Truffula Tuft

Bountiful Cities Project: birdhouse

I've been helping out a local organization called the Bountiful Cities Project. They run several community gardens in low-income areas, as well as offer resources to anyone interested in making our food healthier and more local. I moderate their discussion list and will soon be maintaining their website. They have an annual birdhouse auction to raise funds for their gardens. I made a birdhouse completely from discarded stuff. Here's a picture:

 

The gourd came from a compost pile, the "Cloverleaf Lard" can, the metal flower and the small grate came from the scrapyard behind our studio. Pretty cute, huh? I call it "Junkyard Bonnet".

Seedlings and Sprouts!

 

Just some quick photos of the garden. "Goldy", our 40+ year old apple tree is about to bloom. It looks like pink fireworks from our bedroom window when she does.

 

Only one brave little pea plant has come up so far.

 

The spinach and lettuce are thriving in the cold frame. We eat fresh greens everynight, sometimes with dandelion and chickweed from the very overgrown lawn. I call it "Yard salad".

 

Lots of baby lettuce in the kitchen garden. These are the red leaf variety, from seeds I saved from my LA garden 2 years ago.

 

The bees from our hive are out and about, enjoying the so-called weeds.

 

A rainy day outside the kitchen window full of tomato, pepper and squash seedlings.

I love spring in the mountains!
Jen

Potato Oatmeal No-Knead Bread

Adapted from a recipe in Mother Earth News, enhanced by Ginger West and perfected by me!

Ingredients:
3 cups warm water
1 1/2 tablespoons dry yeast
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
5 cups unbleached flour
1 cup potato flour
1/2 cup rolled oats

Add yeast and salt to the warm (not hot) water in a large bowl. Add the flour slowly, mixing as you go. It will be stiff when you're done.

Let it sit in a warm place for 20 minutes to 2 hours, until it's risen about to 1 1/2 to 2 times it's starting size. It's ready to bake now, or you can store it in the fridge. It will keep for up to 2 weeks and actually tastes better and has a better texture, the longer it's in there.

When you are ready to bake, take the dough out of the fridge. Flour up your hands a bit, this stuff is sticky. Cut off about 1/3 of it - a grapefruit size ball. Put the rest away for next time. Put the ball on a plate with a bit of flour to keep it from sticking. If you want a more loafy shape, use half the total dough and put it in a greased loaf pan. Let rise again for about 20 minutes. It may not do much but don't worry about it.

Preheat your oven with a pizza stone in it if you've got one, to 400 degrees. Slide the dough off the plate onto the pizza stone or greased cookie tray. If you're using a loaf pan just stick it in there. Bake for 30-35 minutes. Check for color. If it looks crispy and brown it's done, if not give it another 5 to 10 minutes.

Voila, yummy homemade bread! You can also use it for pizza crust or rolls. Note, this bread is very forgiving. If you give it a longer or shorter rising time, it will still work.

Homemade Bread and the Spread of Skills

   

I've been an assistant Girl Scout leader with my sis-in-law Gina since last spring. Yesterday I taught the girls how to make a simple yeast bread. This is something I learned from my neighbor Ginger, who copied it out of an article in Mother Earth News.

Soon after she first mentioned it - how good it was and how easy the recipe is,  I went to my favorite discount food store (which has become less and less of a discount). There the organic whole wheat sliced bread that was 1.30 when we got here in January 08, is now over 3.00. That's still 2.00+ cheaper than other places, but after doing some calculations I realized that baking your own saves 1.50 to 3.00 per one-pound loaf (or more if I could find bulk organic flour). I was now motivated.

A little knowledge + Motivation + Access to tools/resources (recipe, flour, oven...) = Willingness to try something new

This is the way self-reliance skills seem to be moving out into the population now. A generation or 2 or 3 ago, people learned this stuff from their moms and grandmas. You watched them do it for a few years, you helped them do it for a few more, then you took over doing it for the family. Now we learn from books and articles, sometimes classes, and a lot more trial and error. But we DO have some amazing internet resources - people who have done the trial and error already and then generously sat down to make some notes about what they did, so you can avoid their mistakes. When I made jelly last fall and it wouldn't set, I got on Google and found out why from a forum of internet-savvy canning ladies. And I was able to save my apple jelly.

We also have our friends on the path. By observing how the Dervaes family kept chickens in their backyard, I saw how how I could do it too. And my doing it helped my friend Nicole see how she could do it too, and so on.

Trial and error + Shared experience = Success

Even though I am wheat-sensitive and not supposed to eat gluten I started making the bread every few days. The first loaves were a lot of work trying to get it all just right. Once I ran out of flour and had to ad lib with some nongluten flour which did not work as well. A couple of times I burned them. But the results have been pretty good overall. I've done it about 20 times now and my confidence and understanding of the process is way up. It's not a big deal and it smells good, tastes great and feels right. In the last batch I made I partially substituted potato flour, and it came out really yummy (recipe will follow).

So the next step is sharing it, like Ginger did with me, like the author of the article in Mother Earth News did, like I just did with the Girl Scouts.

Individual success + Generosity = Spread of skills

None of the Girl Scouts had ever made bread before, they didn't know what or how yeast worked and they didn't know the difference between whole wheat and white flour. But now they do. They were so excited about the bread as it was baking. The scent wafted into the Cafeteria. "Is it done yet?" "Can we look at it?"

At the end of the meeting I brought the round golden loaves out onto the playground, and they tore into them. They gobbled them up, sans butter, right there. That is really the best skill teaching tool possible, bread fresh from the oven made by your own hands.

Peace,
Jennifer

Another 6 months and a new beginning

Six months later...

Well, I started to revamp the blog around New Year's, but still haven't completed the changes. I started a new post right after Obama was elected, even found a good poem to mark that auspicious occasion (which I will still post one of these days) but never actually uploaded it. At least 4 times a month I think, "I want to post about this, or I need to tell everyone to write this letter about mountain top removal....But first I have to finish redesigning the blog."

This tends to happen - I want to do something that, once established, will not take much time, but the establishing of it, takes a REALLY long time. Sometimes it takes forever. It's like a dam in a stream, blocking the flow. The flow sometimes needs blocking - my energy needs to go elsewhere. But the urge to write this blog has not gone away, despite the last year of sparse posts. I realize I am making a big deal out of it and it's not necessary. So instead of a starting up again with a totally tricked out new format, I'm just going to start where I am. Taa daa! Go to the URL to see the beginning.

The new tag line is "Homesteading, creativity and activism in the Blue Ridge Mountains". The homesteading part will continue the posts, pictures and tutorials on cool DIY ways to grow and preserve food, make practical items for the home, musings about homeschooling, bartering etc.

Since New Year's I have resolved to give more energy to personal creative expression. I've been drawing in a sketchbook, doing some watercolors and playing around with paper mache sculpture. So the creativity part will show you some of that.

And the activism of course ties it all together and gives it a larger context. Eventually I will add more tutuorials, more links, more photo albums. But meanwhile, hello again!