstyling backed up in this book Erik bought recently. It's called Barefoot Running, and has a special section on transitioning to barefoot for the elderly and less mobile. The author makes the same arguments that I am here, just somewhat more articulately. Overall it's a really good book on the basic mechanics of barefooting, how to build up callouses, how to approach weather and different terrains, etc. It also has some not so valuable stuff on diet and stretching and spirituality, as if it's trying to be a book about all things--but for the basic barefoot stuff, it's great.

Pruning and Grafting Workshop with C. Darren Butler

This Sunday May 29, learn how to prune and graft citrus and avocados with consulting arborist, ecological designer, sustainable landscaping specialist, and teacher C. Darren Butler. Slots are still available. It's a double workshop (pruning in the morning and grafting in the afternoon). You can sign up for one or both. Hope to see some of you there!


For more information contact Darren at: butlercdarren@gmail.com

Nasturtium Flower and Pistachio Pesto: a story in pictures

Sorry, we don't have a recipe for this, because we always wing it when it comes to pesto--even Erik, who is recipe dependent. You too can make it without a recipe.

Pesto is simply a blending of 5 main ingredients, which can vary widely according to season, availability and taste:

1) an aromatic herb, or blend of herbs (traditionally basil, but we use chives, parsley, mint, arugula and here, nasturtium flower--basically anything with a strong flavor. This can be stretched with some spinach or nettles for a milder flavor.)
2) a nut of some sort, toasted preferably
3) good quality shredded Parmesan cheese
4) good quality olive oil
5) raw or roasted garlic

You throw all these things in a blender, or go old school and mash them with a mortar and pestle. The proportions are intuitive. It's hard to make bad pesto as long as your ingredients are good. Less cheese and nuts yields a lighter pesto. Less herb and more cheese and nuts makes a richer pesto. Less garlic yields a milder pesto. We use maybe 2 raw cloves per batch. It's all good. Process the dry ingredients first, then add oil bit by bit to make a paste. Some people make a smooth paste, we leave nut chunks in. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve pesto over hot pasta, or spoon it into soup for flavor, or dip veggies in it, or thin it down and drizzle it over cooked veggies, or spread it on toasted bread, or eat it off the spoon...

Pop Quiz Answer: Pineapple Guava

Fruit forming. photo credit: Kurt Stüber, via Wikimedia Commons

Yes indeed, as so many of you guessed, that was a picture of our pineapple guava. For those of you who haven't seen one, meet the pineapple guava, aka feijoa or Acca sellowiana: a small, evergreen tree or shrub that bears tasty green fruits which have a Jolly Rancher-like flavor. The fruit form off of flowers that taste like cotton candy. The trick is not to eat too many flowers or you end up with no fruit.

It shouldn't be confused with regular guava, as it tastes much better. In my opinion.

Pineapple guava has pretty silver grey foliage, evergreen foliage, as I said, so can make a really nice addition to the landscape. I've heard of folks planting them in rows to form a hedge. It's a great plant for small spaces. The fruit forms late in the year, which is also nice, since so few other fruit trees bear so late.

But yes, I'm sorry, like so many things we mention here it is plant that prefers a warm climate. It's hearty to 12 degrees, and generally recommended for zone 8 and up, though I think some people have successfully grown it in colder places with special care. But when grown in a climate which is comfortable for it, the pineapple guava is a really sturdy, easy plant. We utterly ignore ours. It gets some of our laundry greywater once in a while.  That's about it in terms of care. It doesn't seem prey to insects or other ailments. All we have to concern ourselves with is keeping the birds and squirrels away from the fruit--which we do by netting the tree.

Okay, next quiz is going to be really hard...

Friday Pop Quiz

Can you identify this plant?

Adventures in Gardening Series: Wrap up on the Hippie Heart: Growing lentils and flax

The Hippie Heart got a crew cut

We're clearing out our cool season crops for the warm season ones, so it's time for some reporting on the new beds we've been profiling under the "Advances in Gardening" series. We'll start with the Hippie Heart.

