A Day of Rest

Today, I plan on doing some writing and reading some of my more spiritual books. I really wish I had a copy of Made From Scratch on hand. It's by Jean Zimmerman and it's a look at what homemaking has meant over the centuries, from vital half of the domestic life (even spiritual in some cultures) to redefined roles in the Industrial age (carrying over to the Fifties Housewife), to the present yearning for fading arts. It really helped me answer my first questions about the spiritual side I've always felt in homemaking.

Now, I have The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaeffer. Good gosh, it's not just about homemaking... it's about adding creativity to all parts of our lives. A fantastic book and I hope to finish it soon.

How are you going to spend your day of rest?

On hold and Pictures

First, the series on using bulk grains is going to be on hold for a couple of weeks while I work something out. I'll still blog in the meantime... there's plenty out there to blog about.

Second, I've discovered this wonderful blog by a mom of many children. I'm going to add her button to this blog because the pictures I've seen so far are... well, I just like them. :) They stir my creativity. Maybe they'll do the same for you.

1000 words

Valentine flowers (beautiful!)

This was so beautiful I just had to share it. Check out these lovely valentine's day flowers at maya*made. (Picture used by permission.)

Frugality and Time

I like the sound of this new series on Frugal Hacks and thought I would pass along the info. It's about finding the time to be frugal. It starts next Tuesday, but this link will take you to the overview.

Frugality and Time

Gardening

I've decided to take a brief break today from my series about grain to offer up a few ramblings about gardening. Don't worry. I'll keep it all in one post. ;)

Last year, my garden was a disaster. I planted lettuce, carrots, radishes (because a still-dear friend of our family said anyone could grow radishes), tomatoes, habaneros, and a single jalapeno plant. The lettuce didn't even show up, the carrots and radishes grew lovely leaves but next to no roots, and the habaneros which supposedly love sun were cooked to death by ours (we couldn't seem to water them enough). The only plants that gave us any fruit were the tomatoes (a full 3 feet shorter than they should have been) and the jalapeno. They looked battle-worn and weary, but they gave us about 10 tomatoes (from four plants) and 5 jalapenos (from one plant). We used them in sandwiches and for juicing. (And I swear, after eating a homegrown tomato I will only buy store-bought under pain of death.)

The year before this we tried planting sunflower seeds. They were the 6 ft. variety with huge heads bigger than my hand, fingers fully extended. That's what the package promised anyway. Ours never got above 2 ft. and the heads were about the size of my toddler's fist.

So, this year I'm going to have our soil formally tested. It only costs $25. I consider that a bargain if it means I'm going to have a decent garden this year.

In the meantime, I'm growing a couple of broccoli seedlings. Soon I'll be starting on my lettuce (maybe if I start them indoors they'll grow better?), onions and spinach.

I've also been reading, both for information and for pure fantasy. I can't help it. I get hooked by anything that has a lovely diagram showing where all the plants go, and I really go nuts if they also have a painting or photograph so you can see the effect. I'm trying to make sure my little garden plot looks just as interesting without becoming too complex. Here are some of the books/e-books I've been reading recently.

• Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. This is the first one I started with. I felt I should try to improve the soil instead of taking the easy way out by creating my own soil on top (replenishing the earth maybe?). I'm glad for the challenge but dang it! I didn't think it would be this hard.
• Momma's Guide to Growing Your Groceries by Kimberly Eddy. There's a lot of things I love about this e-book. The thing I like best is her perspective on bringing in the kids.
• Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte. A great book to help me figure out which plants to put where.
• Texas Gardening the Natural Way by Howard Garrett. The title says it all. A very good, very helpful book that covers more than just vegetables. I don't think we would have had any tomatoes at all if I hadn't used his Garrett Juice and garlic tea. It's also helped us take care of the land we're renting.
  
• Container Gardening by Sunset Publishing. Pretty pictures and easy to understand directions for using containers. My herbs are going to go into containers so I've really been studying this one.
  

I'm just really glad I didn't invest much money in my garden last year. This year I've gotten a better idea of what my soil is capable of, as well as how plants respond to the brutality of a Texas spring and summer. Hopefully, between that knowledge and whatever the soil test turns up, I'll be able to grow enough food to use in the recipes I'll be trying out from Putting It Up With Honey (Susann Geiskopf-Hadler). More on that after I've used the book a few times.

If you have a car loan, you might want to read this

It turns out that car dealers have been going out of business. Didn't know that but it makes sense. This little bit ticks me off though (from the linked article):

When a car buyer still owes money on a vehicle he is trading in, the dealer promises to pay off the outstanding loan, then resells the vehicle. But as more dealers go out of business, some are sticking consumers with the bill. Lenders can then go after the previous owner who thought the debt was paid, or repossess the car from the new owner who assumed it came with clear title.

Our new goal after reading this is to get our car paid off as soon as possible. We've been wanting to do that anyway, but this really cinches it. It also emphasizes to me the need to stay out of debt in the first place, if you can.

