Backyard Garden

This post falls under the category of life in Maine. Thursday afternoon, April 9th, it started to snow. All the weather App's assured us it would rain, so we were hoping to just get rain. It didn't snow a lot by Maine standards, maybe five inches, but it was five inches of heavy spring snow. Five inches of stuff that was just light enough that you couldn't call it slush, but if you touched it, it turned to slush. Jen and I went for a walk around the college campus just after eight pm. The roads had not been plowed; the sidewalks were not cleared. It was slow walking but a good work out. We were dressed for it. On the walk, we saw the tree's weighted down from all the snow and a couple of ducks quacking on the pond as the big chunky snowflakes fell. Some of the college students who were not able to go home when the school closed because of the pandemic had built a couple of giant snowpeople and were throwing snowballs at each other. We got back to the house, threw som

So in the spirit of staying at home (more than usual, but just barely more) and less time shopping we are doing more making things we like to buy. We don't get kombucha that often but often enough to think it was time to start our own. I had tried doing a kit a couple years ago with a dehydrated scoby and that never worked out, I just never pursued it after that. We are always wanting to add more fermented foods to our diet so I tried again. I read that you could make your own scoby from commercial kombucha as long as it was still active, which sounds great to me.  The first try is actually working, a scoby is forming, but I used a small mouth jar and did not give it a lot to eat. So I am getting ready to transfer it to a larger jar with more tea and sugar to eat and I started a second scoby from commercial kombucha in case this one fails. The first try... (3 weeks fermenting) second try back up (1 week fermenting) The type of kombucha we used: What you

The composted manure garden soil was delivered in the rain, and then the rain continued for a couple of days. That produced a soggy wet soil pile in the middle of our driveway. Saturday morning, the rain had stopped, and we were ready to lay down some cardboard and maybe some paper to kill whatever grass we were not able to destroy hand tilling it. The whole plan was a failure. The hand tilling we had done last week was nowhere near the kind of shape we needed it to be. It's funny to feel defeated so early in the process of anything you want to do, but there we were soaking wet topsoil covering our driveway and hand tilled slightly turned up grass in the backyard. We realized the mix we had bought was going to hold too much moisture and it would likely not work well for a garden if it was sitting on top of composting cardboard, this would have been the easy and quick answer to our garden dreams but we knew it had flaws already. We had to get a second opinion even though we knew w

So that worked. Who could have known that following instructions would result in something that the instructions were supposed to deliver? We soaked the beans overnight, then blended the soybeans (without cooking them - I learned), then into a pot with seven cups of water. We boiled it, strained it, and that was soy milk. If we wanted soymilk, we could have stopped there, that was not the goal, though. We added a packet of nigari (sodium chloride) made from saltwater to the bowl of hot soymilk and waited, stirring occasionally. Everything curdled up and started to separate, kind of like making cheese. We put the cloth in the tofu press, and the tofu press into a large dish. The large dish was to catch the water that drains from the curds as they are ladled into the tofu press. I'm willing to bet someone somewhere has started to ladle the soymilk curds into the press without something to catch the water. I bet given the right day; I might even do that myself. We were able to

A few years ago, we received a tofu press to make tofu at home. I think it was Jen's sister Julie who got it for us. Thanks, Julie, if it was you. We were excited; as vegetarian soon to be vegans, tofu was and is a staple at our house. We eat it a few times a week, seven or eight different ways. We could now make it ourselves so, cool. We order a five-pound bag of organic yellow soybeans from amazon, put the tofu press in the cupboard, and waited. The soybeans came in the mail, but the time was not right, so they sat. Then they sat some more, and then we forgot about them in the pantry for months. The soybeans were moved around the pantry so many times it stopped being a bag of soybeans and became something we just moved around. Our brains stopped connecting the green bag to what was inside it. They should have been turned into soymilk and tofu, but they didn't exist in that world anymore.  Eventually, one of our cats got a hold of the bag and destroyed it. The little yellow