Growing Sourdough and Tilling the Soil

My sourdough experiment is turning out to be great fun.

I started a batch at the beginning of the week using 3/8 cup whole rye flour and 1/4 cup bottled spring water, and after the first couple of feedings it smelled absolutely terrible--spoiled rather than yeasty. It did look a bit fluffy and had small bubbles distributed throughout the dough, though.

I started a new batch with rye flour, but rather than throw the first batch away I halved it and fed it with whole wheat flour. By the third day it smelled and looked much more like I expected.

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Now my whole wheat starter is beautifully yeasty and bubbly. It's growing so quickly I'm having a bit of trouble keeping up with it. I made muffins out of it yesterday morning. They were quite good. The sourdough starter provided just enough acid to interact with the baking soda. That made a quick bread that was fluffy without added rising time.

Now I have two loaves of bread rising, and a sponge proofing to make cookies and/or another batch of muffins.

As I fine-tune the recipes I'll be posting some of them on Restricted Gourmet. For now I'm just doing lots of experimenting as I'm learning to work with this new medium. So far I'm liking it a lot.

My second batch of rye starter went through the stinky fast-growing stage too. It didn't smell as bad the first day, perhaps because I kept it warmer at the beginning (I put it in the oven with just the light turned on), but it still wasn't a proper sourdough at first.

Today it settled down and didn't seem very active. Unless I accidentally got it too warm and killed the good bugs, I expect it to be moving into the active more yeasty stage tomorrow. If that's the case I'll try baking some bread with the light rye flour I bought this week.

I read that sometimes when a starter seems to take off very quickly but smells bad, it's having an initial growth of organisms besides the desirable yeasts and lactobacillus. As you continue feeding it, the desirable organisms create enough acid to kill off the bad bacteria and the starter becomes usable in a few days. That seems to be what happened with mine.

Yesterday I bought enough green douglas fir to build one raised bed 6 feet long and 4 feet wide for the garden. The fir won't last as long as treated or hard wood, but it's a fraction of the price, it won't put chemicals into my garden and it will hold for a few years.

I can always reinforce the box with cedar later. Since my garden spot doesn't get much sun, I don't want to invest too much in building raised beds and buying topsoil before I know whether anything will actually grow there or not.

So far I have one layer of the 2" x 6" boards screwed together to make a box. I bought two 2" x 6" x 12' boards and two 2" x 6" x 8' boards and cut each board in half with a handsaw. With two boards per side, the planting box will be 12" deep. I cut 2" x 2" stakes angled at one end to drive into the ground inside the corners. When attached to the sides of the box, they should help stabilize the sides.

This afternoon after church, the kids and I went out in the sunshine and I turned up the ground with a shovel and then used a claw-type tool to till the soil. Tomorrow I'll rake the weeds and rocks out to make the soil smooth and fine for planting.

I tilled an area a little larger than 4' x 6' today. Tomorrow I hope to extend it so the ground is worked up in an area about 7' x 12'. I'll dig out the area for my raised bed a few feet away, finish building the frame, and fill it with a mixture of peat moss, compost and the soil I dug out for the play structure base.

It will be interesting to see whether there's much difference in ease of care, growth and yield between the flat tilled soil and the raised bed. I also plan to plant some vegetables that really need more sun in some large flowerpots on the porch, and will plant a few things in my parents' much sunnier garden also. Between all the different options, we should get enough usable produce for the summer, I think.

With all my projects this week, the only high-tech modern equipment I used was a battery-powered drill and the oven. Growing my own sourdough with no commercial yeast, cutting wood with a hand saw, and tilling my garden with hand tools gave me a sense of timelessness and wonder.

Somehow, I feel so connected across time and distance with all the generations and cultures around the world who have done things by hand in almost the same ways I am doing them now. It's all so simple, yet so miraculous.