Category: photo

[Gardening] A Carrot and a Potato [PHOTO]

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The carrot was discovered in a dismantled tomato or watermelon box. It had grown surprisingly well despite a shadowed and low-maintenance position.

The potato was something I bought from a store. It never sprouted. Lesson learned: do not buy potatoes for seeding THAT ARE BRUSHED BALD. If it has loose peelings left, it is probably not brushed too hard and could sprout. Just remember that potatoes without tons of sunlight / lighting AND strong fertilizing start to wither wither very soon afterwards. IOW, it needs a GREAT growing spot.

[Gardening] My Current House Garden [PHOTO]

 

I am going to downsize and remodel all this stuff. Tons of dead plants to take care of. I might replant some of them, though no guarantees. I have plenty of seeds for a fresh batch, so there is no real need to preserve anything. All in all, smaller is more fun to manage. I’ll say more than six boxes is about the limit. I have about 20. You cannot genuinely care about all of your children if you have too many of them. 🙂

Ultimate Guide to Making Free High-Quality Gardening Soil from Random Grass and Flowering Plants [Gardening] [Foraging] [PHOTO]

Easy & free soil creation recipe:

  1. Collect tons of grass and flowering plant matter into a cardboard box furnished by a lot of papers such as newspapers.
  2. Keep adding minuscule amounts of water into the plant waste pile to avoid complete dehydration.
  3. Just wait a couple months.
  4. Once the the bottom-most soil turns into a dark clay-type soil, dig it out and pile it on top of the less decomposed top-soil to greatly hasten its decomposing.

The main advantages:

  1. You can be sure that the soil is nutrient-rich by making it from such stuff i.e. grasses and flowering plants, especially dandelions and stinging nettles that specialize in sucking nutrients from the deep soil.
  2. As it is made purely from plant waste, it is all soil without any rocks or gravel that can hinder root development. E.g. carrots are especially sensitive to root restrictions caused by rocks and easily become malformed as a result.
  3. It is free and you can be sure that it is good stuff. For example, if you want to farm tomatoes and do not want to have iron-rich stinging nettle waste there, you can guarantee that arrangement. Also, the available plant waste quantities are nigh-limitless and you only need to collect the waste and let the omnipresent decomposers do their thing. All you need to do is to wait and add some water if the soil starts to get too dry or the time comes for you to bury the top-soil to decompose it. Absolutely no money investing required and everything you need can be picked up from the ground or from trash piles (the cardboard and the papers, also possible plastic bags for carrying the plant waste to the decomposing box).

Butchering Some “Winter” Cucumbers

These are the biggest non-growing cucumbers I found. They stopped developing at one point because my fertilizer water juice ran out of nitrogen and other stuff. The cucumber plant permanently drops the fruit out of the feeding chain if it cannot sustain growing them. So if you want big and fully developed fruit, get some water diluted grass fertilizer tea or better. All you need to do is to get some grass and other soft, dead, leafy plants and mince them good. Just do not source stinging nettle if you are growing tomatoes, they do not like the high iron concentration.

[Cooking] Ultimate Liver Bread-Drying Guide [PHOTO]

Recipe:

  1. Work the liver content into a ground-down mass. Use a blender  if you can — a couple of seconds on low intensity is enough.
  2. Make a batch of dry bread powder i.e. bread stuff minus water (the goal is to rely on the meat juices to speed up the dry-baking process). Ingredients:
  • two cups / 4 dl of wheat flour onto the bottom of the bowl (keep two more cupfuls in reserve for adding on top of the liver)
  • one or two teaspoonfuls of salt (to avoid an inedibly bland AKA cardboard-like bread taste, also: bactericidifies the bread and makes it bit more crystallized, hindering mold growth)
  • spices (marjoram and radish-anything are the best possible meat spices, tarragon AKA estragon and garlic are the second best, green pepper for safe peppering and crushed citrus basil leaves to flavor the bread)
  • optional: a teaspoonful of potato / maize flour to cut down the baking time by 30 to 50 % (makes the dough more dense, pushes the fluids to the surface, leading to faster vaporization AKA baking

3. Mix the dough powder and pour the minced liver contents over it. Mix it a bit by covering all wet spots with the powder, add an extra cup or two of wheat flour on top of the liver-moisturized dough and lightly mix it just enough the wet parts no longer stick to your fingers.

4. Place the semi-mixed liver-bread dough inside your sandwich grill / (plane-top) grilling machine. Do not over-stuff the grilling machine or it will not dry up inside, causing it to grow mold inside out.

5. Let the liver bread bake for at least 30 minutes, depending on the type and the power of the grill. It is ready when the bread does not bend and gets hard and feels like one solid, metal-like bar. Mold roots cannot pierce that and the dryness keeps bacteria from growing on it. It is more efficient and more preserving-friendly, batch-wise faster to bake many thin breads than one thick one. Minimizing the dough left under the crust layer is the key for masterful grill use.

