Bread

I think I'm going to learn how to make bread.

Bread seems to be one of those technologies that are important because they changed the world, and at least these days, bread is delicious.

I thought I might start by making some from scratch.

To do that I thought I might grow some wheat. But then I though, "I know. I'll just buy some wheat!".

The plan is already coming off the rails.

Either way, there's going to be some bread.  I love the stuff, and eat it all the time, but don't really know anything about it. I even have a bread maker that makes perfect bread every time. It's a bit like a baker in that respect, but it also keeps it's secrets.

I've made a few attempts over the years, and made some damper as a kid. Damper is made by putting an Australian who either worked on the land 50 years ago, or more often than not someone going camping, and mixing said Australian with some flour, baking soda, and water. You separate the Australian from the dough, and place the dough in the coals of a camp fire then cover it all with ash and bits of grit until it sounds hollow when you tap it.

That means it's as ready as it ever will be, and will be a bit like bread. Basically it's a useful thing to fill all the space in your stomach when it really should be filled with yummy stuff.

In reality damper can actually taste quite nice, but the chances of cooking it just right are pretty slim if the damper I've tasted are anything to go by. Sometimes a small section that isn't either raw, or burnt can give a hint of the potential.

I seem to recall that adding a bit of salt, sugar, and some sultanas helped a bit when we went camping as kids.

Dampers currently sold in restaurants and bakeries in Australia are probably faked a little to make them a little better tasting, and a little lighter.

But it's yeast that in my opinion is one of the great technologies of the world, and the one I intend to explore and get to know a bit better.



120 Things in 20 years - I'm out of bread.

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Aquaponics - Suckfish

I found my cold water algae eating suckfish that I hadn't seen in a while*.

They are tiny and like to hide a lot, but they seem to be doing ok, and there are definitely signs the sump is getting a bit cleaner.

They look like this...

Sorry about the photo quality. My camera thinks I want really sharp images of the surface of the water, so to take a photo I have to fake it a little.

The worm looking thing is a millipede. I choose to use unknown lengthed millipedes for scale when taking pictures of algae eating fish.

The real reason I took this pic, is because it's so infrequently that I see one, and even more infrequently that I see both together.

It's nice to know that I still have two, and it's not just one, pretending to be two.



*120 Things in 20 years world first. To the best of my knowledge, nobody in the world has ever written that before. Even google agrees 

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Aquaponics - Growing sweet potato in water

The good thing about growing things like potatoes in aquaponics is they grow like crazy.

The problem with growing things like potatoes in aquaponics is they like to make babies in your plumbing, and block the water flow.

Following the seemingly happy tomato in a bucket I seem to have created, I figured I give something else a try along the same lines.

I thought I'd suspend a sweet potato over the fish tank and see what happened.

It looks like this...

If you look carefully, you can just make out the roots entering the water diagonally back from the section of sweet potato, and meeting the water just at the waterline of the IBC.

And that's obviously a leaf starting to grow at least it has a chance.





If it grows properly I'll rig a better hanging system for it, but I'm not even sure what time of year they should be planted, so there is a fair chance this wont work. At least the first time.

I tested the fish to see if they would attack the roots and/or  potatoes, and other than for the first few hours, they seemed content to share their world with the plants.

I originally added a sweet potato that had gone crazy with roots, and I suspect the fish simply thought they were worms, but soon gave up when they ended up tasting funny, not behaving sufficiently worm-like, or whatever else fish decide are important traits of their food.

If it works, the lid will be closed to keep the light out, and the plant will be encouraged to grow through a hole in the lid or something. I'll work it out. The result will be some interesting cover for the fish, extra surface area for the nitrifying bacteria to live on, and very visible sweet potatoes that I can watch grow. I should also be able to keep them from getting into the plumbing just because I'll be able to cut them back if it looks like they are getting too close.

One additional advantage will be that I will be able to harvest them one at a time without pulling the plant and disturbing all the small ones before they are ready to be harvested.

But it's early days.



120 Things in 20 years - Aquaponics - Growing sweet potato in water - Maybe.

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Aquaponics - Constant supply

Diseases are getting clever.

Mine makes me throw up my medicine, rendering the windows and the medication  becomes ineffective*.

I don't really have a big enough area of grow bed to be very disciplined about maintaining a constant supply of things like lettuce. To do so really requires leaving a bit of space for the seeds I should be adding next week, but I find myself wondering how carrots might do in my system, and use all the reserved real estate to find out.

It's not always carrots. I don't suffer from whatever habitually planting carrots in any free garden space might be called, although I'm guessing someone does, and I'm guessing it is a condition.

