Second Childhood (Walking Mah Baby Back Ho-me)

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This morning I composed a semi-odd post to a woman who has just been diagnosed with liver cancer. She wrote that she had been drinking kefir, and asked for advice on whether she should continue to use it. I wrote back and asked her how long she had been using kefir. Her response was that she had been using it for a year. 

I suggested that maybe she had unconsciously known she had problems with her liver a year ago, and had begun to make kefir in order to deal with it. She wrote back to say she was completely unaware of any problems. She thought she was in good health when she started using kefir, and began to keep healthy.

I responded:

I am wrong a lot and bear deep shame. It's part of the deal I made for wanting to know everything. Who am I to suggest you might know yourself better than you think? The idiot I am is believes in magic instead of machines. '-)

Speech is mind. Mind is speech

Even for me that's an odd thing to write. I sorta know why I wrote it, but I only understood for the length of time it took me to write it. When I drifted back to contemplating why I write such words, I wasn't real happy. I had taken the chance of being utterly dismissed as a fool. Of course, if I were happy to be a fool (I am is), it would only make sense to carelessly invite a shunning via the bliss of ignorance. After all, liver cancer made sense to her by diagnosis, I drempt that maybe non-sense would gain a less plausible result. 

This is the second morning I've made a kefir smoothie with frozen chunks of mango, although this morning I added a few slices of frozen strawberries to boot. I also included two packets of Splenda just to satisfy my sweet tooth. I may only have one left, so why not indulge... eh?

Somehow, I got the idea to use all the kefir granules I have, not only to have a supply of fresh kefir, but also to revive all the grains of my mother culture by reactivating them in some fresh milk. Since I only needed to put one teaspoon of granules into that amount of fresh milk to turn it into kefir, putting a quarter of a cup of kefir grains guaranteed fast action.

My process was to put around a pint (two cups) of regular pasteurized, homogenized whole milk (as opposed to ultra-pasteurized) into a wide-mouthed, quart-sized canning jar. Then, I dumped all the milk kefir grains (MKG) I kept in my refrigerator into the milk, covered it with a paper towel held in place by a ring top to keep the bugs out, and to allow it to breathe, and waited. 

Milk kefir ferments much faster than sugary water kefir does. I'm not ready to explain why yet. I went down to the kitchen several times during the evening to check on how the fermentation was going. By the time I was ready to retire for the night there was a slight amount of separation of curd and whey at the bottom of the jar. The kefir mother culture had converted the milk to a creamy, but foamy kefir. It only took eight hours at best. "I love it when a plan comes together."

I strained out the kefir grains, returned the kefir itself to the quart jar I made it in, sealed it solid with a cap replacing the paper towel, then set it in the refrigerator to rest. This morning, it made a wonderful batch of mango/strawberry smoothies. I immediately poured a plastic glass half full to consume now, and I left the rest in the blender to enjoy a bit at a time throughout the day.

This is an example of the total decadence of enjoying my second childhood. What better way to spoil the baby I started out as than to serve artificially sweetened milk kefir smoothies to it all day long? It's a trick. The carrot and the stick. As an old man I'm walking the child that is me back into the oblivion it sprang from, and if it pulls one of it's Terrible Two's tantrums, I bribe it to play ball with sweets for the sweet and innocent. Why would I not? Nobody knows, but for we three. '-)

In the same time period, but subsequently, I used all my water kefir grains in the same way. I've been using three tablespoons of water kefir grains with three cups of sugar water due to my initial understanding of what's wot. Using just three tablespoons of water kefir grains in that amount of sugar water takes about twenty-four hours or better to ferment and consume all or most of the sugar. So, just after I put the milk kefir together I decided to use all my water kefir grains in the same vein to see if it might speed things up. 

My water kefir grains have regenerated themselves by half again as many nearly every time I make a new batch. As a result I have about a cup of water kefir grains now, even after I gave a quarter cup of them to my sister-in-law to propagate her own supply along with some milk kefir grains. Now, she knows more about all this than I do.

It's not rocket science to make happen, but dealing with the intuitive response gained by the ritual gets smaltzy. It might seem irreverent to point to the ground as if to indicate that I have a right to be here, but at times my amazement is such that I gotta do something to go along just to get along. 

Using only three tablespoons of water kefir grains leaves the rest of my cup of grains in a sugar solution in the refrigerator where the fermentation process happens much slower. I keep them in a baggie with a splash of milk to keep them vital. Spares. Since I am a neophyte I don't know how to properly store my spare grains. That is why I decided, like with the milk kefir grains, to use them all in order to keep them in good shape. 

The only way I know how to judge when to strain the water kefir grains out of the sugar water/molasses solution is to taste it while it's making on a fairly regular basis. When I taste what's making it should be less sweet over time. That is because the kefir grains are consuming the sugary base I dumped them in. 

If it still tastes sweet, then it ain't time yet. When it gets tart and has an acetic taste, it's ready for the grains to be strained out, and the drinking of it to begin. This batch, with an entire cup of grains instead of three tablespoons, is distinguished so far by a really rich taste. It won't be long now. By lunch time it'll be ready to go. Selah

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The Wilder The Fruit...

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Last week on Burt Wolf's travel show he stated that the bakers of San Francisco's famous sourdough bread claimed it (the sourdough bread) couldn't be baked to taste the same way it does in San Francisco anywhere else in the world, even if one were to use the exact same ingredients. 

