Yeah, so I discovered this morning that I’d left the fan on my plants overnight, which had done a pretty spectacular job of drying them out. Fortunately, after a good watering, they sprang right back. I must be more careful to only leave the fan on for an hour here and there. Perhaps I should invest in another timer.

(Why a fan, you might ask? Plants that grow in unmoving air don’t tend to be nearly as sturdy as ones that have to deal with a little push from the wind every now and again. it also helps circulate the warm air, which pools at the top of my vertical “greenhouse”.)

The bigger task, yesterday, was getting started another batch of seeds in the “grow-op”, including all the following:

All the unmarked items are from West Coast Seeds; the ones marked with stars are seeds that came to me from the fantastic Beth Breisnes in hand-folded seed packets made from newspaper. (Click here to learn how to make them yourself!) She received the seeds at a seed swap but unfortunately lost her photos of the original packets.

Today and tomorrow are busy days, so won’t have time to do anything but tend to the seeds I’ve started in the greenhouse. Hopefully I’ll have time this weekend to finish mixing the sand into my garden beds and then get to planting my peas and a couple other early outdoor crops.

Have you started any part of your garden yet? What are your plans this year?

When I started blogging about my garden last spring, my intention was to document my thought process on why I’d made all the little decisions I was making on a regular basis. Additionally, I wanted to add a little bit of explanation, in the hopes others might find it useful. Unfortunately, as the garden project got busier, I spent less and less time writing about it. So, time to turn over a new leaf…

To bring this up to date, so far I’ve:

1) Bought a wire rack from Costco, some fluorescent shop light fixtures (4 feet long), “daylight” fluorescent bulbs, a few feet of small-link chain and a roll of plastic. Used it all to build a little greenhouse in the basement. (Photos of the set-up coming soon! In the meantime, here are some newly germinated cauliflower:)

2) Bought “Jiffy” peat pellets and used them to start a bunch of seeds. All these varieties are from West Coast Seeds, except as noted. I’ve started the following so far:

3) Last week, my father came over and we pruned the bottom branches off the giant cedar tree in our backyard. Mostly, it was for safety, as the branches were growing between the power and other utility wires. The added benefit, though, is that it’ll give most of the garden an extra hour or two of daylight each day. We’re just using our Yard Waste bin (and those from the neighbours) to get rid of the cedar branches a bit at a time.

4) Picked up a pickup truck-load of construction sand from Mainland Sand and Gravel in Richmond. Brought it back and combined it with my fresh compost to add to my garden beds. My beds were almost 100% compost last year and were pretty soggy, since the compost sucks up the posture like a sponge. I hope the sand helps improve the drainage somewhat; and I’ll add extra wherever I plant my root veggies (carrots, parsnips, etc.) this year.

I think that pretty much brings us up to today. In the next few days, I’ll finish adding the compost/sand to my beds and lightly tilling it in. I’ve got to do a couple of soil tests to make sure the right nutrients are available. Then, it’ll be time to start planting peas, beans and a bunch of other wonderful things. Also, the grass needs some love; it needs some sand and maybe some lime, as well as reseeding in a few places.

So, that’s my garden; how’s yours coming along so far?

I’m sure I’ll be writing about the people I met, the conference shenanigans and the topics I presented on, but there’s one thing I have to share right away.

At the conference, I met Sarah, who had offered to give me a tour of Hester Creek Estate Winery. Near the end of the tour, her family stopped by and I was lucky enough to hear (and record) a little impromptu song from Sarah’s five-year-old daughter Anabel, who apparently knows a thing or two about wine:

If this adorable little girl and her tune doesn’t melt your heart, you clearly need more wine in your life.

If you like this song, be sure to let Sarah know, she’s @winejellysarah on Twitter.

The snowdrops and crocuses are starting to bloom and the seed catalogs are shooting through the mail slot at a furious rate. Spring is creeping up quickly, along with all sorts of important decisions about what to plant and where to plant it. Although the offerings in those catalogs are tempting (we call it “seed porn” around here), I’ve got a wedding to pay for this summer and can’t really afford my lust for awesome (and sometimes expensive) seeds.

To address this, I’m going to be opening up my home (and yard) for a seed swap in a couple weeks, inviting my friends and acquaintances to come over, bring their spare veggie seeds and share in a little coffee, tea and garden-nerd conversation. Even if you’ve never gardened before and don’t have your own seeds, come anyway and get inspired. I’ll be putting my left-over 2011 seeds up for trading and hope lots of others do the same.

