Project Fermentation

Big day here in the apartment!  Not only was it BOXING DAY but for the first time we tasted the Sauerkraut!  My Mom suggested rinsing it before eating (to remove some of the excess salt).  This improves the kraut tremendously.  It’s still not great, but it’s ok, better than most of the kraut of my memory (although my Babcia’s is still better, what IS her secret?). 

The Kim-Chi however is fantastic!  It too is improved by rinsing, but is also nice as is right out of the fermenting bucket.

Also, I've started Project Hard Apple Cider!

Ingredients:

1.89L bottle of organic cider - $7

EVERYONE warned me to stay away from ciders with preservatives (potassium sorbate, etc.) so this is just pure organic apple juice.

1 packet Campaign yeast. - $1

The pack says it’s for 4-22L of juice but I just dumped the whole thing in.  Hopefully since there is only so much sugar the extra yeast will just die off.

Equipment:

1 (glass) jug

Apparently you can use just about anything as a fermenting vessel but the proprietor at the home-brew store says there should be no more than three fingers of air between the surface of you cider and the airlock.  The jug LOOKS like a proper carboy… and it was “free”!

1 airlock - $1 (with rubber stopper sized to fit fermenting jug)

Christmas eve I added yeast to the jug of cider, no stirring just dumped it in right on top, like the proprietor of the home-brew store recommended, and by the morning it was bubbling away merrily!  Millions of millions of tiny bubbles form in the cider and rise quickly to the surface, every few seconds the airlock silently “pops” releasing some gas.  It’s actually quite hypnotic.

For now the whole kit and caboodle is sitting on the kitchen counter.  Should be about a month before we know how it tastes.  Can’t wait!

Any experts (or people who know more than me) with advice? Please leave a comment!

Hard Apple Cider (Project Fermentation)

I have always wanted to make beer (Bek has stories of exploding bottles and is not quite so keen).  And so begins the second phase in our fermentation experimentation.  Hard Apple Cider.  By all accounts much easier than both wine and beer (and more legal than moon-shine). 

As usual we have no idea what we are doing so I (as usual) went online. Apparently, hard cider is one of the easiest fermented beverages to make!  The basic ingredients are “sweet” cider and yeast (most people recommend Champagne yeast).  The only pieces of equipment you are not likely to have lying around are; a fermentation vessel (I’m using the (glass) bottle my cider comes in) and an airlock ($4 at the local home-brew store).

But cider is soooooooooo good! We drank the whole bottle before we even got home!  Oh well, just have to buy some more and try again tomorrow!

First Steps in Project Fermentation: Kraut and Kim-Chi!

We (my girlfriend, Bek, and I) have always wanted to make sauerkraut, problem is neither of has ever done it!  And I at least don’t really like plain kraut.  Some is nice (my Babcia makes a great kraut!) and Kim-Chi (spicy Korean sauerkraut) is excellent (Bek loves it too)!  So we are going to give it a try.

Having never made either before we’re going to use recepies from the internet.  Apple, Carrot Sauerkraut        and Kim-Chi.  So today we went to buy ingredients; 1 red and 2 green cabbage (the local store didn’t have Napa Cabbage so for Kim-Chi we used a regular green one instead), apples, carrots.  All the rest we already have.  It’s great when that happens!

For the kraut, because there are no instructions on the recepie page, we basically followed the instructions for regular kraut on Sandor Kainz’s website, Wild Fermentation.  We used half red, half green cabbage (as Mr. Kainz suggests).  Hopefully this will give us a nice pink kraut!

For the Kim-Chi we followed the recepie on the site except for adding a puree of one apple and half an Asian pear.  Many other websites I’ve read suggested this as it adds a “natural sweetness.”

On the left is the fermenting Kim-Chi and on the right is the Sauerkraut.  Both buckets were full when we started, the salt draws water out of all the vegetables and makes everything shrink.  A lot!