This morning, on another of Burt's travel shows about Brussels and the Flemish language, he stated that the beer makers in Brussels claimed that their beer couldn't be reproduced anywhere in the world but Brussels. Both of these claims were based on the same reason, according to Burt (an award-winning chef). Wild yeast. 

Kefir makers, as the purported masters of fermentation, support the same claim. If you make kefir at your house, the mother cultures you use to create the desired product will choose from among the prevailing wild yeast at your house to incorporate into themselves to make a kefir that will keep you alive in order to continue to propagate itself. Since one's own gut bacteria is what your immune system is composed of, then the kefir adapts itself to what makes you strong. In essence, the health of your gut bacteria decides whether you live or die.

Some say that the kefir mother cultures, which reputedly and mythically came from the Caucasian  mountains. (This is a very strange part of the world):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasus_Mountains

There seems to be a progression shown on the Results Page of a Google Search on how the white people were generated somewhere in China, then they migrated to the Caucasus mountain regions, then to Russia where they were labeled "White Russians", and then to Scandanavia/Germania where they became Vikings and Norsemen (North men), then most recently and now currently, to the British Isles, and the Americas and Australia. The White Russians were the Czar crowd who were undone by the Slavs. Many of the pure White Russians migrated to, where else, Hong Kong. Back to China where they originated. 

That just don't say much to me about white people being called "Caucasians". They might as well be called Roms, a darker-complexioned set of tribal groups who perpetually seem to enjoy the nomadic, wandering life. The Roms (also "from" the Caucasus regions after the white boys) are apparently not Aramaic. Indeed, they were the victims of genocide by the Turks. But the Arabs have their own groups of nomadic tribes, Berbers, that like to keep moving. None of them seem to wanna be called Arabs, but labeled by their tribal callings that sport a somewhat different set of begats. 

What does any of this have to do with "wild yeast"? The same people be-co-me different people when they migrate to a region that supports a different combination of botanical or biological wild yeast. It's like the infamous smog around Los Angeles. They breathe the smog and get road rage against even friendly neighbors. It's the same principle espoused by many kefir makers, beer brewers, and bread-makers who use fermentation to achieve the end product in all the various regions of the world. Environmental exclusivity. 

They each legitimately claim their product possesses a uniqueness that cannot be duplicated in any other part of the world. They claim exclusivity over the purity of the product itself anywhere else it's made., and attempt to ruin any copycat pretenders. Like Italian olive oil or Dutch chocolates. Why would they not? That's business! Exclusivity can produce a higher margin of profit if the mojo is kept believable by insight and advertising spinners. 

With the question being: What does the "wild yeast" that supports the claim of exclusivity to fermented products also change the fermenters? This seems to be the claim of the proponents of kefir, and other fermented products. I've seen it openly suggested on the e-mail discussion lists. 

"Sure, I have extra kefir grain cultures. I'll send you what you need to start making your own kefir for the price of the postage." It's mythically a sin of some sort to make a profit. For good karma with your own culture you have to give the baby grains away. A tacit promise is the starter culture to make kefir with, will become what that starter culture needs to be sitting on your kitchen counter. Wild yeast are everywhere.

Read the disclaimer at the top of the page. I'm trying to capture drifting thoughts with wo-id-s (words, woe-to-the-id-s). Sometime I find myself scraping the bottom of the barrel in my terse considerations, but sometime it's worth it. I'm just looking for a viable descriptor. A word. A term. An expression that will stop the drifting long enough for me to save it against it's will for posterity. No blame. 

It's not true that what I'm really doing is attempting to save my own person for posterity. It's not. I swear it. It couldn't be that. I am is much too wonderful to stoop to that level of self promotion. Maybe. Only because I am is all things great and small. Some of it's ancestors thought the entire universe into Being. Now, the I am is in retrograde and the same universal spirits that created it attempt to resolve the "posterity" dilemma by dissembly.

Hydrogen bombs should do the trick.  A sustained series of cataclysmic explosions that will temporarily stop the eternal fermentation of the cosmic soup by destroying the cauldron which spills the water of life and puts out the fire that cooks the broth. POOF!

It doesn't matter. You know "matter", right? If you don't know what matter is, then what could matter about the rearrangement of matter via holocaust? If you do gnow what matters (quite naturally implying that I am does), then you also know that it cums and goes just like somebody you used to gnow. 

Matter comes and goes. All the ti-me. Why else would male ejaculations be called "eruptions". Some time like Old Faithful, and other times like a mudpot. Other times like Mount Vesuvius that is minimally enhancing to the continued procreation of life, but great sport. Aiiiiyeeee!

Things that are only intended by the serendipitous intervention of "wild yeast" aren't meant to last for eternity. In my opinion, they ain't built right for the long haul. Like human bodies. Not designed for immortality. Wild yeast as procreators or progenitors themselves are not dependable and will not "get your back" as you attempt to make the world a better place to spend eternity as an immortal. Besides, they probably mutate, and make it extremely difficult to trace one's family tree through the last species extinction plague. 

