Fermentation

    I read an article about fermentation by Sandor Katz a while back and couldn't wait to order his book, The Art of Fermentation. It's basically an encyclopedia, huge and extensive, but encouraging. Katz presents fermentation as a natural and historical practice; one that does not have to be complicated or intimidating. This is exactly what I needed to read. My experience with fermentation, up to this point was home brewing beer with my ex, Preston, but it was mostly his thing. I just helped and enjoyed the product. I thought wine would be fun to make (er, should I say 'have and drink'), but the steps involved, the intricate recipes and supply lists were enough to scare me away. 

That was until we moved into a house with fruit trees. There in our yard grows the main ingredient for so many yummy things, and my need to utilize what the earth gives without waste has won me over. My goal for the year was to begin some sorts of fermentation using our fruit supply. While searching the web for plum wine recipes I found one sourced from True Brews, by Emma Christensen. I ordered the book for myself and found it to be SO helpful in starting small and overcoming the fear or fermentation failure. 

My first actual ferment was soda! Yep, bubbly, juicy soda carbonated with yeast. I tried all sorts of fruit mixtures and found that stronger, sweeter flavors mask the trace taste of yeast. Blackberry, blackberry plum, strawberry, and ginger were all successes.

Next up: Kombucha 

A work friend gave me a split of her SCOBY and a cup of starter tea and off I went. It's a quick, two week process of brewing, fermenting, and bottling. I've been tinkering with flavors, my favorite so far being pineapple sage. It's a type of sage that tastes so much like pineapple you'd think the juice was added to the kombucha.  

pineapple sage

Third tackle: shrubs! 

It's fruit-flavored drinking vinegar. Potent and syrupy, it flavors whatever you add it to - water, mixed drinks, white wine. I am making mine with our oh-so ample plums and blackberries. The lot behind ours is overrun with blackberries so I prop the ladder up to the fence and pluck away. 

Fermentation pantry - Shrubs, kombucha in back, dry cider

Project #4: Hard Apple Cider

In my last post I mentioned the mass picking and pressing. I made a batch of dry cider with the fresh, unpasteurized juice. That is currently sitting in jugs for its secondary fermentation (which will last two more weeks.) We did a four gallon batch of hard cider using juice I had pasteurized so we could take our time getting to the project. It's also in its secondary fermentation. We'll taste before bottling to see if it needs extra sugar, but our goal is a drier sparkling cider.

Left: 2 gallons (and taster bottle) of plum wine in secondary ferment
Right: 4 gallons hard cider in secondary ferment

The Big Show: PLUM WINE!

This is the baby we've been waiting for since we moved in to our house. We have to very large plum trees and right now we've got plums falling out our ears.  After rinsing, halving, pitting and chopping the plums we add them to a bucket of sugar water. For sake of following a recipe (Again, I'm basing most of my homemade drinks on Emma Christensen's recipes in True Brews) we sanitized all the fruit. 

Our large batches (a two gallon wine in secondary fermentation and a four gallon in primary fermentation) have been sanitized with Campden tablets to kill wild yeasts before adding a packaged yeast. We also add a yeast nutrient to keep it working, acid blend, pectic enzyme, and tannin. After a week of primary fermentation we were pleasantly surprised at the taste - like wine already!

A cup of wine with yeast bubbling in it - yeast starter for the batch

Plum Wine, 24hrs after submerging the fruit and sanitizing. How RED! Ready to add yeast!

For experimentation sake I set aside a small batch of plum wine to let ferment naturally - wild fermentation. I did not sanitize the fruit or add packaged yeast. The yeast from the fruit skin and the air will do the job for me. I've never tried anything like it, so I'm excited to see how it goes. 

Bottle shelf with the wild fermenting plum wine.

Fermentation is not a new concept - but its new for me, and now I see it everywhere. It's a cycle of earth and life that I'm learning with both my hands and my heart. It's a process of preparation and patience - learning how to let life work from within.

As I walk around our home I find so many forms of growth, fermentation, and culturing. It's a beautiful thing to feel everything around in seasonal motion.

Hops - maybe to add to cider later!

Farm rows beneath burlap - soil development this season.

Duck bedding is curing along with some coffee grinds. This will make rich compost and mulch.

Rae's plantain infusion for medicinal salves.

The lady fowls enrich their pond with pooh, which makes for great plant watering.