The Internet, after all, is a very big place.

But, if I ever found some self discipline, or more grow bed real estate, I'd more thoroughly deploy my system for making sure you plant stuff when you should.

And its this...

If you get little jars with each kind of seed you grow on an ongoing basis, you can label the jars with the days of the month you plant on to ensure a constant supply. In my case, Cos lettuce needs to be planted every 5 days, so my jar would be labelled 1 - 5 - 10 - 15 - 20 - 25. And my baby spinach, 1 - 10 - 20, chives  1 - 15 for every two weeks, and basil has a 1 for once a month.

The result, is all you need to know is the date, and you know what to plant. If you had enough jars that keeping track of such things became necessary, you could also add how many seeds to plant.

Remembering to plant stuff was never really the problem. The main problem was remembering when I planted stuff last. This way you just look at the date and know.

Unless you are lazy.



120 Things in 20 years has taught me that in spite of my seed management system enabling my ongoing dedication to laziness, I still have to remember what season it is and pull out the suitable jars from long term storage. Who would have thought knowing what season it was might be useful.


*I think I just found a linguistic need for a quantum word requiring that rather than being fixed, it's location and or existence is dependant on the observer.

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Photography - Time lapse caterpillars

My old phone's camera didn't quite behave as it should have.

Each time it went on to the charge cycle it would shut down the camera.

I did manage to get some photos, although I haven't yet explored ways to knit the individual photo's into a video stream.


I had plans of rigging the phone to the back of the boat for my epic Murray River adventure, and adding as large a memory card as I could.

That way I hoped to be able to catch the entire journey, how ever long it might turn out to be.



I think I'll still want to do something along those lines, but now I might have to buy a purpose built device to achieve the same thing.

It's a shame my little test run didn't work, because in the end the caterpillars started to do the transition thing.

It's not very clear because they moved too close to the lens, but they have started to lay down silk to make somewhere to live while they become whatever it is they are going to become.



















120 Things in 20 years - Making the sacrifice of wearing dirty clothes, so that the reader might enjoy failed, but shake free, caterpillar time lapse photography, foolishly set up on top of the washing machine.

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Aquaponics - Salts

Here's something you don't see every day.

Unless you live at my house.

Adelaide water is internationally famous for being not very wet. In fact it's so dry we tend to convert it into beer and wine, where dryness can be considered an advantage.

It's full of salt and smells a bit like swimming pool water until you filter it through a brewery or vineyard because to make it slightly safer, they (in this case the "they" that is the water authority) add a generous helping of pleasant smelling chemicals.

Yum!

Interestingly when you distil or evaporate something, you only take the volatile chemicals up in the evaporation, and you leave behind the salts.

These are salt crystals growing on the clay ball media. They grow on the very top of only the top-most clay balls in the grow bed, and only when conditions are right.

I don't know what the right conditions are, but it's a safe thing to report, because crystals cant grow when conditions are wrong.

I'm going to add that to my short list of things you can say and not be wrong.

They taste of things carbonate, with a hint of things from my school science lab. Fairly neutral in flavour with nothing standing out that I can identify.





120 Things in 20 years, where we learn that, like store bought strawberries, spontaneously appearing chemicals in the form of aquaponics salts, taste less interesting than they look.

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Photography - Time lapse

Ages ago, the nice young lady we know who swapped her iPhone for my home made burger, gave me her old phone. She didn't need it any more because she had just signed up for the iPhone.

Today I discovered a very cool function on the old phone. It turns out you can set it to take six photos with however long a pause you desire between each pic. It says that if you hold the button down it will keep taking photos until the memory runs out.

I plugged it into the charger so it wouldn't run out of power, stuck a 4gig memory card in, set it to take photos every 5 minutes for a few days, and then thought about how tired I'd get holding down the button.

The result was a cable-tie, and a toothpick, to jury-rig a finger.

Now I have to wait 35 minutes to see if it's still taking photos after the first 6 that happen automatically. I wish the people who went to all the trouble of making such a cool function would have considered how much better having a "run forever" option might have been without the user having to invent a fake finger.

Nobody can hold a camera still for more than a 30th of a second. Never mind 7 days.


So for a subject, I thought I'd drop two big fat caterpillars, and a capsicum leaf into a jar, and see if I can catch them turning into whatever it is they turn into.

If all goes well with this test, I'll need to figure out a way to knit the images together into a movie.

When that works, I have bigger and better plans, but for now...I wait.





All the fun of waiting for live, time lapse photography, here at 120 things in 20 years

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