If I am is truly deluded and insane it's because I constantly conclude that there is more to me than any other can "see". That's why it's called the memores. There is more of me than even I can "see" at any one ti-me. The ties-to-me that you can't perceive are ongoing, and if you refocus your at-tension to admire the markings on a butterfly's wing, I am is no longer what you looked away from. "Life's a bitch, and then you die."

It is the "more of" each of us that portrays immortality. I have literally forgotten more than you'll ever know about I am is being me. It's recoverable into consciousness, and then some beyond the bejinning. Nothing encountered by me in my me-moirs suggests there was a beginning or will ever be an end to what amounts to a dynamic, ongoing system of eternal change. I am has probably been blown to smithereens by nuclear holocaust a billion times (ties-to-me) before. It apparently "picks itself up, dusts itself off, and starts all over again..."

Why? Oh dear God... why?

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The New Cool

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When I tried to research my reaction to the lactic acid in my water kefir the learning curve was not enticing. My aversion to scientific terminology prevails. I just do the best I can with what I can figure out as I go along, and that's all I got for it. I probably did about the best thing I could do for it, that is, without a clue to why I did it, and that was to drink a tall glass of water with a teaspoon of baking soda in it to change my ph. All I knew was that I was dying, and I had to do something. 

The new air-conditioner is a lot smaller and lighter than the old one that finally died on me. It would be a lot easier and simpler if I had a regular window to stick it in. It came with the extra framing needed to do that. I don't have  a regular window in this room. Merely a large plate glass window I got from a discarded sliding door. I had to cut a hole in the wall and box in the old air-condition. Now, I gotta box in the new one. The good thing about this it the the new air-conditioner is running the whole time I'm doing this. 

The problem is that the hole in the wall is just under the roof on a two story house, and I can't reach it from the outside with the eight-foot ladder I have. I have to do what I'm gwine end up doing from the inside of the house and reaching out through the hole in the wall. It might not be pretty from the outside by the time I decide to quit working on it, but it will keep the cool air inside the room. What other miracles are needed?  

It's difficult to tell if one thing had anything to do with the other, but in the last couple of days I've been very aware of my crown chakra and my third eye. Sometime it's so prominent it finds me. That's unusual because most times I have to take steps to get it to show up, and even my best efforts ain't guaranteed to bring about the desired results. 

Why this is happening is a mystery to me. It's not like anything special is going on. I'm not witnessing no miracles or seeing the world in a different way. It's a feeling. A physical feeling that has always associated to the time when I have witnessed what some would call miracles or visions that tell of evolution and the deep past. Presently, it's just the physical sensation implicit in that part of my world is very active. Unconsciously active, but active. 

I'm thinking about using the cypress planks I had cut back when I first started building my house on the wall around the air-conditioner hole. I took those planks down when I expunged my useless walk-in closet. I sealed of part of this room to create it, and kept it that way until I realized that's where I wanted the head of my bed to be. 

These cypress boards are about one foot wide (30.5 cm) and several feet long. They're only about a half-inch thick (1.27 cm), and the grain of them is simply beautiful. The wall I might put them is the most unattractive place in the room, and so their being there would really improve the looks of the place. Besides, it would get them outta my bathroom beside the shower stall where I have them stashed. 

I just came back from buying some building supplies and stopped by the Wal-Mart to buy some supplements I use. I tested my blood pressure on the machine at the pharmacy. I have the lowest numbers I've ever seen. 94 over 57 with my pulse at 77. I have no idea what these numbers mean. The ideal rates posted on the machine are much higher. 

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Water Kefir Crisis

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Yesterday morning I opened a sealed quart jar of water kefir, stuck it up to my mouth to drink, and the fumes in the jar almost made me pass out. Like a dumb mofo I took a drink anyway. It tasted very powerful. At first I thought it was a good thing, but as the day wore on I got sicker and sicker. The only thing I knew to do was to drink lots of water, and I did. Quarts of it. It took until around bed time to feel better. I'm not exactly right this morning. I drank a little milk kefir to see if that would help. 

I bought a new air conditioner. The old window unit I've have for years and years appears to have gone the way of all good things. It's a puzzler. Sometime it works, and sometime it doesn't. That's not good enough when it's only a few days into Summer. I don't tolerate heat as well as when I was younger. 

I got my brother to come over and help me take the old one out and put the new one in. The old one weighed twice as much as the new air conditioner. The new one has digital controls and a remote to operate it. I set it up in the hole where the old one was, but I'm still not feeling well from yesterday, so I haven't sealed it in yet. Manana...

Despite the fact that there is daylight all the way around the new air conditioner I turned it on anyway. It's located up high on the wall, and cool air falls down, so it still keeps the room cooler than having nothing. In fact I lay down on my bed to see if I could take a nap, and I had to pull a sheet over me to feel comfortable. That's mo' bettah!

A few weeks ago I was in Fayetteville to keep an appointment at the VA Hospital. Fayetteville is considerably larger than the little town I live near, and it has most of the large franchise stores that aren't here. It also has a Harris Teeter grocery store that carries lots of the exotic items not found at the local stores here. 

They have an olive counter with a selection of olives you can buy by the pound no matter which types of olives you choose. The first time I bought a variety of all the olives they had at the counter to see which kind I liked best. As it turned out I favored the Greek olives they call Kalamata. The second time I visited I bought just those olives. 