This isn’t meant to be a particularly formal event, but I’d like to suggest a few guidelines in case you’ve not been part of a seed swap before:

1. Please provide your own baggies or envelopes to manage/track the seeds you receive.
2. If a particular kind of seed failed miserably for you, please be honest; don’t pawn off your seeds because they sucked… instead, share the awesomeness. (An extension to this guideline is: please don’t bring really old seeds; most seeds lose their viability after a couple of years.  If you’re not sure if they’re still good, don’t bring them.)
3. Bring a notepad. If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to learn from others insights. (Who *knew* that epsom salts can help make tomatoes AWESOME?)
4. If you’re a first-time veggie gardener and don’t have seeds to trade with, consider baking some cookies, or bring some of your canned goods or whatever else you have that might be of interest. I’m sure you’ll walk away with some seeds and some great advice on how to get started.

If you’re interesting in joining us, please RSVP on the Facebook Event so that I know how many people to expect. I look forward to seeing many of you soon!

A large bowl of very happy sourdough culture and two loaves of fresh bread

A couple weeks ago, I was at an event organized by Slow Food Vancouver representing my friends at Skipper Otto’s Community Supported Fishery. By lucky accident, my table was right next to the folks from Beyond Bread (formerly the Transylvania Peasant Bread Bakery) who were giving away portions of their sourdough starter culture. After a fantastic conversation with the Head Baker, he convinced me to give sourdough another try. (I got disheartened this spring because I didn’t know what I was doing, and my garden was taking most of my spare time.)

Fast forward to today and I’m now producing delicious, if not yet perfect, loaves of sourdough bread. Since I’ve started to tell others about my latest sourdough experiences, I’ve been asked by a bunch of people for pieces of my culture so that they can give it a shot themselves. (If you’d like some of my culture to start your own sourdough, let me know… I’ve got plenty!) Of course, once I deliver the jar of culture the initial enthusiasm seems to turn to panic; you can see the question in their eyes: “what the heck am I actually supposed to do with this?”

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to write a few blog posts detailing what I’ve learned so far about working with sourdough and baking bread. I’m not an expert, just a fellow amateur with a bit of a perfectionist streak. Hopefully this is all useful…

Let’s start by talking about what a sourdough culture is and how to care for it.

A sourdough culture is made up of four things: flour, water, yeast and bacteria. As mentioned one of my previous blog posts:

…[T]he basic idea is that you have this jar of flour and water in which both yeast and a particular bacteria happily live in. Those guests gradually eat the flour and turn it into carbon dioxide, alcohol (often called “hooch”), a tangy acid (hence the name “sourdough”) and a bunch of other complex things.

In other words, you’ve got an advanced microbiology experiment, right on your kitchen counter, without any of the usual pesky biocontainment protocols. (Ever see the old Andromeda Strain movie? “We haven’t done a thing about the G.I. tract yet.”)

Yeast farts! (aka Carbon Dioxide)

Left alone, the culture will produce so much acid, alcohol and carbon dioxide that the whole process will grind to a halt and the culture will die. (You know the old adage about not pooping where you eat?) As the proud owner of a sourdough culture, your goal is to keep the thing alive and adequately happy until you’re ready to take advantage of it’s incredible transformative powers. By feeding your culture regularly and taking away some of it for baking, you can easily control the accumulation of these by-products.

There are also a few other variables you have in your control, for example, temperature. Your culture is most active at a temperature just above room temperature; as such, the warmer the room, the more often you’ll need to feed it. Putting your culture into the fridge is an effective way to slow it down, if you know you can’t tend it consistently, but don’t store your culture in an air-tight container; it can suffocate on the carbon dioxide it’s creating.

Two jars of sourdough culture

How often and how much you feed your starter culture is a matter of personal preference, but be mindful that if you feed it big meals of flour and water regularly, you’re going to have a lot of very happy starter. The less often you feed it, the more time there is for acids and alcohols to build up, which add flavour but reduce the activity. In terms of overall amounts, I feed mine equal volumes of water and flour once a day–usually about a quarter cup of each, but go higher if I know I’m giving some to others, or I’m going to bake a bunch of bread.

Because different flours can weigh different amounts of the same volume, your culture may be more or less runny than mine. If you see a recipe that mentions “baker’s percentages” or “percent hydration”, the numbers are based off the weight of flour; a starter with 100% hydration has equal weights (not equal volumes) of water and flour. My current starter culture sits at about 140% hydration, but with that much water the culture eats through its food pretty quickly… if you’re not planning on baking every second or third day like I am, I’d suggest reducing the amount of water you put in and go for a less wet culture.