The Yard Crew

"Moving toward a more harmonious way of life and greater resilience requires our active participation. This means finding ways to become more aware of and connected to the other forms of life that are around us and that constitute our food - plants and animals, as well as bacteria and fungi - and to the resources, such as water, fuel, materials, tools and transportation, upon which we depend." -Sandor Katz

In the passing time

It's been nearly a year and a half since I've posted here. In the passing time I've picked up on tumblr, which I thought would be a more creative outlet but I tend to just post photographs. I haven't exercised my "voice" in a while, other than personal journaling. But this morning as I cleaned the house my soul danced between these walls and I felt like submitting here again.

So, here "we" are. Two years into Seattle life, and oddly enough, still where I was in my last post: "I am an air plant, suspended in a glass globe amongst the Seattle morning fog. It is good, for now." We are still looking for our piece of earth. A lot has happened in the mean time but that is still our goal. Portland may be our home, we both feel it. 

For now, I am still working at the barbershop. Rae is teaching gardening at an alternative school on the South end. We live in North Seattle, where we feel grossly out of place, other than our close reach to the Puget Sound. This city is polished, new. Tech industry is blowing everything out of the water and if I weren't biking to work every day I would probably have gone out of my mind by now. My bike has become my main mode of transport as well as enjoyment. 

I like lists, so here's the compilation of my riches right now:

• P-patch: my personal garden space at our apartment complex where I find my most cherished alone time. This year I am growing strawberries, carrots, beets, turnips, chocolate cherry tomatoes, basil, overwintered garlic, flowers, and first attempts at Star of David okra and national pickling cucumbers. Hoping to pickle everything this year!
• Beekeeping: I got in here after Rae started in April 2014, beginning Cooperative Bee Company. I tagged along until he invited me to maintain my own hive this year. Our new hives this year are named after my grandmothers, Bette and Emma. Mine is Emma. We are up to five hives now after a hive split and Rae catching a swarm, both within this past week. I am so proud of Rae in this venture. He has always wanted bees and now he is catching swarms and caring for the ladies that give us food. It's so blissful and humbling. He has already made his first round of salves from the wax we harvested from last season. 
• Home: we moved to a one bedroom apartment. Rae works a lot and I quit my bartending job back in March so I could have more self care time. This apartment has become my space. Bright, quiet, filled with plants and books and food. I invest everything I want out of my own walls into these and I'll carry it when we move on. 
• Pets: Rumi and Frankie. Enough said. ;-)
• Relationships: I recently began writing to loves. The winter was hard, and I wrote letters for Christmas gifts because that was all I could manage at the time. It was a release, a comfort, to communicate with family in ways that I don't feel free to do on Facebook. I continued my writing to friends and am working on being more intentional with the relationships that feed me. 

Of course I have a million more interests and loves but those are the biggest recipients of my energy recently. I am now writing from a different computer so not many of my photographs have been transferred, but I can't leave a blog without one! So, here's what lately has been looking like...

Cheers, friends!

urban farming

I begin this entry with a long, calming sigh. This morning Rae and I went to help out at the CommonWealth Urban Farm again. We found out about this local garden being nurtured in the backyards of houses very near ours in Oklahoma City just a few weeks ago and were eager to help.

{A quick back story/redirection of this little blog space: I began this blog a couple years ago with the intent of keeping it as a "get to know me" section of my photo & design website. And as it goes I seemed to post more "life" statements than business. Which I'm fine with. But thus far this little blog space has been a random collection of all the random things I am/love/do/enjoy. Which is also fine if you enjoy keeping up with it. I would like to be a bit more directed in my writings about where my life is going, but we'll see what happens.}

My life (and, in turn, this blog) consists of my loves: photography, cosmetology school, growth, gardening and all things earth and quiet reflection. Then of course Rae, family and friends, being most important. My 2011 year began with my independence. Moving away from the life I had in Stillwater, starting over at "home" in my grandparents' house, formulating and creating a life that was wholly mine. I began building this picture of how I wanted to live, and started right away. I continued my recycling, began gardening, drank more tea, let my soul spread out on the land that I was tending.
My vision has been to live a sustainable life. This has been growing for years, but as I moved into a house with a yard the desire for such multiplied. A desire to farm, garden, respect, appreciate and tend the earth to harvest my needs. Support local everything - art, food, music, business. My hair career will go anywhere with me, and allow me the time to garden, photograph whatever I fancy, and have a family. I want to carry my baby on my back as I harvest our food. Raise a conscious and informed child, without robbing them of the due innocence of that time. I long to nurture and care for my family, our pets, our land, and everyone I encounter. I felt everything in me that was resting for so long now flourishing with produce (hence, my carrot tattoo.) My soil was feeling ready.
Then I met Rae, who had the same vision I did, a shared vision for life. It was recognized between us so quickly and organically. And so we continue this journey together.