In the last week or so I saw some olives at the Wal-Mart SuperStore here in town that are labeled Gloria's Harvest in those shiny mylar packages. One of the three kinds they had was the Kalamata olives. I bought one package of them to give them a whirl. I think they're possibly better tasting than the ones from Harris Teeter. I bought two more packages. Wal-Mart is notorious for not continuously carrying a particular brand of food, especially if I like it. 

I'm going back to bed. My enthusiasm for keeping a positive attitude has waned. Maybe I'll feel better tomorrow. '-)

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Progress With My Milk Kefir

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Yesterday I started to describe what happened when I had to milk cows when I was a kid. I didn't like to do it very much. The worst part of it had to do with only having one pair of shoes that I wore to milk the cows and wear to school soon after. 

When I got to the part about why that was not good because of the smell I started to describe the barn conditions that enhanced that odor. Suddenly, I was at an impasse. I had to tell too much to get the point across. Now, I find that what I have for words is a detailed report that is not that easy to finish. I guess I'll work on it from time to time. It'll be a miracle if I finish. Ordinary scenes are difficult for me to get right. 

When I received the milk kefir grains in the mail to start making my own kefir I went to the grocery store and bought some whole milk. It was labeled organic, but had been homogenized and pasteurized. It was definitely not raw milk straight from the cow. 

Later, after I had made a couple of batches of milk kefir a conversation about the difference between regular pasteurized milk and ultra-pasteurized milk on one of the e-mail discussion lists I subscribe to. Most of the members thought that ultra-pasteurizing milk went too far, and produced inferior results compared to the regular pasteurized milk. 

I didn't know for sure what I was using, so I went downstairs to look at the packaging. Sure enough, I had bought the ultra-pasteurized type of milk. Soon after, I went to the store and found the regular pasteurized milk to see if that would make a difference in the kefir I got from the ultra-pasteurized milk. 

I brought the regular pasteurized milk home and immediately strained the milk kefir grains out of what I was making, and put them in the milk I'd bought. I left the kefir grains in the regular pasteurized milk for about 4-5 hours to acclimate them to the change, then strained them out again into some fresh regular pasteurized milk to let it sit overnight. 

This morning I looked to see what the results were. It was much better, at least according to what I've been reading about other people's experiences. The kefir was much thicker, but it hadn't separated like the ultra-pasteurized milk had. When I leaned the quart jar over to one side the milk kefir was one big glob that hung together like clabbered milk. This was a very good sign. 

The next step was to find out if I could separate the kefir milk grains from the big glob of kefir. I got out my big plastic bowl and my nylon strainer, and dumped the contents of the quart jar into the strainer above the plastic bowl. 

The kefir that had the look of a fairly solid blob went straight through the strainer and most of what was left in it was the kefir grains. I lowered the strainer with the kefir grains in it into the kefir in the bowl and swished them around like Harry had suggested, and soon I had nothing but kefir grains left in the strainer. Hurrah!

The problem I have with making my own kefir is that I have way too much of it. I'm making milk and sugary water kefir, and I only have use for just so much. I need to cut down to a pint of each per day, and that's still more than I actually need. 

I'm giving the over-abundance of milk kefir to my brother's dogs. I haven't tried to feed them water kefir yet. I'll be surprised if they drink it, but I don't know. Dogs seems to know what's good for them better than humans. 

My youngest brother, who is eight years younger than me, came by yesterday with one of his high school friends. There were three of them that hung around together. This particular guy is a typical Leo. Pushy, aggressive, and I sorta have to get along with him because of his friendship with my brother who lives next door. I do what I can. 

My sister-in-law had told him about our kefir project. Yes, she's hooked on it too since the last few days. He came over here to find out what's going on. He ain't no spring chicken, so he's more open to better health. In his own inimitable way he demanded that I give him all the facts about kefir and why it might be a good thing for him too. 

His demanding ways put a strain on my budding ability to describe what's wot. I was finding it difficult to smoothly come up with the language I needed to convert him to breeding bacteria and drinking them with aplomb. That's sorta what I write this blog for. 

Over time I can find a plausible lingo that most anybody might understand, but yesterday I wasn't quite ready, and my temper was rising. Fortunately, my brother recognized the signs and made excuses to return with his friend to his house before murder and mayhem transpired. '-)

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I Gotta Get Outta This Place

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In the early hours this morning, I had another dream that I was stuck at work. This time, my clothes got locked up and I couldn't leave the building. I think the object of these dreams are that I have to realize I'm actually in my bed, sleeping and dreaming, and that I have to astral travel outta there during the dreamtime of these events. Like realize I'm dreaming, and then taking off straight up as if I'm wearing a jetpack. 

I wonder if astral traveling will leave me when I get more senile? I doubt it, but I could lose a sense of control. I only have a sense of control if I become lucid during my dreamtime. With the question being: Who/what gets lucid? 

This goes straight to the heart of the matter from my perspective. Identity. The purpose of every human on Earth is to acquire a personal identity. Some call it individuation. Others call it enlightenment. If it doesn't include the dreamtime, however, it's not the real deal. If it's gone when you lose consciousness... what good is that? Real identity is supra-conscious. It's above mundane conscience. 

I had a problem making milk kefir. In the last couple of days it became apparent that the reason it was separating sooner than expected, thus making it difficult to strain out the kefir grains, was that I was using too many kefir grains for the amount of milk I put it in. 

