Green and Cheap Plant Starters

I have been experimenting with making seed starters and planters using materials I would otherwise throw out. I wanted it to be something that would be disposable, as I am getting tired of finding space for all my plastic containers. I also wanted it to be something that I could possibly just plant in the ground with the plant. Here are a few of my creations.

I have seen some people using paper rolls for planters, so I decided to give it a try. I used mostly toilet paper rolls. I cut them in half, took a small square of paper, pushed the paper into the bottom using a tall glass that was just smaller than the inside diameter of the roll, and...	voila! A small plant starter!
I did find the paper roll planters tend to get moldy, which was disappointing, but it ultimately didn't seem to affect the plants that much. Although the mold is gross, I haven't lost a plant yet, and all these tomatoes were started in the roll planters.
I tried my hand at origami. Origami is very difficult to do with newsprint!	So I improvised a little on this one, using a few cuts and one staple. It works, and is a great size for starting tomatoes.
Paper mache seemed like it might be easier, so I gave that a try. I used flour as glue. Although is was fun and did give me some good results, it did take about 15-20 minutes to make each one - and it was messy!	And although these I wouldn't plant directly into the ground, this was the fastest and easiest of all - fast food containers! Rather than throw them out, just wash them out and plant!

Simple Pleasure

I like to hide happy meal toys around my garden so that when I'm weeding I get a happy surprise.

Making Cultured Buttermilk

Continuing on my "living like a peasant" kick, as my son calls it, I have tried my hand at making cultured buttermilk. Buttermilk runs about $2 a quart and milk is $4 a gallon. It just makes sense to make it myself.

It is EASY!!

I buy cultured buttermilk about every other week to make pancakes, mostly, but I also use it in cakes and biscuits. One week, I decided to replace what I used with regular milk. By the next weekend, I had a somewhat thinner version of what I had started with - but it was still very much buttermilky.

I did a little research online and found that to get the thick buttermilk, you had to let it culture at room temperature for about 24 hours after adding the milk. This thickening is called clabbering. The cultures get their best activity at about 70F, which is why it was thickening so slow in the fridge.

I was a little nervous about leaving dairy out for that long, but the website I was visiting, created by a chemist, assured me that it would work and that he had done it for years. So I poured a little buttermilk in a quart jar and filled the rest with 2% milk (because that is what I had - he recommends whole milk). I put the open jar in a crock pot, put the lid on the pot, and waited 24 hours.

And it did work!

What you should be seeing here is the thickened buttermilk pulling from the side of the glass. Can you see how thick it got? And it smells so good!

I can't wait to use this in blueberry pancakes tomorrow!

Now I will always have fresh buttermilk and it will cost half as much!

I Am Not Myself...

I have no idea what has come over me, but I have become obsessed with tea cups!

I was in a thrift store and they had a bunch of tea cups in the display case at the register. I saw one that really struck me, and the guy in line ahead of me said that he had been thinking about buying it too. I didn't have the money to get it then, so I left without it -- physically, but it was with me mentally as I couldn't quit thinking about it!

So I went back the next day and bought it and two others, since there are three of us in the family.

My husband suggested that we have "high tea" that weekend. We have an old fancy silver tea service and now had cups to go with it. We set up the table for tea, threw in some Vivaldi -- because nothing says hoity-toity like Vivaldi. My son thought it was so weird that at first he couldn't quit giggling. But everyone had fun and we decided that we would try to make it a regular thing.

Then I started trawling eBay sneaking peaks at other tea cup and saucer sets. You know, just to see if I got good ones.
But then before you know it, I had placed bids on 5 sets!! Agh, what was I thinking? I openly said that I probably wouldn't win them all. Yet secretly hoped that I would.

I did! So, in a few weeks I will be the proud owner of way more tea cups and saucers than I have room for!




Here are the three I bought from the thrift store - the last one is my favorite.
I will post pictures on the ones I just won as soon as they arrive!

I Love Bread

I have been working on developing my bread making skills over the last few months and it is starting to pay off.

My Very Own Yeast

I had always wanted to start my own wild yeast culture, but had never been successful. It always seemed to get to a stage where it was smelling wonderful, and then the next day or two it went completely wrong and kept going more wrong.

Then I found this great recipe for a starter at The Fresh Loaf. The secret ingredients are whole grains and pineapple juice. The yeast lives on the surface of the grain, so by using whole grains and grinding them yourself, you increase the amount of yeast that your mixture will have. The pineapple juice makes the environment of the mixture such that bios other than yeast do not find it appealing. I did not follow their recipe exactly. Here's what I did:

1/2 ground rye grain
1/2 pineapple juice from canned pineapple (I made an upside-down cake with the fruit)
mixed in a pint jar I had a lid for - just set it loosely on top.

I checked it and stirred it every day, but really did nothing else to it. In less than 2 weeks, I got the bubbles and yeast smell I was looking for.
At this point I watched for liquid buildup on the top, then proceeded with the dividing and adding steps - pour off the liquid, take some of the mixture out, add wheat flour, add equal amount of filtered water (you don't want tap water chemicals in the mix). In another week, my yeast was strong enough to make a loaf.
My yeast is now over 2 months old and I have made many loaves with it. Yummy sourdough loaves.

Don't worry if you don't like rye. After a bit of dividing and adding, it all becomes wheat. And I have found that when I want to make bread, I can just pour the entire mixture into my recipe, swish the jar with some filtered water, add equal amounts of flour, and the yeast that was in the residue just takes right off again. I occasionally switch jars for cleaning, in which case I swish the water around then pour it into a clean jar and add flour.

<- see how fluffy the dough gets!

Chewy, Crusty Bread

I became hooked on crusty bread when I was traveling Scotland. It was damp and cold, so every so often, I would find a nice coffee shop and enjoy a mocha and crusty bread. Heaven! Since coming back to the States, the only bread that has compared to that bread has been the New French Bakery baguette. Since first finding it though, it has been hit and miss to obtain. So I have been trying to recreate the bread.

For months I have been reading bread making article on the web describing how to get the crusty crust from steam. I tried spraying the dough while baking and leaving a pan of water in the oven - it works best to use both. I also read about the need to develop the gluten. There are many different techniques, and I have tried and failed at a lot of them. Then I ran into this seemingly too-good-to-be-true technique: No Knead Bread.

Let me assure you, it is NOT too good to be true! I just baked my first loaf last night using the recipe and technique. Other than the fact that I burned it due to the fact that I was baking while also watching a very funny, and strangely appropriate to the situation show - The Worst Week of My Life - it came out beautifully. The technique calls for a cast iron dutch oven or Pyrex, of which I had neither. BUT, I had read in comments on other no-knead sites (see the New York Times YouTube video) that some had used a clay pot cooker.

I have several of those! And it works! Soak the pot as you would whenever you are cooking something in it. Oil it. Add the shaped dough to the pre-heated clay pot. Cover it for 30 min, then bake uncovered for 15 (not another 30 like I did!).

The crust was perfectly crusty. The interior had that perfect crumb that crusty bread should have. And it was delicious!!

<- This is not the loaf I burnt, and was even more delicious :p