Our current life consists of this:
-recycling, reducing our output of waste, and reusing what we can
-purchasing all food products locally and/or organically (or retrieved from the dumpster, if possible)
-purchasing other daily needs with conscious effort to support local and small business.
-keep a low consumer profile (i.e. we try hard not to buy things we don't need or have room for, being minimalist in possessions)
-learning to garden, compost, and harvest
-planning our family (yep, not just us and the cats....)
-paying off debt and saving money for the future

So CommonWealth garden is our new Saturday morning thing. I worked at the pub last night until 2am so when 8am rolled around and bushy-tailed Rae was ready to garden I put on quite a pitiful show of whining and moaning. But I got up and had my coffee. And by the time we were moving wood piles to make room for another compost pile I was deliriously happy to be outside instead of in bed. To be learning and growing and preparing for our future.

 starting another compost pile

 the carbon (brush) to cover the nitrogen (rotten fruits, veggies & other green items)

 winterizing the beds

 rotten produce from a local grocery - its still so gorgeous!

 sifting to get all the compost

spoils we brought home from the donated "trash" produce

<3

july

july was a blur! quickly passing. rae, class, working, photographing home births and engagements and pregnant tummies, editing all my june weddings and ! *whew*

my {very rare} free hours are spent photo-editing and recharging. when i begin to get frantic about my lack of time i just imagine those hours i spent just letting myself be. i deserved those hours, days, months. and i cherished every moment knowing that i would soon be starting something new and staying busy (although at the time i didn't know exactly what that would be.) i know this is exactly what i need. i'm re-learning time management....or at least attempting to. haha!


anyway, here are some shots of late...

my final mens haircut! yay!

also - passed my core cosmetology class with flying colors! on to taking customers! agh!

kitty stalking

carrot pulling/water hose attacking!

crop consternation

after my first round of seed plantings were unsuccessful (blaming frost) i planted round two. but didn't think about labeling the rows. "ah, i'll remember what they are!"(...insert scoff here...)

my "herbs" had grown like crazy these past few weeks and i was grateful. but still a bit disappointed that the only thing i had were herbs. i had planted carrots, lettuce, strawberries, bell peppers and jalapenos. i've gotten one or two nice tiny strawberries, but that's it thus far.
so every day as i diligently watered i entertained just a bit of bitterness. herbs. hmm. sure. i'll use them. i'll water them. they're going to be the best damn herbs ever, because that's what's growing for me right now!

then yesterday as i watered i decided to pull up a little green shoot. i thought it was parsley. but noticed it was strangely familiar to the little carrots i had encountered at homeland the night before. lo and behold...when i pulled the green stalks....a gorgeous orange root did emerge from my earth.

*geek*

needless to say, i was ecstatic. i pranced from garden to house to garden, fetching my camera, bowls, and whatever else i might need for some happy-go-lucky-harvesting.

the whole situation made me think...how many things in our lives might we miss by neglecting to nourish what we think isn't productive? or at least not productive in the ways we would prefer? probably more than i'd like to admit, speaking for myself. but the past months have left me tending every last, lonely little plant. i have been paying more mind to nourishing myself in places i had for so long forgotten. the little things. but it felt right. so i did it. and now here's crop. carrots. peace. open doors. closed windows. perfection in timing and a little kiss on the cheek from the universe.

"hey kid, you're in the right place."

it's nearly unexplainable, this peace. this life.

ecstatic new earth momma

also, i found i have wild onions growing in my backyard, so i pulled up a handful of those as well. <3

* cheers to growth, harvest, diligence *

can i get a "heeelll yeah!"

since i moved here i have been planning on getting a japanese maple for my front flower bed but had been waiting since the smallest ones i found were $40. this weekend i made the plunge, and to my surprise the tree rang up as $15! yay!! so while preparing to plant my tree yesterday my neighbor tells me that he has caught allie in his workshop! double yay!!!
so my baby kitty is home! she's skinny and dirty but she came home a new lady - she loves me! she was preston's cat and was still never fond of me after he moved but 4 weeks in the rough and i think she's grateful to be home. <3
mom came over to help me plant my tree. it was a perfect monday. i have my tree. i have my kitty.

also, more garden photos to come soon. i've done some moving & changing. i replaced my sunflowers with tomatoes, peppers and basil. and my strawberry plant is producing! yay!

my front flower bed!

my lovely new japanese red maple

by the end of my dirt day i turned off the water hose and stood here a minute at my fence to soak in all that is my home.