Bulk Grain, part trois

(I thought of using spanish in the title instead of french. Decided french was confusing enough.)

(And no, I don't know spanish or french very well. I just know how to count in both languages. :)

Last time I talked about making sprouts to sprinkle in soups and layer on sandwiches among other things. Today, we're going to take the sprouting concept a little farther in one direction. Next time we'll take this to the other (you'll see what I mean when we get there).

Sprouts can be used to grow little seedling grasses which can be juiced and imbibed. Everyone has a different reaction to these, so if you truly can't stand it, I wouldn't force myself to like it. However, wheatgrass has more chlorophyll than wheat sprouts and we've gotten a really good reaction when we add wheatgrass (live or powdered) to our diet, especially in the winter. If you decide to grow wheatgrass (or any other green grass seedling) you'll need a wheatgrass juicer. They aren't that expensive and they juice all kinds of greens, so if growing wheatgrass or something similar is something you want to try, I highly recommend getting one. These greens, for the most part, aren't chewable. My husband and I have occasionally taken a small clump of grass and chewed it but only Mr. Vinca managed to enjoy it. Chewing the stuff made me gag.

Oddly enough, I have no problem with the juices, whereas I know several people who do. Go figure.

So, why do we put ourselves through this? Several reasons that would take up too much of this post and are too similar to the reasons for making sprouts. Most importantly, we feel better when we drink wheatgrass juice. We don't drink large amounts and we don't drink them every day, but we've found with greens you don't need a lot to benefit your life.

Because we've used wheatgrass quite a bit, that's what I'll talk about in this post. However, you can also grow barleygrass, sunflower greens, and buckwheat greens using this method (see both the wheatgrass section in Recipes for a Longer Life and The Wheatgrass Book both by Ann Wigmore). Also, water requirements change with the seasons as well as location. Feel free to change around the method to suit your area.

Growing Wheatgrass

1. Soak your wheat like you do for sprouts. We use 2 cups for a 10"x21" flat.
2. Drain the sprouts well.
3. Prepare your container. Traci Sellers uses small paper bowls with no soil just holes punched in the bottom, and our local health food store sells hydroponically grown wheatgrass, but I've never been able to grow wheatgrass without soil. If you use soil (like me), any container will work as long as it allows drainage without letting a whole lot fall through. You won't need much soil in it... about 1 to 2". Some also add azomite or peat moss.*
4. Sprinkle your soaked sprouts on top of the soil. Do not press them in or cover them with soil.
5. Gently, gently water the sprouts, trying to make sure you don't bury them.
6. You can either cover your sprouts at this point with another container turned upside down, or you can do like we do. We get anywhere from 3 to 8 layers of newspaper wet and lay it down on top of the sprouts (3 if it's humid, 8 if it's dry or winter).
7. Twice a day check on them to make sure they have enough water or that the newspaper hasn't dried out. If it has, wet it down with some water.
8. After a couple of days, your sprouts should have grown 1" blades of grass. If they have, uncover the sprouts so they can start getting some sun.
   
9. Water every day, make sure it gets sun or a good equivalent, and watch it grow.
10. When the grass gets to about 6", it's ready to harvest.
11. Harvesting: cut with a sharp knife close to the roots. Put in juicer cut-side up. Start with 1 oz. for adults, 1 tsp. for children. Mix with half n' half with apple juice or water if the taste is too strong. 4 oz. is the limit for most adults and personally I feel lucky if the kids will take 1 tsp. in their juice.

* Both are optional, though we've found in our personal experience that without azomite we can't get a decent crop from our wheat we buy at the LDS cannery. It just doesn't grow very well.

Wheatgrass is a little more complex than sprouts but not much more. It's also a good introduction into growing seedlings and the complexities of gardening.

If you want a kit, they sell them on the Internet. We started out using supplies from Wheatgrasskits.com. They have a lot of information as well as supplies, juicers and kits for other kinds of indoor gardening.

Oh, and as a side note, if you end up with wheat that hasn't been threshed/winnowed properly and you don't feel like getting it consumable for people or using it for wheatgrass for yourself, wheat makes a very good cover crop.

We don't have any livestock but we've heard wheatgrass makes an excellent food for cows. The milk they give when they eat wheatgrass has a very high vitamin and mineral content. According to Price's book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, one village he visited in the Alps considered the butter made from such milk sacred: something to be used all through the winter months when the cows don't produce as well. He tested it and it did indeed have a much better nutritional content than the butters sold commercially. So, FYI.

One final word about spent wheatgrass. Some people can manage to get a second growth out of it. If you cut it before the jointing stage, it will grow back just like your lawn after mowing. However, we usually either just throw it out or compost it. Of the two, I highly recommend composting. Not only does it reduce landfill space, it takes all that lovely green growth and turns it into something you can use on future flats... or in your garden, whether you use containers or the backyard. I'll try to do a post on composting soon since we're gearing up for our garden here in Texas.

Next in this series: low-heating grains, the why and the how.