Topic: Natural wines and other ferments

[Bamawing]

It sounds delicious, Anthro...

I wish I had some shmooo seeds. I feel actually guilty about the state of my garden boxes on the terrace... most Germans love growing things, and they have beautiful gardens. I have two dead bushes and some ivy that starts dying every time I try to water it.

I am allergic to ivy, but since it's the only green thing in my boxes, so far I've left it alone.

[anthropositor]

I am still learning about the climatic conditions required for Shmooo.  I planted extremely early in Spring in the hopes of getting a crop to go to seed, then harvest, and plant another crop in time for it also to go to seed.  It didn't happen that way.  The first crop would not go to seed, even after three or four months.  So I planted more.  Now, all crops are going to seed at the same time.  The oldest are producing larger heavier seed stalks by far.  Oddly, the rabbits want the leafy material far more than the seed stalks.  Of course, they still have not really matured.  That is to say, many of the flowers are still on the stalks.  There is a slight bitterness to them that is certainly not present in mature harvested seed that has been well threshed.  It may be a few more weeks before I know more about that.

Last year I did not harvest the seed.  I just let it fall with the plants for a natural planting.  That does not appear to work here.  It may be that a few hard freezes pretty much kills the seed.  We are perhaps only a week to a month from a good hard freeze here now, at which time I will have several days of unrelenting work, harvesting both seed and leafy material.  Today, I harvested a lot of unripe seed stalks for further experimentation.  Then I tore up half the plants I had clipped and threw them to the rabbits.

I know I can eat a half pound of the leafy material day after day without ill effects.  (I should note here that I recently described an incident which was pretty alarming, involving dizziness and falling down and regurgitation).  While I am still speculating what caused that, it certainly wasn't the Shmooo.  I am not doing loading experiments with it now, and haven't been for some months.  Lately, I have been eating only a few leaves to a few dozen on any given day.  I have even gone a week or so without any.

Now, since that rather dramatic incident, I have been eating some of the unripe seed stalks, but very tentatively.  I'm not sure exactly where I put that report.  Maybe over on the fighting for the property thread.  I'm not going to go look for it because my laptop is acting skittish and I don't want to lose what I have written.  But it must be in the last half dozen things in my posts.  I'm still evaluating what that was all about.  My guess is that it has more to do with the stresses of the battle for my house and acreage, which has been going for thirteen months, and could easily go for another year.  Such things do take their toll.

[anthropositor]

With the world-wide Depression, my interest in rabbits has sharpened a lot.  So much that it needs its' own thread here in nutrition.  So look for it soon.

[anthropositor]

Along with all the Shmooo the rabbits have been eating is a considerable amount of wine and Hard cider that they have been drinking.  It is hard to measure exactly how much they drink and how much leaks from their drink bottles.  But they are drinking more wine and cider than water, and ultimately I may need to cut back on the wine and cider.  Two considerations come to mind.  First, the liver of that New Year's rabbit seemed to me to be considerably larger than I had ever seen before.  Second, I expect that the drinking may have some impact on the viability of potential offspring.  That remains to be seen.  I haven't yet actively been trying to breed them.

I have heard no reports of the cattle used for Kobe beef having difficulty bearing young.  But it could well be that the cattle grown for meat are raised with beer, and the cattle used for breeding purposes are not.  I have determined that rabbits in cool weather do not consume water with any frequency even when it is continuously available to them, when they are fed fresh grasses, clover and weeds.

Not all of the wine and the cider come out tasting ideal to me.  I am using wild airborne yeasts for the fermentation.  As a result, each bottle comes out subtly different.  The batches which strike me as not being perfect tasting for me go to the rabbits.  The principle is, of course, no waste.  My less favored flavors have a use.

[anthropositor]

My wife and I have been refugees for about 2 1/2 months now, due to perjury and chicanery during the trial.  My lawyer did none of the key things we had in the works, for reasons that are quite inexplicable to me.  There was some "in chambers" action as well that I was not privy to.  Since the villainy cannot be accurately sorted at this time, I won't be writing further about it on the other thread.  I still make some wine, since it is economical, and since I have generated some new notions.  It turns out that it is possible to ferment wines without even the wild yeasts that I have been using.  All one needs are the appropriate enzymes produced by those yeasts.  Go figure.