How will you know if something’s not right with your culture? If your culture smells yeasty and a little like sourdough, and seems frothy and like it’s grown a little a few hours after feeding it, you’ve got a healthy culture. If it smells really sour, or like it’s just been on a Just-Hit-Legal-Drinking-Age-style bender, it likely needs to be fed; you need to use and/or dilute it with fresh flour and water right away. If you see mold on your starter, you can safely assume your culture is dead. Way to go, murderer! (The particular yeast and bacteria that co-exist in your healthy culture are remarkably good at keeping bad bacteria and molds from growing, so any sign of them means it’s time to dispose of your culture.)

If you leave your culture untended for a few days, a greyish liquid might form at the top of your culture. That’s just hooch (alcohol) and you can either spoon it out or mix it in; the alcohol will cook out when you’re baking and help give your bread a more interesting flavour, but too much of it can kill your culture.

If you know that you won’t be able to give your culture any attention for awhile, you might want to consider long-term storage. One of the best ways to do this is to freeze it. First, take some of your culture and smear it on a piece of wax paper. Once it’s completely dry, crumble the culture into powder and put it into a freezer bag, remove the air and put it into the freezer. The yeast goes dormant when it’s dry; when you’re ready to starting playing again, add the powder to a mixture of flour and water and start feeding it regularly again. It might take a week or two for the culture to fully come back to life, but when it smells and acts right, you know it’s ready for use.

When you use it for your first loaf of bread, you’re only going to use a portion of your starter–the rest will stay behind and continue to grow, which is why a sourdough starter culture is sometimes called a “mother culture”.

Of course, no matter how carefully you try to limit the amount of flour/water you’re adding, it doesn’t take long for you to end up with more starter than you can handle. Some of it might have to go down the drain, but sourdough starter can be used in a wide variety of recipes besides bread. For example, we make a quick pizza dough with it all the time. You can also use it for pancakes, waffles, flatbreads and more

Homemade pizza on a sourdough crust. Yum!

Hopefully, I’ve demystified sourdough for you a little bit and now you’re excited to get started. So what’s next? The easiest way to start with sourdough is to find someone who’ll share their healthy culture with you; you only need a couple tablespoons-worth to add to a flour and water mix to get things doing. It is possible to cultivate/capture the necessary yeast and bacteria to make your own from-scratch culture, but since it might not work out as hoped, it’s probably not a good way to be introduced to sourdough. As I mentioned at the start of this (long) post, I’d be thrilled to share my starter with you to experiment with. Just ask.

My next blog post will be about making a basic bread. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about your experiences with sourdough, if you have any. I’d also love any questions or tips you might have…

Good morning and Happy Canada Day!

After almost two weeks in cramped quarters, mixed weather and truly spectacular scenery, it’s time for me to leave Otto and Boris so that I can continue on to Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands) for my own personal adventure.

This has been a once-in-a-lifetime trip; it’s hard to imagine that Otto has been doing it yearly for the last forty-two years. There have been a ton of changes in the industry since Otto began and it gets harder and harder every year to make ends meet. There’s increasing competition for the fish out there, the costs of running a boat continue to go up (especially fuel) and there’s more and more pressure from fish farms up and down the coast. I’ve had a chance to see, first-hand, how innovative models like our Community Supported Fishery keep fishing a viable profession in the face of an increasingly corporate, centralized and industrial fishing industry.

In addition to this blog, I’ve started uploading pictures taken during the trip to my Flickr account; when I’m back from my adventures in Haida Gwaii I’ll make sure they’ve all got captions, so you know what you’re looking at.

With the first fishing of the season under the belt, I’m sure it’s going to be a good season for Otto, Terry and Rod on the North Coast. Word came down yesterday that the Nass opening will happen next Monday for two days, again; hopefully it’ll be great fishing in fantastic weather. It’s time to wish Otto well and make my way to the ferry. Thanks so much for following along on our journey… it’s been a blast!

My writing for this blog isn’t actually finished, even if my journey with Otto has. I had the chance to do and see a few amazing things here in Prince Rupert that I hope to share with you as soon as I get back to Vancouver. One of the highlights was an incredible lesson by Opa Sushi in Prince Rupert on how to cut sashimi and make other Japanese dishes from a whole sockeye salmon. Once I edit down the 90 minutes of video I recorded, I’ll be sure to post it on the blog. Also, I’ve been collecting some amazing salmon recipes along the way that I’ll also be posting when I return. Stay tuned…

After a restful night tied up in Port Edward, we went over to the packers’ dock to unload the salmon, get it in bins and get it on the truck heading down to Vancouver.

