Poor radishes . . .

Well, I flubbed it again. Ok, lesson learned. Refusing to thin your radishes because you are selfish will get you ZERO radishes! If you are me, repeat that until it starts to sink in.
My radishes were not developing properly, the leaves would have been edible if they weren't so bug-eaten, and the two radishes that looked like they were starting to bolt had roots that were both underdeveloped and woody at the same time! I had to pull them all up and throw them away. Maybe next year I will try again with radishes. But for now, I am sick of them. Plants I still have: sweet potato (the leaves are bug-eaten but it keeps making new leaves and is pretty and viny in a 5-gallon bucket hanging from a plant hanger) and chammomille (lots of green, no flowers yet, but it's not even July so there is still plenty of time for that to happen) and a secret.
Do you want to know what the secret is? Okay, I will tell you. I have a tomato seedling outside (two, actually). I have never had any success with starting seeds inside, but these tomatoes are doing better outside in the summer than any of my indoor stuff ever did! I hope the growing season is long enough for the plant to mature, but if not I will try again next year!

Mint Soda Experiment

A few days ago (and I was playing with the idea in my head long before) I decided to make a lacto-fermented mint tea drink. No kefir, no kombucha, just tweaked the classic ginger ale recipe (the one on Instructables using honey instead of sugar) to omit the ginger and replace the water with mint tea. And the whey came from raw milk, curdled with lemon juice and strained. (By the way, the "cheese" from this process tastes like lemon-flavored yogurt. Good with fruit.) And I brewed in in a mason jar. Now I'll be honest with you - It isn't fizzy. But it is nice and tart. Oh, another thing. You can kinda taste the salt. But the ginger ale has that too, and I LOVE it. If you can't get raw milk, strain commercial yogurt with live cultures. The way you strain it is: put a coffee filter inside a strainer and put it in a bowl. Pour the yogurt or curdled milk through the coffee filter and leave it in the fridge for a few hours or overnight. You get "cheese"in the filter and whey in the bowl.
Now I am wondering how this would taste with chammomille tea. Or if I could make it fizzy by using something a little more "live" than just raw milk. Well, I have a yogurt experiment sitting in the sun outside. And in a few months my ginger should be ready to harvest, so I can make ginger ale. Good stuff. Love ta hear about your cooking experiments!

Kitten Wars!

If you are anything like my little sister (go ga-ga over anything cute, especially kittens) you will love kitten wars! It is a website where there are two cat pictures and you vote on which one is cuter. You do this until you're bored. There seems to be an endless supply of matches.
http://kittenwars.com

Random little things . . .

I haven't posted in a long time! I turned 16 over a month ago and I haven't posted since then. I had a chocolate chip cookie cake and my parents made the candles say 10000 (16 in binary!) which was so cool. And I got a huge bag of Lincoln wool to spin. It was from a sheep named Mary Todd. I made a PVC niddy-noddy and dyed some yarn red with Kool-Aid. Now I am trying to knit a simple lace shawl but keep messing up. Ugh!
A couple days ago I had a sleep-deprived EEG and an MRI. Luckily I fell asleep for the part of the MRI that scared me. I woke up and didn't have a needle in my arm anymore. Lucky me :) But I had to stay up all night so the tests had better SHOW something! Please pray for me about that.
We've had a lot of heavy rain that killed my lettuce and severely damaged my radishes, but I planted new radishes, sweet potatoes and chamomille, and now when it's about to rain I cover the radishes and chamomille with garbage bags so they don't get waterlogged or uprooted. I wonder if I can try again with the lettuce in the fall, since it a cool-season crop?

The Raw Milk Debate Intensifies

As I hear about how Wisconsin is trying to legalize raw milk, the other side seems to be fighting back tooth and nail. They launched a new anti-raw-milk website, which the WAPF advises not to look at. What I want to know is, if raw milk is already so hard to come by because pasteurized milk is the social norm, what does the factory-farm-loving government have to fear? I mean, think about it. The government is also very pro-evolution, or at least it seems that way. So, then, whatever happened to survival of the fittest? If raw milk kills all the 'idiots' who drink it, then won't the 'sensible' pasteurized-milk-drinkers proliferate, leaving all the raw-milk-drinkers dead and gone? But they don't seem to think that way, do they? Which, in my opinion, shows much inconsistency on their part. People can be SO illogical.
Unless, that is, they have something to hide. Like they're in cahoots with ConAgra, maybe, and are only pertending to care about our health. If that is so, then I have to hand it to them. They are very deceptive and almost had us convinced. Maybe we are just a little too smart for them. Maybe it's the raw milk . . . just kidding?

Adventures in spining: cotton balls!

So I figured out some tips for spinning cotton and spun some that came from a vitamin bottle. Now I bought two 200-pc bags of cotton balls for $4.24 at Walgreens. Two cotton balls makes this much yarn!

How to make a free item

I am fascinated by the concept of transforming free or very cheap materials into usable items. With this I made a dish scrubby, crocheted from 2-ply handspun cotton (it came with a bottle of vitamins) and 'yarn' made of plastic mesh bags. I don't know how effective this tiny scrubby will turn out to be, but if it's a total flub, who cares? The materials were free, and the work was enjoyable.