The Hippie Heart is a heart-shaped bed where I was intending to experiment with planting seeds straight out of the pantry, ill-advised as that might seem, just to see what happened. Erik grumbled at this plan--and for good reason, since a lot of seeds we can buy in bulk bins may be hybrid, sterile or irradiated. But I wanted to try it anyway. This first season I planted the Heart with bulk bin flax seed and lentils from a boxed lentils. The results were mixed. Sort of interesting. Not super-productive, but not a failure, because I learned lots.

First, both flax and lentils are very pretty plants. In its prime, the Heart was an attractive thing The flax grew straight and tall and made lots of periwinkle blue blooms that turned their faces to the sky.  (The mature were knocked over in a storm, so if I plant it again, I will do so with supports). The lentils, which were planted around the edges of the heart, made pleasant, rounded shapes, not big and sprawly like so many legumes can get. The folliage is delightfully delicate, almost lacy.

Fascinating flax

The flax proved fertile. The flowers died back and left pretty little round pods, each of which holds a few flax seeds. Of course, we didn't plant enough flax to really do anything with it. I have a few bunches of harvested flax now, and if I beat the pods, I might harvest a cup of flax. This doesn't seem worth the effort. The dried stalks are very pretty, and I might bring some of it inside to put in vases. Also, the chickens like them a lot, so the bulk of it will probably end up chicken fodder.

The harvest is in

What's more important to me was the experience of growing flax. I hold it in my hands and say, This is linen. This is flaxseed. This is linseed oil. Henry the VIII's shirts were made of this stuff, as were my grandmother's best napkins. Rembrandt mixed his paints with this--most oil painters do, since linseed oil is a common carrier for oil pigments. Heck, he was painting on linen, too.  The linoleum of our kitchen floor is made with this. And at this moment, all over LA, raw foodie are subsisting on dehydrated flaxseed crackers.

Flax pods. They rattle, and kittens like them!

I love growing a plant with that much cultural relevance and history. It doesn't matter so much to me if it's practical, though I may not do it again, not on this scale.

The fate of the lentils

The lentils were less successful.  They came from a box of Sabarot green lentils. They were planted in November. Months passed. They didn't flower, didn't flower. I began to figure they were sterile seeds. At the very last moment, in May,  a few tiny flowers appeared here and there, but by that time I had to take it out. So that is the risk of growing from unknown seed raised for commercial consumption. It was a risk I took. In the future, though, I'd consider planting lentils from real seed, because the plants are compact and attractive.

A cover crop option?

Here's a side thought--being a legume, lentils help draw nitrogen into their soil via the roots. If you want to boost the nitrogen in your soil, you can plant legumes, then cut them down when they flower, leaving the roots with their nitrogen nodules in the soil for the next crop to feed upon. (If you let them grow beans, they consume much of that stored nitrogen). This process is called cover cropping, and though it sounds like something only a farmer would do, you can do this in your garden beds to rest and rejuvenate them. The thing about these boxed lentils is that they didn't flower for months and months, and then hardly at all, so they're an ideal cover crop: they give you plenty of time to knock them down at your leisure.


What's next?

While I liked this experiment, I don't know if I want to continue with pantry seed--though I do have a lingering desire to grow sesame plants! I'm not even sure if I want to continue planting annuals in that bed. Edible perennials are always preferable to a lazy gardener like myself, so I might be leaning that way.  Will let you know what we figure out.


Previous posts on the Heart:

http://www.rootsimple.com/2011/01/advances-in-gardening-series-progress.html

http://www.rootsimple.com/2011/03/advances-in-gardening-series-were.html
http://www.rootsimple.com/2011/03/hippie-heart-horizontal.html

Speaking at Vroman's in Pasadena

Hey all you local-type neighbors: We're pleased and proud to be speaking at Vroman's Pasadena store on June 17th at 7 PM. Hope you can stop by!

Side Yard Hops Trellis

A little hard to see in these crapular photos: the new south side hops trellis.

I love looking out our bedroom window in the summer at the hops I've trained up the east side of the house. And I also like the beer I've made with those hops, so much so that I decided to expand my hops growing project to the south side of the house.

