KW-25 Soft bread and hard edges
should you pluck out your potato flowers?
I’ve had a lovely week in the garden. All of the root seeds are in the ground, nearly all of the plants which started off as seeds in trays a couple of months ago seem to be happy enough in their new places, and I was going to say that I think we mostly have won the war on slugs. But then, this morning, I did see a few again. Time to get out again at sunrise and start relocating them.
Sad news from the vineyard, though, it seems like we have failed up there again. I have thoughts about it, but I shall save those for a newsletter where I have less to say. Probably in the winter.
The pumpkin patch is not awesome, but at least there will be some activity up there. I was hoping the summer wheat might beat the weeds, but it’s a dead heat at the minute. The plan is going to be basically to mow it and use the grain-rich weed mowings as pig food directly. I think they’re going to love it, and it should give maybe a hundred feeds, so not entirely wasted.
Self Sufficient Bread Baking.
Bread has four ingredients: flour, salt, yeast and water.
As you know, we are now self sufficient in wheat four. Two years ago, I bought 2 kilos of winter wheat seed and harvested nearly 30 kilos of wheat from it. This would be, to an proper farmer, an awful year. But proper farmers need to buy tractors and fuel and herbicides and pesticides and fertiliser and all that expensive stuff, and then they need to make a profit to feed their families with food they buy from the supermarket and to send their kids to private schools. We just need it to bake bread, and save a couple of kilos to sow again.
The wheat currently doing great guns in the potager is from that saved seed. We are self sufficient in wheat.
Water. Well, … 1
Salt. I was hoping to pick it up off the ground. That is, after all, where salt mostly grows, right? Underground. I spent many, many hours pouring over geological maps of the local area. And then the maps of the whole of Germany and bits of the Czech Republic. There is no salt in the ground anywhere near me.2 There is no rock salt in Germany. My current thoughts on obtaining the sodiummy chloridey flavour enhancer are to spend the winter walking to the Mediterranean where I shall find a nice clean cove, set up tent, and spend a month extracting it from the sea. Until then, it looks like we are still buying it.
Yeast. Dried yeast is expensive. So I cycled off to a friendly baker and bought some of their fresh yeast. 1 euro for a chunk as big as my fist. For the last month, I have been keeping it alive in my fridge. Whenever I need to bake a loaf, I bring it out, warm it up, mix in a bit of sugar to perk it up a bit, and wait for it to go frothy.
I pour the bubbling goodness into my wheat and water mix and set about kneading it with a wooden spoon for a good half hour. I make it quite wet, rather too much so to do it with my hands.
Then, I bake bread, add some flour and water to the yeast slop, mix it up and leave it for a bit, returning it to the fridge when I remember.
The Week Ahead
Now that the potager has entered the summer cycle of weed, water, mow, it’s time to turn our attention to the soft fruits. They are a bit overcome with weeds, but nothing that can’t be sorted out quite quickly, and bang straight on with the harvest. Strawberries are nearly coming, and the gooseberries are starting to plumpen up. It’s nearly jam time!
The Tomato House - I was full of optimism for the next step last week, but sadly one of the few things that I just refuse to even try (quitter!) is to get bags of cement by bike. I need three of them. That is all. Just three. But the nearest builder’s merchant is 18km away, and don’t forget, the barracks is on the top of a hill. One bag at a time, 108km, 1000m ascent. No. Just no. I thought I had a vehicular assistance planned for last week, but that fell through. So, hopefully this week.
Smaller things this week:
Continue with the potager edges that I made great progress on this week, but forgot to take a photo of
Tie the strings of the bean gate
Put pumpkins in the vineyard
Clear the rest of the pig poop out of the pig house and wash it down
Fix the fence that the piggers ate away before they decide to go through it
And at the end of the week, it is midsummer. In name. We have not had a great deal of the warm stuff, but I suspect there will be plenty of that to come. I shall do my 108 sun salutations and make a fire. And it will be lovely.
Pirate Gardening Tip of the Week
Pirate gardening is mostly old man gardening. It was old man gardening when I started with my first vegetable plot 30 years ago. So, mostly, it’s just old ways of doing things.
Plucking potato flowers
Plants, that is, flowering plants which are pretty much the only plants we eat mostly want to make seeds, send them off into the world on the wind, on the backs of bees, or through the poop of birds, and make babies. Go forth, and be fruitful. Literally.
If the plant is apple or a cob nut, or a leaf of wheat, then that’s exactly what we want as well. If it’s a carrot or a cauliflower or a potato, we would be best to deny it it’s reproductive urges and make sure it does less of that silliness and more of the things we want it to do.
So, the theory (and the science, for that matter3) is that if you stop the plant putting all it’s energy into making seeds (which are made in the lady flowers, remember!), then it makes more of the roots. Which makes sense, I guess, because more roots mean more chance of new plants sprouting next year, and double the chances of planty sexytime.
This one, though, I am going to leave up to you. If you want to maximise your yields, and that is all you are interested in then a) you’re probably a permacultist and b) go for it. I, on the other hand, think potato flowers are properly beautiful, and chose to leave them on the plant. Also, potato fruits are mental. Remind me to show you them in October.
I guess this week’s Pirate Gardening Tip is - here’s a thing you might not have known you can do, but I don’t do it. Helpful as ever!
Five Years Ago
And now, I am going to go and see what’s going on with the oats I soaked overnight. Once again, I am trying to make decent plant based milk. I think that it might be all about the bag you use to strain them. Onwards!
I do hope you all have lovely weeks. Make sure you spend as much time outside as you can, and a happy midsummer to you all. Take care of each other
Your loving Pirate Ben
xoxo
https://services.bgr.de/atomfeeds/dataset_7F12ED28-84DA-4AAE-AEDB-33310962705E.xml
Water / well, well / water. Yes, I know. And I apologise.
If you like maps and minerals, this is the link you have been looking for: https://services.bgr.de/atomfeeds/dataset_7F12ED28-84DA-4AAE-AEDB-33310962705E.xml
If this newsletter goes out late, which is looking likely, it is because I was trying to trace the original source paper. I found it.
It is called Influence of Flowering and Fruiting Upon Vegetative Growth and Tuber Yield in the Potato and was published by the University of Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station in 1942.
I am frankly horrified with myself that what I remembered from it was that in this experiment, they showed that indeed, removing the flowers from the plants resulted in increased potato yield. How can this be more interesting than that the experiment took place at Castle Danger? Damn. I wish I had called this place Castle Danger instead of The Barracks. Missed opportunity there!
Here you go:
Omg! I always get surprised to see how much this place has developed throughout the years! Congrats!!