6. Set the baked bread sheet / brick to dry in a well-aired position. Placing it on a wheat-flour-covered baking paper sheet is a decent idea. The mold will form on any surfaces that are blocked from releasing moisture and the proper drying/hardening process is prevented. Avoid hard surfaces and ones without moisture-sucking properties such as wood, plastic and metal. Covering with enough wheat flour can make even those surfaces plausible. Flours generally contain moisture very well and vastly improve the general preservation potential of food items. The final drying process can take a day or two, depending on how much water density the preserved item originally had.

Culinary dosage:

A pinch full (a couple spoonfuls at least, more if your stuff is very doughy i.e. whitish in color) of the bread brick and grind it down or dissolve with some water. Then mix it with your lunch bread dough or a meat stew / soup to prop up the flavor and the nutritional value.

  • The liver can have (can have lots of mold — this dry-breading method kills it and drowns out most of its flavor-presence. Common mold is not toxic, just bad-tasting. If nothing else works, add some oregano — that will drown any other flavor. The baking process eliminates most of the ill-tasting mold compounds, vastly improving the edibility.
  • Mold fungi does not rely on light or air for survival. Using an oven for this is extremely inefficient — it’s not wise to constantly heat up the air next to the food instead of the food directly like the grills do. The grill setting of ovens is not that good. Ovens take much more time and electricity to bake the food than contact-heating grills.
  • Preserve a lot of time. For every two ounces / a kg , you will be grilling for one or two hours. Reserve a ton of time and patience for the job. If you under-cook, mold will take over it from the inside
  • Why liver? Organs are a gold mine for rare nutrients. Most importantly choline, a vital nutrient and an extremely rare DNA preservative. It pretty much has trace amounts of most things you are ever going to need, besides C and some of the B water-soluble vitamins. Do not feast uncontrollably on the concentrated liver content, as it has so much vitamin A content that you risk having vitamin crystals or stones forming inside your fat tissues.
  • A couple spoonfuls of liver bread (less than 50 grams) is often enough to nutritionally spike a full-course meal. The extra stuff will most likely not even benefit you as the body regulation only accepts a certain maximum amount of a specific non-energy-source nutrient (e.g. the blood-cell-vital B12 vitamin) per two hours or so. If you are a body builder and need to take in a lot of stuff to keep getting bigger, you can refuel every couple of hours. Small meals are better anyway to avoid the annoying anabolism symptoms such as drowsiness and sluggishness.
  • You can soften the baked-hard bread bricks later (they sometimes get stone-hard after a couple of days) by cutting of a piece and dunking it into water for a couple of minutes. You can dry the excessive water again by adding some wheat flour.
  • If you cannot consume wheat, you can use the wheat substitutes such as spelt aka dinkel / hulled wheat and buckwheat. They are not as sweet as bread / common wheat. You can always add some sugar. The role of the wheat in the mixture is to stiffen up the dough, making it very challenging  for mold fungi to infest if properly baked dry.
  • My grill is George Foreman Fat-Reducing Grill (GF1884056), made for grilling meats and greens. A flatbread is the only kind of bread you can make with it. Any thick breads (quarter-inch / 0.5 cm or more) will be left raw in the middle. Unlike sandwich grills made for toasting bread that you can stuff almost full without under-baking issues
  • You can tell the amount of liver content by how black the bread is. Low-liver content bread is sheet-white and the high one is all grey with black spots. Cooked liver is black.

[Gardening] Butchering a Tomato [PHOTO]

 

It is a two-by-two-inch / 5×5 cm undergrown tomato. It is a lopsided and grown in a partial shadow. It has a lot of connective tissue and surprisingly few seeds. The yellowish part has a slightly more fresh and less stinging taste, so eat them as soon as they start turn red if you like minimally demanding tomato taste. Otherwise, it is the same generic tomato smell /taste you can get from smelling the leaves of any tomato plant.

In short, self-grown tomatoes taste the exact same as store-bought ones. Do not waste your money and time on neither “extra fresh/natural tomatoes” or self-growing them. It took six months to produce that one tomato. Guess how many hundred other tomato plants I have that have produced none. Yeah, many. Not worth it, sugarplum.

There is not enough depth in the tomato aroma to create any kind of taste variety. That is also why is works so well as vinegar ketchup ingredient — it is so watery bland itself that it highlights the taste of the vastly-more health-beneficial vinegar.

The tomato legacy will go on as I have a couple of large plant boxes to grow this stuff in. It turns out, you can always count on the green beans and the watermelons to die for no reason. The original cultivar/variety was probably Marmande, though the next generation will be all mine — developmentally challenged and F’d up to the Moon. It shall be known as “Deranged 1.” […Just look at this list {Rutgers NJAES, opens a new tab} and you’ll get it.]