Otherwise useless, the narrow side yard on the south side of the house is the perfect place for a vertical plant like hops. To accommodate the bines (what you call a plant like hops that attaches itself to a support without suckers or tendrils) I put some pulleys on the eaves of the house so that I can lower the bines to harvest the hops without having to climb a ladder.  I attached some twine to metal cables that run through the pulleys. Hops stick to twine like Velcro and grow so fast you can almost watch them climb. I train them into a "V" shape and cut down all but the strongest two bines from each mound in the spring.

Year three of the front porch hops: Cascade and Nugget.

Two years ago I started Cascade and Nugget hops in self watering pots placed by the porch on the east side of the house. This year I transferred those bines to the ground and they seem to be doing well. Cascade, especially, grows like a weed here. While I proved to myself that you can grow hops in self irrigating pots, I think they will do better in the ground.

The new varieties on the side of the house are Golden and Chinook. Since this blog also doubles as my garden diary I'll note that the Golden is on the southeast and the Chinook on the southwest. It's important to keep the bines labeled so when it comes time to make beer you know which variety is which. When I planted the Cascade and Nugget in the ground I got them mixed up. They look and smell different when mature so I'm pretty sure I can tell the difference come harvest time. But, never having grown Chinook or Golden, I don't want to forget which one is which.

Here's how you have to harvest hops without a fancy pulley system:

Growing Artichokes on the Sly

Artichokes also provide shade for lazy cats

It is possible to grow vegetables around the grounds of an apartment building, especially if the landlord is neglectful. Often the biggest challenge you'll face is the gardeners, who will weedwack everything to lawn level. If you can negotiate with them, or somehow put a protective barrier between your plants and the whirling cord of death, you can grow stuff.

Take this lovely artichoke. It was a sprout off of one of our own plants, which we gave to a friend who lives in a courtyard apartment. She tucked the sprout near a wall, between some permanent shrubs. It flourished through our wet winter--she says she didn't give it any care at all. Now it's way too big to weedwack, and covered with fat artichokes. It's also such a magnificent plant that it looks like it belongs there. She's harvested over forty chokes so far--that's a lot of good eating!

We realize artichokes don't grow everywhere, but investigate perennial food-bearing plants that grow well in your area. Check out the book Perennial Vegetables for inspiration. Herbs, like chives, are an easy place to start. Alternatively, consider tucking some annuals here and there among the landscaping. Garlic is a good bet. It blends easily into flower beds and grows with little care. (Of course, you'll want to take note of whether your landlord is spraying the landscape with pesticides.)

And homeowners can use these same tips to integrate edibles with their existing, ornamental landscapes without alarming their neighbors or the HOA.

Plantain for rashes

It's hard to take a decent picture when both of your hands are covered in green slime!

 Mrs. Homegrown here:

A couple of days ago I made a mistake: I attacked a stand of rogue borage without gloves. You know how it is when you think you're just going to make one pruning cut, and then end up hacking for an hour in a mindless frenzy? Borage is covered with irritating little hairs which made my hands and forearms itch and burn. I really should have known better.

Plantago major

Fortunately, our yard provides the cure for such indiscretions in the form of a nice patch of common plantain (Plantago major). This broad leaf plantain, as well as its narrow leaved cousin, Plantago lanceolata, are fantastic for easing the irritation of itchy rashes and bug bites. I harvest the leaves, dry them, and make them into salves for year round use, but when plantain is growing, it's easiest to use it fresh. All you have to do is pick a leaf, chew on it a little, and rub the pulp on your skin. Really rub it so you get the green juices out. You'll feel relief immediately.

Keep this in mind when you're out in a park or hiking. Plantain grows everywhere--it's a universal weed, and it's particularly fond of lawns. Once you know what it looks like, you can find it easily.

Do any of you have a favorite natural cure for rashes or bug bites?

Chatting over at the Stumbling Homestead

We had a nice chat about all things homesteady with Darcy over at the Stumbling Homestead. If you'd like to listen to the podcast, click here. Their backlog of episodes is well worth checking out, too.