Now that I've remedied that problem by using fewer grains I'm getting some pretty good kefir, and I'm making smoothies with it. Kefir of both the milk and sugar water kind have a sour, tart taste because the whole point of making it is for the kefir grains, the probiotics, to consume the sugar. I make smoothies to disguise the tartness. 

Presently I've got about a pint of strawberry milk kefir in the blender sitting on my kitchen counter. I kept the kefir in the refrigerator all night after I strained the active grains out of it to get it cold before I put the frozen strawberries into the blender with it. After I blend them together it won't go back into the refrigerator. I keep it in the blender on the countertop and keep sipping at it all day long. 

I could leave it on the kitchen counter without it going bad for days, perhaps weeks, according to some of the pundits. The smoothie I made yesterday morning tasted the same from morning to night. Whenever I wanted some I blipped on the blender, mixed it up again, and it was warm, frothy, and semi-tasty. I gotta work on the taste. I'm drinking it for the probiotics in the kefir. 

Since I had to go to the VA Hospital to go through the pre-opt ritual before my cataract surgery happens on July 12th, I went to the health food store to get some mineral drops to put into the water kefir I make. The health food store carries some chocolate covered, candied ginger root pieces. Since I like both ginger and dark chocolate I usually buy a few pieces while I'm there. It doesn't happen often because it's fifty miles from here. 

The idea of putting some of the candied ginger into the water kefir made sense to me. I put bunch of sugar in the broth anyway for the gut bacteria to eat and turn into kefir. I thought the candied ginger would flavor the water kefir pretty good, but I wasn't sure how the chocolate would do. 

This morning when I went downstairs to brew coffee and check out the kefir I found out my doubts about how the chocolate would blend in. It didn't. It melted off the candied ginger and floated to the top of the quart jar. The candied ginger stayed at the bottom of the jar with the kefir grains, but the grains didn't seem interested. Another impulsive idea bites the dust. 

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The Latter Course

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It was a joke. I'm not a cannibal. I didn't really eat any Chinese people at the restaurant. I doubt I could get anybody to cook them anyway. I don't eat raw foods much. I'm too snaggletoothed to chew them up in order to digest them. 

The water kefir I've been making and drinking has turned out well. It could be better. In the desire to make it better I bought a plastic bottle of mineral drops at the health food store. One of the primary needs of the water kefir grains revolves around whether or not there is enough minerals in the sugar water used to make it. 

The pundits offer all sorts of advice about how to tackle this problem. All the way from adding a tiny bit of baking soda and some eggshells to the water to newt's eyes (not really). Others have suggested putting a multivitamin in the water, and some of the members of the e-mail discussion groups I subscribe to say that the simplest thing to do is to buy the liquid vitamin drops and put the appropriate amount into the water, and be done with it. I chose the latter course. It's as good a way as any to make sure I get enough minerals in the kefir. 

The milk kefir I'm making is a different story. The problem has been that the milk I've been putting the milk kefir cultures in has been separating into curds and whey altogether too fast. When that happens it's hard for me to retrieve my milk kefir granules from the milk I put them in. I didn't know what to do to rectify this situation. I didn't know what question to ask the discussion group to get a helpful answer. 

It's all good. The response of one of the moderators of the group to another member's problems solved mine. I've been using way too many kefir grains for the amount of milk I was putting them in. He suggested one teaspoon for two cups of milk, and I was probably using a tablespoon per cup or more. 

He also wrote about the warm temperatures of summer and how that affects the amount of kefir grains he uses, and described the method he uses to strain the grains out of the milk. I used a less gentle, more haphazard way of straining. Not in total ignorance, With no experience I don't know how to read good advice like this until I screw everything up. 

As it turned out, I had not really screwed things up. The reason I had not was due to simply lacking the insight experience provides. I was lucky I scrutinized this dude's post to somebody else, for an answer to a problem I didn't know I didn't have. I.E., I didn't know that I didn't really have a problem until later. 

In response to the possible insight I got out of Harry's post I went straightaway to my kitchen and added twice as much milk to the new batch I started in order to find out if I could save any of my kefir grains from my klutzy misunderstanding. I hoped with only hope left that whatever kefir grains that might have survived my crude attempt to strain them would be revived in new milk. 

This morning when I went into the kitchen to check on what happened to my milk kefir grains, I saw that the strained material I'd garnered from the separated whey was floating on the top of the new milk. Immediately I was encouraged. 

I picked up the quart canning jar and swirled the contents around (which is recommended from ancient times) to see if there was any early separation. It seemed thick, viscous, and utterly (pun intended) desirable for an ideal batch of milk kefir. 

When I bought the commercial milk to use to make kefir,  I bought some whole, vitamin D ULTRA Pasteurized, homogenized milk. Some of the more experienced members of the discussion groups aren't too happy with the ULTRA killing of the good things in raw milk. Many of them only use fresh raw milk and seem ready to argue about the proper goodness of doing that. Others think they're a bit fanatical and use commercial skimmed milk with success. 

When I thought I had really screwed up and possibly killed my kefir grains, I became much more flexible about how I should make kefir. I decided to go buy some regular whole milk that was homogenized and merely pasteurized instead of being Ultra pasteurized, in case that might have been part of the problem. 