Sandor Keinze recommends covering the fermenting Krout and weighing it down with something, we used small plates and jars full of water, it seems to work.

So far so good!  We’ll see in a week or two how it all tastes!

Apartment Aquaponics 102.

Fish Day!  Last night (much to the cat’s delight) I added fish to the aquaponics tank.  They’re just small feeder goldfish, the smallest (and cheapest) the pet store had to offer.  Still a dollar a piece, far too expensive I thought.  I’m feeding them crushed up cat food, about 1 pellet every 3 days.

Your supposed to wait to add plants, about 6 weeks from when you put the fish in, but I don’t think I will.  Just going to get some plants and stick them in as soon as I can, the waters already kind of murky.

Expenses so far: $21.

Apartment Aquaponics 101.

Aquaponics: essentially a (beautiful) marriage of aquaculture and hydroponics.

Aquaculture is fish farming.  Fish are grown in ponds or tanks (or giant net enclosures in a lake or bay), like a feedlot for fish.  With aquaculture it’s possible to produce a lot of high quality protein in a hurry.  But all those fish so close together create a lot of nutrient-rich waste!  In open water this is not quite so much of a problem (it’s still a problem) but in ponds or tanks it is a HUGE problem!  The water needs almost constant pumping/filtration just to stay liveable!

In hydroponics plants are grown without soil, all the nutrients they need are brought to them in water.  The plants are either suspended with their roots in the water or supported in a moist “soil-less medium” either pea-gravel, “expanded clay” or, in my case, aquarium gravel.  The benefit is plants can be grown closer together because they don’t have to compete for nutrients, the drawback is all those nutrients need to be supplied by the farmer, usually in the form of nutrient-rich liquid fertilizers.

So, plants grown hydroponically need nutrients in liquid form,

farmed fish produce a lot of nutrient-rich waste-water.

Hmmmmmmmmm…

Enter aquaponics!  The fish poo and pee in the water which is pumped up to the level of the grow-bed (where the plants live).  The water trickles down through the “soil-less medium” and is filtered by the hungry plants (which feed on the waste produced by the fish) before falling back into the fish tank.  Simple.

Well, not really.  There’s more to it than that.  We’re going back to science class.

Fish produce ammonia (NH₃₎, which in its raw state is poisonous to plants.  We need bacteria, called nitrosomas, to convert the ammonia into nitrites(NO₂₎.  Unfortunately nitrites, while not poisonous are, as far as we’re concerned useless.  We need to convert them to nitrates(NO₃) which the plants can “eat”.  There is a bacterium to do this too, its called nitrobacter.  Fortunately both will develop naturally if given enough time.

So now; the fish create ammonia in the water, bacteria in the tank convert the ammonia into nitrates, the water (with nitrates) is pumped up to the grow bed where it is filtered by the plants before returning to the fish tank!

And that, boys and girls, is how it all works.

To any teachers reading, this would make one hell-of-a science project. 

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I wanted to try aquaponics for myself.  It sounded so simple and so interesting!  And think about it, scaled up an aquaponics system could be used to grow alot of food!  Especially after last summer I was definitely thinking in terms of food production.    So I started doing some research.  By far the best web page I found was Hydroponics plus Fish Farm equals Aquaponics; a how to, it describes EXACTLY how to make an aquaponics system in a greenhouse.

But my girlfriend and I live in an apartment! There just isn't enough room for a greenhouse and all that equipment!  So I did what I always do in these situations.

Pay a visit to Value Village.

And this is what I came up with!  It’s a little (2 1/2-3 G?) fish tank.  I picked it up, along with pump and grow-bed (that black box with gravel in it is the grow-bed (used to be for a filter?), the piece hanging down on the left is the pump) and a fluorescent light (which I don’t expect to need) for about $11 (after tax).  Gravel was about $7 for a 2kg bag.  The pump was working to fast and totally flooding my grow-bed (that not good) so I stuffed a piece of sponge in the outlet (that’s that little yellow thing).