For the bigger boats, there’s a machine I can only describe as a “fish vacuum” that sucks the fish out of their fish holds and sends it through a hose to the sorting/grading conveyor belt, where the different species (sockeye, pink, spring, etc.) are separated into separate larger fish totes (bins) by hand. These are big industrial operations, with forklifts and other industrial equipment constantly in action. Our small catch avoids most of this flurry of activity, however, since we’re only using this company to help get our catch down to Vancouver.

Instead, two barrels are lowered by crane to our boats (the tide is out, and there are big tides here, so we’re almost 30 feet below the dock) and filled by hand as Otto and Terry pull their salmon out of their fish holds, one at a time. As each barrel is filled, it’s hoisted up and poured into one of the large totes. There’s no worry about separate the different species because that can be done in Richmond when the sockeye and pinks are dressed–which is a fancy way of saying “gutted”.

Our catch almost filled two totes, which were then weighed, tagged and filled with ice slush before being loaded onto a truck. In about 24 hours, that truck will arrive in Richmond and be met by Sonia and Shaun, who’ll be scheduling a pick-up for members shortly thereafter.

Otto, Terry, Boris and I are now traveling back to Prince Rupert to buy groceries and wait for news on when the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) will be opening the Nass fishing grounds for another opening. Dock talk suggests that there’ll be another opening next Monday for the Nass and that the Skeena River fishery (just south of Prince Rupert) might have an opening not long after that. For now, though, we’ll travel to Rupert, and wait.

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During the trip, you can either check this blog for the latest entries, or you can go to this interactive map of all the blog posts related to this trip. You can also find photos from the trip on Flickr.

I’m not sure where to start, apart from the fact that today was even less productive than yesterday. A ton more boats left the fishing grounds early; we only caught a handful more fish ourselves and our fishing buddies Terry and Rod had similar experiences. So, it’s now mid-afternoon and we’re on our way back to Port Edward, where we’ll have to deliver our fish in the morning.

It’s been raining and windy since mid-morning and a misty fog has descended on the ocean around us, giving us only about a half-mile of visibility. Fortunately, we stay close enough to shore on this trip that it’s easy to see the landmarks necessary to keep us on track. (If the weather was worse, we could always use the radar on the boat, but that’s not a fun way to navigate and it doesn’t always see debris in the water.)

Fishermen like Otto are some of the last hunter-gatherers in our culture; they go into wild and wonderful places far off the beaten track to gather food and bring it back to us. It’s physically challenging work and you have to have a particular kind of personality to accept that you’re completely at the whims of the natural world, both above and below the waterline. If the weather and the fish don’t cooperate, a great day can turn into a lousy one quite quickly.

One of the upsides of leaving the grounds early is that we’ll be in Port Edward with enough time tonight for a shower and early evening; we also won’t have to get up extra early to ensure that we deliver our fish on time. We’ll tie up at a wharf that’s only five minutes from the drop-off point.

Terry has already transferred his catch to our boat, so he’s heading into Prince Rupert while Terry will be joining us in Port Edward.

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During the trip, you can either check this blog for the latest entries, or you can go to this interactive map of all the blog posts related to this trip. You can also find photos from the trip on Flickr.

Good morning from Sommerville Island, where we anchored again last night after our first day of fishing. Although yesterday started off glassy calm and sunny, by mid-day the wind started to pick up and the tide changed, making things a little rougher (as you saw in the “reeling in the net” video yesterday). Although we were allowed to fish until 10PM, we gave up about 7PM because the fish got sparse, making the bumpy weather not worth it. A relaxing evening in a quiet sheltered bay was just what was needed before giving it another shot this morning.

There’s about 80 fish in the hold now, mostly sockeye with a few pinks and a few springs (including a *big* 20lb one!); hopefully we can double that today. If we get good fishing today we’ll stay as late as we can, getting up extra early to get back to Port Edward tomorrow morning to get the fish on a truck to come down to Vancouver.

Although fishermen are often tight-lipped about their catch, it’s pretty clear that no one had a stellar day yesterday; a ton of people left the fishing grounds even earlier than we did and a few even headed back in the direction of Prince Rupert. There are rumours of some boats that only caught a handful of fish all day. That must be profoundly disheartening…

Time to get some coffee into this groggy body so that we can hit the ground running.

There’s fish out there, somewhere… hopefully Otto can find them.

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During the trip, you can either check this blog for the latest entries, or you can go to this interactive map of all the blog posts related to this trip. You can also find photos from the trip on Flickr.