When I got back from the grocery store (a different one where I could read the labels better with my cataract-ed eyes), I decided to strain the batch I'd left on my kitchen counter to make all night, that had the kefir grains floating on top of it. Hopefully, whatever healthy grains that had survived my neophyte's plight could be strained out of the thinner milk. 

After I used Harry's method of gently straining the kefir grains out from the fermented mix, it turned out that practically all the grains I'd retrieved from the separated curds and whey were kefir grains. They weren't dead at all. That's why they had turned the new milk I put them in, into really good kefir. 

Ironically, instead of having killed the few milk kefir grains I obtained, I had tripled my supply of milk kefir grains, and learned an important point about using too many. 

I decided to make a kefir smoothie with the kefir from last night with some frozen strawberry slices I'd bought for that purpose. I tossed a handful of the frozen slices into the blender, added the three cups of milk kefir, and... voila! I had a bland strawberry kefir smoothie that was a little too frothy. My smoothies will get better. It was only my second one I've ever made. 

Ehhh... Who cares? I'll live until I die. I'm a lousy cook too, and I ain't dead yet. '-)

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One More Step Toward The Light

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 Today was a big step toward me actually getting a cataract operation. I went in for a pre-op interview. It took much longer than it would have if I had been more patient. Bureaucratic snafus galore. Just because I write that I could have been more patient doesn't mean that I was all that submissive.

Having been a student of charisma from childhood does grease the wheel occasionally. It's probably true that with the advent of cell phones the image of someone talking to themselves like somebody was there has taken a different turn, and dulled one of my most inspiring tools for instigating change. 

It helps if I actually am a stranger in a strange land to start talking to invisible friends to inspire people to wait on me first to get me outta their place of business. Now it's nothing unusual for people to be talking into a phone through the bluetooth mobile device in their ear. 

They talk to the person on the phone like they were inside their own house having a regular conversation, but they're in the canned goods aisle at Wal-Mart. They scowl at me for passing by shopping as if I had no respect for their privacy. Privacy? Privacy? They're at Wal-Mart, and mad at me because I can't help from hearing them say personal stuff to an invisible friend. 

I talked with several doctors and nurses today about the cataract operation to be. It was described to me a dozen different ways about what's gonna happen. Since I have been reading about the procedure for years I only half-listened. None of them got off base from what I have gathered. 

They all seem genuinely concerned that I feel comfortable with the operation. I feel unworthy. They deal with a lot of people who got all shot up in one of the continuous wars our country likes to engage in. I got shot at, but I never got hurt. I didn't realize I was covered by the VA, but since I am, then I want the best they got to offer. In a lotta ways, that's up to me. 

After my appointments at the VA I kept a semi-appointment with a friend to stop by where he teaches chemistry to see if he was available to go to lunch together. I don't have a phone anymore, so it was a hit or miss situation. He was in the last throes of holding a chemistry lab class. I had to wait about a half hour, and then we went to eat Chinese. I had already eaten three of them before my friend suggested we should eat the food instead. 

The food was not wonderful. There are some wonderful Chinese restaurants around these days, but the ones I seem attracted to seem to be second or third generation Asians who Americanized their Chinese food sort of like the Italians did after they had spent a couple of generations away from the mother country. The places where the owner and his help don't speak English well have a different agenda than the Asians that have been here for a while. 

There are three weeks that have to pass before I get the cataract in my right eye replaced with a clear lens. I'm sure I'll be able to see a lot better. Everyone tells me so. It's hard for me to get worked up about it. I'm sure it will improve the quality of my life. I hope that's what happens. On the other hand, I might see stuff I prefer to be gone forever. 

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Rain! The Blessings Of Heaven

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We finally got some rain. Not enough, and pretty late in the growing season, but better than nothing. Huzzah! The weather report states that even east Texas is getting some rain. I had an e-mail exchange with an acquaintances there, and she reported her rain gauge showed more than an inch so far. 

The peat bogs in the northeastern part of North Carolina are burning underground where they can't be reached to extinguish. They need rain there to soak down to where the fire is at. 

I prepared my first milk kefir smoothie from my own kefir with fresh blueberries. After I removed the mother culture grains by straining, I put the kefir into the blender with a lot of blueberries, blended them real good, covered it with a paper towel over the top to keep out pesky bugs, but let the kefir breathe, and set it back into the refrigerator to ferment slower from the baby grains that got through the strainer. 

Last night I got it out and poured an 8 ounce glass of it to taste it. It tasted okay, but I wanted it a little sweeter, so I put a single packet of Splenda in it, and that did the trick. It was thick and fruity and very yummy . This morning I drank the other half of it first thing. The only facet I might change would be to use fewer blueberries. I think I tried too hard. 

In some ways I'm going a little nuts again for growing and consuming bacteria. Sure, it's reputedly friendly bacteria, and I'm being very careful to keep it that way, but my thinking about diet is being completely altered. 

Now, I'm thinking about why dogs eat shit. They're trying to get gut bacteria from other creatures that will help them digest their own food better. Gut bacteria manufacture vitamins, and convert minerals into usable forms. What is easy is simple. 

The weirdest part of this is the milk kefir "grains". They don't "look like" grains in the same way the water kefir grains look like cooked white rice. When I put the water kefir "grains" into sugary water that contains minerals found in nearly all ground water, their babies look like teeny tiny grains of cooked white rice. Not the milk kefir grains. They get bigger and bigger like a matrix. I have one milk kefir culture that's as big as a golf ball, and others that are growing. 