Tomorrow (after the water has had a chance to sit a little and the temperature has stabilised) I’m going to add a few feeder goldfish.

Expenses so far: $18.

Saturday August 18: Berries!

Monday, we weeded our strawberry patch and harvested “runners” (the tiny plants which mature strawberry plants produce). A mature strawberry plant sends out a long, thin tendril on the end of which grows a new plant, an exact clone of the first.

The young plant can be separated from its parent and planted elsewhere. It will (hopefully) grow into another strawberry plant! We gathered about half a bushel of runners from the edges of our patch, leaving the runners in the center to grow on their own and thicken the patch.

The harvested runners are being stored wrapped in a damp towel and in the fridge.

That day we also maintained our raspberry plants.  Cutting off the old brown stems (called canes) at the base and “tipping” (cutting off the top ½ inch or so) the new young canes so they will put more energy into producing berries and less into growing taller.  We weeded as we went and as usual gave the fresh weeds to the pigs (I never thought pigs ate much salad but apparently they do)!

We are down to 6 pigs from 18 when I first got here!  This number is not including Ballsie, the sows and their piglets.  Now that there are so few pigs in the herd each pig's individual personality is much more visible.  The largest is also the most aggressive, obviously the “boss pig,” but also the most cautious and wary of people.  The two smallest, whom I think of as “The Twins,” have always been the best foragers, first to attack a pile of weeds and last to stop eating.  Where the others run away when a new pile of weeds are thrown in to them The Twins don’t move, even if the pile lands on top of them, they just keep eating!  In general pigs shy away from people and don’t like being touched but there is one who seems to enjoy a scratch between the ears now and then.  If you haven’t been around in a while she will actually come looking for attention!

No matter how hard the day, no matter the weather, no matter how hard we’ve worked, no matter how tired I am, the pigs never fail to make me smile!

One of our geese has taken ill (from a description in a book we suspect botulism).  He (or she) is almost completely paralyzed.  We have separated him from the rest of the flock and are feeding him on egg yoke and water from a syringe, just a little dribbled in the beak every few hours but the outlook is not good.  Botulism is often fatal.

Saturday August 4: CRAFT Days and Busy Days!

The past few weeks on the farm have been busy, busy, busy!  The now almost mature corn field has had to be fenced (to keep out the racoons and squirrels), many of the vegetables, including the potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant and very productive zucchini are starting to produce!  We have had volunteers and WWOOFers come and go, my fiancé, Rebekah, was here for one glorious week and Paula, one of the other interns, took her week off this past week.

Yesterday I moved the pigs.  Really this just means expanding their pasture on one side to include some fresh area and reducing it on the other side, to let the old pasture re-grow.  Pigs are intelligent animals with good memories; ours have learned that I usually bring them their food.  So for the entire time in the pig-pen I was followed around by a curious and expectant entourage of ten of so pigs!   Another aspect of pigs' memories, they remember where the electric fence used to be and will not easily cross that line even when the actual fence has been removed.  It is possible to completely remove ther fence (we did), giving them access to the corn, tomatoes, potatoes, etc, before re-stringing it without worry of them wandering off!  This is not true of any other animal, just pigs!

It took them three days to go from the old area into the fresh grass, in the end we had to pour a trail of pig food from the old area into the new to entice them over!

On Monday we went to a local CRAFT day.  CRAFT stands for Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training.  Each CRAFT day (once a month or so but not everybody attends every one) members of the local network gather at a host farm for a potluck lunch and a day of workshops.  This Monday's CRAFT day was hosted by Jim and Maurine Giffin on beautifulEdencrest Farm.

Jim and Maurine have two Belgian draft horses which they use for much of the general work around the farm.  Tthey also have tractors so not all of the work on the two-hundred plus acre farm is done with horses!  We learned, among other things, about caring for and handling these beautiful animals, some of the economic realities of farming and about beneficial (and harmful) insects.