[Gardening] Ripening Tomato #2 [PHOTO]

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I look up the best time to harvest the fruit and the answer is “as soon as it starts to change color” i.e. as soon as it reaches/passes its greenest point. In short, it is a way beyond ripe already, it simply is not expiring yet.

I am going to pick it pronto and take more pictures of the cross-cut once the green disappears (I want the slightly-aged look). As you should not trust random people, here is a quote I am basing this around:

“Tomatoes are gassy — I mean they emit a gas. Ethylene gas is produced by fully formed mature green tomatoes. Inside the mature green tomato, two growth hormones change and cause the production of the gas, which in turn ages the cells of the fruit, resulting in softening and loss of the green color, turning into a red shade. The ethylene increases the carotenoids (red and yellow colors) and decreases the chlorophyll (green color).

Because of this process, tomatoes are one of the only vegetables, I mean fruit, which can be picked before it is completely ripened. Harvest time for tomatoes should ideally occur when the fruit is a mature green and then allowed to ripen off the vine. This prevents splitting or bruising and allows for a measure of control over the ripening process.”

(Source: https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/vegetables/tomato/harvest-time-for-tomatoes.htm , even more info there if interested e.g. about how exactly to pick the fruit without turning it into a disorganized pile of fruit meat)

[Gardening] Ripening Tomato #1 [PHOTO]

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[A green beefsteak-shaped tomato with a sudden orange coloring on one side of it.]

It is ripening i.e. it has stopped growing in size. The ripening is the last and the fastest phase of a fruiting process. That is when the rotting-hastening sugars, and seeds form.

Usually, if you definitely want full seeds and/or you want the fruit to have maximum flavor, it is recommended (by me, not the consensus) to let the fruit age a bit. Not too long or it will be all soft mush i.e. half-ketchup already. Maybe pick it a day or two after it reaches peak redness. Please not that by then, it has already softened significantly.

If you want a crunchy ‘mato, pick it a day BEFORE it is ripe. Either way, the fresh consumption window is within mere days of ripening. That is why most of tomato production goes straight for manufacturing non-spoiling vinegar ketchup.

Those flowers in the background are dried up cucumber flowers. I like growing things wild, entangled and mixed up.

The cultivar AKA variety is most likely Marmande. It mostly affects the shape of the fruit, nothing else. E.g. my Moneymaker and Marmande plants are identical.

This ripening happened in a relatively cool room with no significant indoors heating sources nearby. This means that the common claim about tomatoes being heat sensitive is not very well substantiated. Tomato is considered to be a particularly needy plant.

It is winter outside. Seasons do not matter with indoors gardening. So feel free to express yourself freely with plants all year.

[Gardening] Tomato Fruit [PHOTO]

Kuva0502.jpgThe mid-tier tomato plants are starting to flower while the big ones are fighting with cucumbers for the sunshine superiority and making tons of leaves. That grass tea fertilizer clearly made the difference. Plants, especially big ones, suck the nitrogen out of the ground very fast and adding it back to the ground enables a ton of otherwise restricted, new growth. Fertilizing should never be overlooked as a gardening aspect. Even tiny herbs benefit from the fresh flow of nutrition.

[Gardening] Night of the Living Dead Bean [PHOTO]

Kuva0501.jpgThree (3) main points of observation:

  1. the green bottom part with live leaves,
  2. the stem mucus buildup at the end of the green part, and
  3. the absolutely brown-dead top of the plant.

The stem was cracked early on in this plant’s life cycle, though it still operates as nothing happened, creating the nutritive fluids that no one is going to utilize before the whole planet is dead and decomposing. This is a decent analogue for how any amount of resourcefulness and durability is wasted if the grand picture is lost. This is a grotesque piece of live existence.

[Gardening] Flowering Fertilized Tomatoes [Photo]

Two of my oldest and biggest tomato vines are making flowers, mostly because of increased lighting, watering frequency and fertilization strength. BTW, you know that your fertilizing tea AKA water solution is GREAT for the plants when it smells terribl– of ammonia, you know, like piss aka urine. I am disappointed only about the fact that it is JUST ANOTHER F-ING YELLOW FLOWE–

Okay, I am calm now. Tons of extra lighting lamps and really smelly NH3 fertilizer as a watering solution is how you can perform miracles even indoor farming. So stock up with boxfuls of fertilizing-ready grass, plant and other organic waste for the winter while you still can. Buy  some lamps and compatible LED bulbs for them, too.  Just try to keep the plantation area small enough as ventilating that plant-emitted irrigation water gets vastly more difficult in winter, as you and some plants might not like cold air constantly brushing against them.  A couple square meters is always fine, bigger apartments might be able to handle a little more.