The crazy idea I'm getting as I go along here, is that these biological matrixes get other bacteria they need to act as a part of themselves from the environment they find themselves trying to survive in. That's why I'm freaking on the notion of wild yeast. The kefir matrixes are able to discriminate which "wild yeast" to bring into themselves from the outside to create products that cure and heal their hosts. In this case, me. 

I'm not reading this anywhere else yet. I have done a brief web search using the entry "wild yeast", and there were plenty of hits. Wild yeast is a well known subject. It's particularly well-known to bakers of sourdough bread. 

The first article I perused was instructions from this amateur baking nut who wrote about how to create your own individual sourdough culture from scratch. Apparently, it takes a while to employ the process, but the yeast is from thin air. 

If kefir truly does become a genuine obsession for me I will naturally have to learn a lot about the process of fermentation in general, much less specifically. I asked my friend who teaches chemistry about fermentation processes, and he started calling them off the top of his head like beating the band. This is beginning to look like just another case of me being the last to know. 

I won't have to take to the highway to find competent gurus to inspire me when and if I get stuck with some problem involving fermentation. I did have to "take to the highway" to satisfy my spiritual quest. As it turned out, not so much to find competent gurus (there are none), but more, perhaps, to get away from the dogmatic influences that kept my nose to the grindstone of living in the Bible Belt. 

My nomadic traveling as a beggar exposed me to all sorts of other ways of approaching the spiritual aspects of life. All sorts of people believe all sorts of things, and what they each do seems to provide just as much satisfaction for what they put into it as any other approach. 

I taught myself the occult practices to help me upgrade my nomadism to a little easier way to survive, but only after I turned thirty years old. Before that I had no particular skills other than youthful innocence and occasional sincerity to touch other people's greedy hearts. 

Astrology was particular difficult to learn while bumming around North America because it required implements like huge ephemerides tables to look up the positions of the stars in the night sky, and compasses and paper pads and awkward to tote stuff like that. 

Eventually I had to settle down and stay in one place long enough to learn the rudiments. That was my second marriage in a nutshell. Astrology is the mother lode of all the other occult practices, and in the end game, all one has to know to operate out of an intuitive relationship with the world around them. 

In a way, the individuated person is like a milk kefir matrix. They draw what they need from the ambient environment around them. Wherever they set up their tent becomes the center of their universe, and by charisma, other people's universal center for that event. 

I have a friend who uses music in much the same way as I used homelessness. He and his friends set up their camp at music festivals in a very appealing way. Its how other people wanna see themselves as being carefree spirits, instead of working on assembly lines in the 9-5 mode.

The last time we talked about this, he spoke of having conversations with other festival owners to the effect that, if his gang would bring their tent act to their festivals, and set an example for others of how to make their camp sites attractive, they would get a free pass to musical happiness. Smells like a career to me. 

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Lying At The Bottom Of The Hill

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An interesting thing happened this morning that caught me a little off guard. I drank the last of some water kefir I've been sipping at for the past day or so, and took a sealed jar of the next batch from the refrigerator. After I broke the soft vacuum seal on the new stuff I decided to add a small amount of un-sulfured molasses to the kefir to kickstart whatever baby culture granules may have slipped through after I strained the main kefir grains out. 

Very quickly after I drizzled the molasses into the kefir, and looked away to put the lid back on the molasses jar, the molasses disappeared in the amber-colored kefir water. I picked the half full quart jar up and swirled the contents around to find the molasses. I found the molasses at the bottom of the jar. I could be wrong, but it looked like the baby culture grains had enveloped themselves in the molasses before it diluted into the water. 

I let it sit for a while on the kitchen counter to let it warm up to ambient temperatures while I went about my business. Before I left the kitchen I checked it out again, and saw tiny carbonation bubbles were emerging from the molasses covered grains like crazy. I've been wanting the tart kefir to be more effervescent. Perhaps I've found a way. 

With my vitamin D time out in the Sun just completed, I'm ready to consider the real reason I chose to live my life in such an unfettered fashion. I've contemplated every possibility that was consciously available for me to grok in that chosen moment. I can't say that I've never turned my back on some opportunity to more deeply fathom the nothingness of my ground of being. I too have sinned.

"It's not easy being green." ~ Jim Henson

The implied ground for my being is generated through a deliberate act of denial in which I silently scream to all others. "You are not me." I'm not sure if this dynamic was generated by an abstract system of reason or logic or a more primeval stimuli. Having to initiate a well-formed scream to jumpstart the desired world into ex-is-tense, implies that there needs to be an emotional investment inculcated to set the mojo in motion. 

"Do what thy wilt is the whole of the law." Aleister Crowley

Crowley appeared to understand that nobody knows what you're doing when you "do what thy wilt". It's impossible to perceive the other's reason for their behavior without imposing your own idea of reality upon what they said or did. An immediate problem is that other people don't do what they do for other people's reasons. Granted, some appear to not have their own reasons. No blame. Why bother?

This imposes a next case scenario situation that revolves around what other people think they would be doing if they acted like they think you did. If they think, in their heart of hearts, that what they thought you did was punishable by death, in their world view, they might just kill you for taking out the garbage on one of their "holy days". 

