Herman and Ethel Merman run amok on Serendipity Farm

Hi All

“Bojon”c. 1900. Probably combined and condensed from Bo-hemia +   Hun-gary. Used as a pejorative. A very stupid person of Central/Eastern European Slavic descent who works   with their back instead of their head. Fit only for manual labour, the bojon   nonetheless frequently finds him/herself in political office, especially in   areas of heavily bojon dominated constituency in the USA, as well as the   backward, shithole areas of Europe where they originate. The bojon is   characterised by a very brief attention span and being unable to perform   tasks requiring much mental agility. Ideally suited for repetitive tasks, as   long as it doesn’t involve anything very important.“The stupid bojon was unable to pour the piss from his   boot, even though the directions were clearly written on the heel.”(appropriated from urbandictionary.com)

I love the word Bojon. I discovered it last night when hunting for sourdough recipes on a wonderful blog called The Gourmet Bojon. I had NO idea what a Bojon was and the assumption was that “Bojon” meant great unwashed unemployed masses and it struck a chord with this penniless student hippy. Aside from that, the blog was both humorous and very well written and is now tucked up to bed in my rss feed reader for my next mammoth perusal. Check it out here if you have a few spare moments and a yen to dabble in some pretty amazing recipes…

http://www.bojongourmet.com

This mornings breakfast consisting of oats, chopped dried dates soaked in boiling water with home made almond milk and a dollop of pure sunshine a.k.a. Christi’s precious peach and rhubarb jam 🙂

Not a patch on my breakfast in their present state but soon…these little seed kipflers will be planted out in bags and are the beginning of our potato futures on Serendipity Farm

The surreal screen saver that greeted me this morning…Steve has been messing aboot!

I have been replying to comments on the blog and only I could make a comment that was almost as long as a blog post! I think I am going to have to channel all of this verbosity and literary enthusiasm into writing of some sort. I could drain that bubbling spring and see if what eventuates is less verbose and more pointed and pertinent, condensed, LOL see what I mean? I use too many words to get to my point ;).  Saturday was a bit of an anticlimax to me. The permaculture meeting that I attended was interesting and somewhat informative but was more along the lines of a get together over a cup of tea and a bit of an informal chat and lunch. I don’t want to appear ungrateful for the effort that the lady facilitating the meeting took BUT…I am a bit past talking about things and want to get stuck into “doing” on Serendipity Farm. I can find out things out of books by buying the book myself. I can check out blogs and I can educate myself online without having to take 140km round trips that eventuated in a sense of deflated excitement for something that didn’t quite hit the mark with me. As Steve would say “It wasn’t quite what I was after today” and I would have to agree with him.

The results of 9 trays of sourdough starter turned into sour little crispy shards

A closeup of the sourdough “crisps” looking a whole lot like Lavash bread

The process of turning sourdough crisps into salt and vinegar scented sourdough starter powder for sourdough futures and for sharing with friends and family

As this IS my year of living honestly, the second deflation of the day was the sad homogenous mass that awaited me when I got home that refused to raise much and that when baked could have been used to construct the foundations for a mud brick house. I am talking about the sourdough bread that we baked. One of the loaves was reasonably easy to cut and could possibly have been eaten without having to check in to the dentist’s emergency department soon after attempting. The remaining 3 were decidedly terrifying in weight, height, texture and taste. I have to admit to adding about 3 times more sourdough starter than was called for in the recipe (thanks to my frugal heart, my desire to use the starter rather than throw it out AND my fear of what might bubble up out of the septic tank should I be stupid enough to flush it…), using up all of the various packets and bags of flour left on Serendipity Farm (some of it expired last December…) and just about every single process involved in the production of said bricks being ignored . What did I expect? Vinegar bricks is what we got :o(. The vinegar bricks were cut up this morning (Sunday) and strewn in the compost heap in a vain attempt to initiate a few new suites of “organisms” in the mix. I think it is somewhat telling that they are still in the compost heap and even the sparrows are shunning them. After some online research and the addition of several new blogs into my rss feed reader, we are now enlightened members of the online community about sourdough. We have a few adjustments to make to our starter and a couple of new recipes to follow and we should be able to produce something at least edible next time!

Little grape hyacinths that were lazily dumped on the ground to be dealt with later, still in their heap on the ground but flowering against the odds… “way to make a girl feel bad guys!”

