whew!

Spent most of the weekend at Mother Earth News Fair, down at the state fairgrounds in Puyallup. Attended some cool workshops (and parts of some less-impressive ones), petted some very fluffy llamas, studied a variety of chicken breeds up close, and bought a pot of comfrey since I've had terrible luck getting it to start from seed (future me, if you're reading this: be less darwinian about starting new plants! it's okay to coddle them a little at the starting line) and a set of plug spawn for shiitakes. And just generally soaked in the weird all weekend. The fair brings out an interesting cross-section of people, including small farmers who are happy to have a market for their rare breeds of pigs, hippies who want to discuss their global herbalism tradition, historical reenactors demonstrating 19th-century crafts, libertarians who want government out of the liquor-tax business, and white people who are all about "primitive" survival skills. Very much a place where you need to take what works for you and ignore the rest.

So I feel really pleased and really lucky that the one book I came home with was Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation, because that was a pretty darn perfect match. Not only is the subject fascinating to me, but Katz's take on the fermented-food revival is refreshingly reasonable (we did have someone literally try to sell us a "miracle" soda at the fair)—and he interweaves the recipes themselves with enough background on where they developed, the group of DIY Radical Faerie communards with whom he lives, that the sense of shared experience and joy is contagious. I've read the whole thing cover to cover already.

Also I have a batch of plum vinegar started on top of the refrigerator now. Perfect timing to "recycle" a couple of plums that were getting a little too squishy to eat.

a quick book rec

Okay, two books, really.

All the books on modern homesteading, traditional skill preservation, raising food, etc., have their own spin, and like the techniques they outline, they're a very YMMV business. The ones that are really working for me? The Urban Homestead and its follow-up Making It, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen (find them online at Root Simple). The authors are very clear on the YMMV aspect and stress flexibility in their suggestions, and they offer a lot of practical project advice for growing food in limited space, making the most of your resources, decreasing your dependence on outside resources—and they make it sound like it'll be fun and an adventure, like you don't have to get everything perfect to succeed (which was an attitude that really put me off an otherwise-helpful garden book for my region recently). I keep wanting to recommend them to friends for one project or another—the potato-growing tower made of used tires, or the chapter on urban foraging, or the explanation of how to decipher esoteric beer recipes and not be intimidated by the snobs of the homebrew world.

If you get the same kind of mileage I do, basically, these books could take you places.