Pop Quiz Answer

The answer to yesterday's pop quiz: as our friend Nic Sammond put it, "Your shelving was designed by Tokyo Electric Power?" Alas, I can't pass the blame off on anyone but myself. When the big one hits, we'll have a giant salsa bowl of pickles, jams and broken glass.

It's well past time to install some bungee cords across the shelves.

And we'll make our quizzes a little harder next time. 

Friday Pop Quiz

Our pantry. So what's the main thing wrong with this picture? Hint--we're in California. Leave a comment. We'll provide an answer tomorrow.

Wish we could offer a prize, like an all expenses paid trip to Vernon, CA. But, alas, we have a tight budget here at Root Simple. You'll get bragging rights.

No-Knead Artisinal Bread Part I

You can make a decent loaf of bread with one of the many popular no-knead recipes on the interwebs. With just a little bit more effort you can make a much better loaf of bread with a "levain" (or "sourdough starter" in less yuppiefied parlance).

For about ten years, I used to bake the loaf I blogged about here and put in our first book The Urban Homestead. Lately, however, I've completely changed the way I bake thanks to meeting Mark Stambler and Teresa Sitz of the Los Angeles Bread Bakers.

I'll post a specific recipe once my method crystallizes a bit more. In the meantime, this is the general way I've been baking. All the mixing and first fermentation can take place in a plastic tub or large bowl.

1. The night before I mix my dough I take some starter, add flour and water to create the "levain". Starter is made by mixing dough and water and letting nature do her thing. I'll blog about the process in detail in a future post. Right now I'm working with a starter that has the consistency of bread dough, but I'm going to switch to a more liquid starter to avoid the dough messes in the kitchen that cause marital strife.

2. In the morning I mix the final dough, carefully measuring ingredients on a digital scale. While I use a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook, I'm trying to wean myself of its use. Kneading, it turns out, is unnecessary labor and can be replaced by simply folding the dough a few times during the initial fermentation period.

3. After mixing the dough I let it rest for around 20 minutes to allow flour and water to integrate.

4. Following the rest period I mix in the salt.

5. The dough rises for 2 1/2 hours. During this first fermentation period I pour the wet sticky dough out onto a work surface every 50 minutes and quickly fold the dough in half two or three times.

6. At the end of the first rise I shape the dough into either a batard or a boule. At some point I'll make a video on how to do this.

7. Once shaped, the boule or batard goes into the refrigerator covered with a floured piece of canvas, in the case of a batard, or plopped in a proofing basked in the case of a boule. The dough can stay in the fridge for 24 to 48 hours. During this second, slow, fermentation period the dough develops a more acidic, complex flavor, plus it allows for more flexibility in terms of your baking schedule. When you want a loaf, all you do is heat up the oven, pull the bread out of the fridge and toss it in the oven. There's no need, it turns out, to bring the dough to room temperature before baking.

8. To get a decent crust in a home oven I recommend baking in a dutch oven as in the no-knead method. Pre-heat both dutch oven and stove, toss the loaf in the dutch oven and bake for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes remove the top of the dutch oven and continue baking until done (usually another 20 to 25 minutes).

A note on water: chlorine and chloramine inhibit starters. I have a carbon filter on our house water which I thought removed both chlorine and chloramine. However, I discovered that I got much better results when using bottled, distilled water. After pouring through multiple aquarium enthusiast internet forums (not particularly exciting when you don't keep fish) I figured out that my cheap carbon filter removes some, but not all of the chloramine in our water supply. At some point I'll do some tests to confirm this. In the meantime, I'll stick with bottled water.

I should note that the road to bread baking nirvana is littered with hockey puck loaves and existential angst. Push through the wall of frustration and you emerge on the other side an alchemist, with the power to turn flour into loaves, lead into gold and Dan Brown into Shakespeare. Well, maybe not that last bit.

Photo Tour of the Root Simple Compound

New, as yet unnamed, kitten enjoying homebrew. Photo by Emily Ho for re-nest.