Aside from the wonderful crop of Oxalis growing in the pots, these orchids are really enjoying their freedom in the mottled sunshine

Aren’t they beautiful? Very exotic looking but one of the true tough survivors on Serendipity Farm

I wish I had attended the Tamar NRM (natural resources management) Sustainable Living seed swap day before I headed to the meeting because I could at least have collected some free seeds that we could have used in our vegetable garden. I think I am going to have to call yesterday a bit of a dud. Never one to be kept down by a dud day, I got up this morning full of renewed energy and excitement about turning Serendipity Farm over to the Permaculture side. We have decided to move our veggie garden into the external chook coop that is protected from wallabies, rabbits, possums AND chooks (who do the most damage of all 4 if you ask me!) and extend this compound out to form a large area for veggie gardening in. If you can’t beat them…join them! That’s what we are doing…moving our veggie production inside the chook pen to stop them from scratching and pecking their way into the record books for vegetable destruction. They can stand and stare into the compound with their sad little chooky eyes and watch those delicious vegetables grow bigger and riper and the ironic thing is that when the door was open to this area, they never set foot inside!

A little Camellia Reticulata discovered in the undergrowth and free to flower in the sunshine note the clivea underneath

A little flowering quince (Chaenomeles) coming into bloom with a little flowering chook hiding underneath.

One of the natives dropping in for a visit.

It’s been raining for the last few days on Serendipity Farm but we don’t care! We have been holed up slaving for “the man”. In this case, “the man” is our lecturer Nick and we are his beavering slaves. We had procrastinated enough about not doing our Job Specifications for the unit that we are currently undertaking and the memory of manipulating our way around the vernacular and jargon of “the industry” has us twitching at the thought and the Job Specifications are penultimate only to the actual costing of the job where we find out that all of those lovely sustainable touches that make everything more simple and natural actually cost twice as much as doing it old school. The planting alone amounts to $14 000+. Isn’t it lucky that it’s only theoretical? We may be only working on this plan for our Diploma but our lecturer gave us freedom and said “knock yourselves out!” with our plans and we have discovered some amazing products, wonderfully sustainable practices and now have several plans up our sleeves should we ever come into any form of ready currency in the near future.

A bank of mushroom compost and some wood futures (sensibly stacked under the deck close to the house) along with hay for the chook roost

After abandoning Herman’s sour building material offspring earlier in the week, I found a fantastic blog that walked me through the process of sourdough excellence from start to finish and as usual I have been overcomplicating things. The blogger actually said that they don’t even measure their starter, flour or water and just give rough approximations in their bread making. I have been messing about with hydration levels (whatever they are…) with the remaining 3 sourdough starters that I have left. Herman, my original, is still half rye and half white because I am aware that should I kill the other two, I won’t have a starter left so he is being maintained “old school” so that I can fall back on his regular rise and fall should something strange hybridise out of the others. From Herman sprung Ethel Merman, the unbleached organic sister of Herman and mother to Myvanwy (Miff for short) who is a 75% hydrated variant of her mum. Both Ethel and Herman have a steady rise and fall but Miff seems to be bucking the trend. I would have thought that less water would make the process slower and shorter but I would have been wrong! The flour rich sourdough starter goes up and stays up much longer than her predecessors and actually looks very yeasty in comparison to Herman and Ethel who look more “doughy”. I also read that the strongly vinegar smell that I have been concerned about is just a starter phase that most newbies (consider me numero uno newbie on the sourdough starter block!) mistake for their sourdough starters declining and is the cause of many a good sourdough being flushed into the sewer system. The acetic acid bacteria clean out all of the bad bacteria and lay the path for lactic acid and yeast which are the desirable proponents of sourdough. Herman, Ethel Merman and Miff all have a nice fruity yeasty slightly lemony smell now. I expected Herman to still smell vinegary but he has changed. It’s great fun messing about with fermentation. I still haven’t worked out how to stop things from going mouldy in my vegetable crisper. Most probably use them within 6 months might be a good start…

Mushroom futures!

I am going to let you off easy with a shorter post tonight. I don’t even know if I have photos to accompany it! I am usually very regimented about sorting everything out early but sometimes it’s good to fly by the seat of your pants and wing it! I am looking forwards to Christi of http://farmlet.wordpress.com/  blogging fame’s post because she is going to tell us all how to make the heavenly heady concoction she humbly called “Peach and rhubarb jam”, sent to me recently that we are just about to run out of and are doing paper, rock, scissors over who gets to scrape the jar out with their finger…I am just about to head off to the net to see if there is a way that I can cheat to beat the odds! See you all on Saturday when it’s supposed to be a sunny day and Earl has bagsed a nice long walk on the beach :o)

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