2018 Garden Retrospective

In 2018, we grew 63kg of food, up slightly from 54kg in 2017. Considering that gaining access to the garden plot in town more than doubled our available growing space AND gave us access to a polytunnel, that seems a bit depressing at first glance, but if we include qualitative as well as quantitative criteria, the result is not as grim as it could be.

Weekend update, 7-8 April

It's been 5 weeks since my last post and I confess I feel a little bit guilty. I've jotted down notes for at least six different topics, but I never seem to make the time to sit down and turn them into cohesive paragraphs. At the very least, I have been hard at work during those 5 weeks, developing a new gluten-free bread recipe, mending a bunch of old clothes, spending a week volunteering at Coed Talylan near Llangadog, and most recently, getting the vegetable patch up and running.

This time last year, our conservatory was full of seedlings ready to plant out, but with the possibility of snow as late as two weeks ago, everything is a bit behind schedule. Looking around this week though, Spring is most definitely here, and so this weekend was all about the garden.

Milk Kefir Sourdough Starter

In my Universal Pancake Recipe, I mentioned that a little milk kefir mixed with flour makes a good, low-commitment sourdough starter. Today, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail about how that works, and how to make and maintain your starter.

Let's start with the basics: What is sourdough?

For the purposes of this blog, sourdough is any dough which uses a starter culture containing a diverse mixture of wild yeasts and bacteria. Store-bought yeasts consist of a near-monoculture of the yeast species Saccharomyces cerevisiae (the same species as the yeast used for brewing beer, but a different strain). A sourdough starter contains both Saccharomyces cerevisiae and lactobacillus bacteria (the same stuff that makes lacto-fermented pickles and turns milk into yogurt). Unless you are growing your culture in a tightly controlled laboratory environment, it will also become home to lots of other types of wild yeast and bacteria, creating its own little ecosystem.

Weekend update, 1-4 March (Storm Emma!)

Well, we survived the "Beast from the East" and my first-ever snow day more or less without incident. On the first day of the storm, I arranged to work from home, but by around 9:30 the university decided to close up shop, so I got an unexpected 4-day weekend!

The view out our back window on day 2 of Storm Emma.

As someone who grew up in Los Angeles, I still get a little giddy whenever it snows even a little bit, and we had much more than a little snow this weekend. The cold weather didn't stick around in South Wales nearly as long as it did in other parts of the country, but my area did get just under two feet of snow over the course of two days, accompanied by 45mph winds. In spite of the giddiness, I confess I did worry a bit about our garden as the snow drifts rose over the tops of our raised beds and completely buried a large portion of our herb garden. I was very glad that that we'd finished the raised beds and put new cloche hoops and fleece over them.

By Sunday morning, the snow was beginning to thaw and I peeked outside to inspect the damage to our herbs, which weathered the storm without protection. Much to my amazement, the only casualties appeared to be a recently-transplanted garlic mustard and a couple of broad beans whose cover blew off during the worst part of the storm. Plants are amazing.

Compost Update

February is winding to a close, which means that we've been following our new composting regimen for nearly two months now, and I figured it's time for an update.

Between the two of us, Steve and I have done a pretty good job of turning/rolling the bin at least three times a week. Unfortunately, our £7.50 RollMix Composter doesn't seem to be able to withstand even two months of that kind of use. There's a springy wire that wraps around the outside of the cylinder to help hold its shape, and the end of that wire popped out within about two weeks of use. After three or four weeks, the casing for that wire started to rip around the middle. At this point, I just hope that the bag itself lasts long enough for us to decide whether or not a big, rigid compost tumbler on a frame is worth the investment.

The wire on our RollMix Composter started poking out of its casing
after just a few weeks of use.

At this point, it's still difficult to say whether the frequent turning has had any significant effect on the rate of composting. The stuff in the compost tumbler does seem to be breaking down a little bit, but I don't know whether that's actually the case, or if the new additions just look brown because they have a coating of dirt on them from being mixed with the rest of the compost.

Frequent turning of the pile is supposed to help create a better oxygenated environment for the aerobic bacteria that do the heavy lifting in the initial stage of composting, but those bacteria also need heat, which is in short supply this time of year. As I'm typing this, the weather guy on the radio is going on at some length about the "Beast from the East" bringing icy weather from Russia and making this the coldest February in some large number of years, so our local population of decomposers is working at a serious disadvantage.

Whether or not the tumbling action has made a significant difference, there can be no doubt that the composition of the pile has a huge effect on the behavior of the compost.

Universal Pancake Recipe

A few weeks ago, I promised that I would post my Universal Pancake Recipe.

The first few years I went gluten-free, I hated it. Okay, I still hate it, but I've also learned to appreciate the staggering variety of flavors and textures that are available beyond the basic three grains.

As I was re-learning how to cook without wheat, barley, and rye, pancakes were one of the first things that really *worked* for me. I'm terrible about following recipes, preferring to eyeball rather than measure, and substitute whatever happens to be at hand. Pancakes were the first thing that I felt comfortable eyeballing, and having at least one dish that I understood well enough to improvise gave me back a lot of my confidence as a cook. They're a great, low-commitment way to try out a new flour or flour blend.

Hopefully, if anybody else out there is struggling with re-learning how to cook gluten-free, this will help give you the confidence to experiment, and the knowledge to rescue something that doesn't seem to be working at first.

Weekend update, 17-18 February

Saturday was spent in the garden. The weather was finally clear enough for Steve to put the second raised bed into place. Our cloche hoops finally arrived, so I bent those into shape, and covered them with new, not-ripped fleece. Doesn't it look much nicer now?

As long as I was out in the garden, I picked a few radishes, transplanted a few that were overcrowded, and moved a few shovelfuls of dirt back into the raised beds. (We needed to clear a bunch of dirt in order to set the beds into place.) Our soil is still very, very heavy clay, but it was heartening to see SO MANY WORMS in every shovelful.

On Sunday, I intended to make pancakes, feed the worms, do some sewing, write a blog post, etc. but I only got as far as making pancakes before my brain chemistry turned against me and I became non-functional for the rest of the day. Will try again next weekend.