In case you've tired of the continuous coverage of Osama Bin Laden's compound, how about a look at ours? Writer and photographer Emily Ho sure did a nice job putting together a photo tour of our crib over at re-nest in a post entitled "Kelly and Erik's Urban Farm."

Funny, when I look at our house I see all the work I have left to do, the chipped paint and broken concrete. Emily managed to capture the pretty stuff. Thanks should also go to Tara Kolla of Silver Lake Farms who helped us redesign the garden last fall.

How Not To Bake Bread

Homegrown Neighbor here:

So Mr. and Mrs. Homegrown are away on book tour while I'm holding down the fort in L.A. and looking after their chickens.

I figured that while they are away and not blogging much, I can step in and entertain you with tales of my epic baking failures. Sure, lots of blogs have pretty pictures of food and neatly typed recipes, but everyone likes a good tale of failure now and then.

Now, my neighbor Erik, aka Mr. Homegrown is quite the bread baker. He can turn out beautiful, tasty loaves of bread with ease. Down the street here, my loaves are quite the disaster. I've been wanting to learn to bake bread for a while and my experiments haven't been going well. I'm hardly an incompetent cook. I can even bake cakes and cookies and other things leavened with baking powder or soda. But with yeast, well, I just haven't figured it out.

I'm trying to follow the Mother Earth News 'no knead' bread recipe that you bake in a dutch oven. I've tried other yeasted bread recipes before with little success. Since this one is supposed to be easier, I thought this is the perfect bread for me! Apparently some folks gets great
results with it. Grumble. Grumble. I get chicken feed. Not that the chickens are complaining. They love this experiment.

One loaf flattened out completely in the bottom of the pan. I was able to glean some of the pretty tasty insides before turning it over to the hens. The next loaf I was determined to shape better. The dough was a sticky mess. It stuck to everything including plastic wrap, my hands, the bowl. I added more flour to deal with the stickiness but things still went wrong. I at least got something that looked more like a loaf than a pancake. But I think I cooked it too long. Again, I cracked it open, ate the soft inside of the bread and gave the rest to the chickens.


I tend to be a very experimental cook. I like to learn from my failures. Often things taste good but aren't pretty, but after a few tries I can make them taste and look good. But not bread. It defies all of my time tested methods of how I teach myself to do things. I've been reading books on baking and they make my head hurt. How much protein is in the flour or what kind of enzyme does what is way beyond my comprehension at this point. So when the neighbors get back, in exchange for ten days of chicken- sitting, I'm going to have Mr. Homegrown teach me how to bake a darn loaf of decent bread. With none going to the chickens.

Mr. Homegrown here--happy to give a bead lesson, but I've had plenty of failures myself. One tip would be to use a scale when measuring bread ingredients. Another would be to make sure you're not using old, dead yeast. Lastly, I know you're sick with a sore throat and that's the time to order take-out.

At People's Coop in Portland This Evening

Today , Wednesday, May 4th: We'll be speaking and signing in the community room at People's Food Co-op, 3029 Southeast 21st Avenue at 6PM. Please note that we gave an incorrect time in our last post--were on at 6 not 7.


To our readers elsewhere in the world, well return to our normal DIY posts soon.

In Seattle, Headed to Portland

Photo from bikejuju.com

Dig that tallbike, welded up by our host in Seattle Tom, a.k.a. "bikejuju" who has a blog at www.bikejuju.com. His wife Lyanda is the author of a book readers of this blog will enjoy, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness. And they have the prettiest mixte I've ever seen in their living room.

This afternoon we head to Portland. Hope to see you at one of our appearances.

Come see us in Portland!

Tuesday May 3rd: Feel like going out for a drink? We'll be hanging out at The Tugboat Brewery, 711 Southwest Ankeny Street, Portland. We'll arrive around 7:30, and will stay as long as anyone is willing to hang with us. Stop by for a brew and a chat!

Wednesday, May 4th: We'll be speaking and signing in the community room at People's Food Co-op, 3029 Southeast 21st Avenue. 7PM 6PM.