The real world problem associated with successfully doing whatever thou will to, no matter what, has to do with one's reaction to the other's premise that you did whatever they saw you do for their reasons. The response I've found useful is to accuse them of attempting to make me obey their rules of conscience, and inanely quote Moses like I was suddenly Charlie Heston.. 

That strategy hasn't always worked. Try as I may, some people won't allow me to gently refuse to be their victim. Sometime I've been sadistically moved to punch them in the haid to knock some sense into them. That hasn't always worked to my advantage either. Good to know. Rheumatoid arthritis in my hands put that tactic to rest. 

It seems like following Crowley's advice to "do as thy wilt" is fraught with peril. Each of us are ultimately responsible for how we individually respond to wot the world sots before us when we take liberties with their conventional sense of things at the grassroots level. In most places, somebody gonna say something...

In my questionable opinion I sense that each of us has to create the freedom we individually need to do as we will to. With my eternal question being: What can I do to provide myself with more elegant solutions and give myself more wiggle room?

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The Moon's Day

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We barely got any of the rain from the high pressure front that passed through last night. I guess anything is better than nothing, but we've missed out on the rain for several months now, and it's really dry around here. Further west and up near the big cities they did okay. That's the way it seems to go sometime. The brown grass seems to make it hotter than it really is, but temperatures in the high nineties is plenty hot. 

The weather seems to have sapped all my energy for writing today. I stepped outside to the second floor deck to give myself a haircut. The sun was already getting high enough in the sky to tan my hide. When I finished cutting my hair I went ahead and laid out for a while to make sure I got plenty of vitamin D. I'm getting tan enough now so that I can lay out for as long as I want. I still limit it to 20-30 minutes. 

Laying out in the sun when the temperatures are this hot already tempts the monkey to get on my back. That's what we called having a heat stroke when I was a kid working in the tobacco fields. More technically it's called heat prostration, and it can kill you. I've had it so bad in the past that I got unconscious. If I hadn't been found and drug outta the sun I would have died. It would have been an easy way to go. 

My kefir obsession seems to be going pretty good. The water kefir I make is very tasty. It's a little effervescent from the fermentation, and the ginger root powder I put in it to give it a snappy taste. I'm drinking about two cups or more a day. The milk kefir is more of a problem because the heat makes it ferment real fast. 

It's getting tarter or more sour than I really like it before I strain out the mother culture and put resultant kefir in the fridge. Straining out the kefir grains really slows down the fermentation process, and sticking it in the refrigerator also nips the process in the bud even further. It's after that happens that the "second fermentation" occurs. You can mix in various fruits and flavors to offset the tangy taste of fermented milk. 

Making a kefir smoothie is my next project. Commercial kefir smoothies by LifeWay is what set the standard for how I like for kefir to taste. Accordingly, I went to the store and bought some fresh blueberries. When the milk kefir ferments to just the right tartness, I'm gonna make the two into One, drink it, and immediately become an immortal. 

I might add a little sugar or maple syrup to sweeten the pot. Why should I suffer if what I'm after by making my own kefir is cheap thrills. Okay, so I'm "after" more than that. Kefir grains is the best source of friendly gut bacteria available to the minds of men. Well? That's the hype. You don't think I'm gonna jump through this raps' hoops without believing the dogma, do you? At least for a little while. 

I really believe the probiotics rap. It's the most incredibly inane non-sense I've ever been attracted to. What I've grown to believe in the last year or so is that whether I'm healthy, wealthy, and wise depends on the balance in my belly of a bunch of gut bacteria. They ARE my immune system. 

I've been led to believe that a body is always gonna have some of the friendly and the unfriendly kinds of gut bacteria in their intestines at all times, no matter what. It all comes down to which gut bacteria you feed, and which ones you ignore. Philosophically, that's pretty much the accepted way with abstract thoughts too. "What miracles more are needed?"

So, that's the direction this new obsession seems to be taking me. The only decisions I have to make in this regard is what to feed the friendly gut bacteria in order for them to at least prevail... mostly. 

They were not able to prevail against the side effects of a rotten tooth. They couldn't save me from dying due to a direct frontal attack on my immune system. They couldn't survive the dentist's frontal attack on all my gut bacteria with the antibiotics he prescribed. I had to go along with the man who knew he was saving my life. 

I'm still replacing the murdered gut bacteria with as many friendly ones as I can force down my gullet. I didn't trust the probiotic capsules to do what needed to be done. The commercial kefir was better. Both of these sources of consumer products were sterilized or homogenized by an act of law. They're not self-propagating. They don't reproduce themselves according to the needs of your actual habitat like live cultures do. 

This new obsession is full of stuff to goof on. Last night I was watching a travel show on PBS featuring the writer/chef Burt Wolf. He is a great presenter, but I'm equally impressed by his cooking credentials. This particular show was about San Francisco. 

Eventually, he got around to talking about the famous San Francisco sourdough bread. It has a taste there, when eaten in San Francisco, he claimed, that could not be acquired any other place in the world. Whereupon, to my great surprise, he explained why. 

It's the wild yeast that grow there, he said, and even if you were to buy some of the ingredients and the same yeast there, when you took it somewhere else to make sourdough bread, that the wild yeast where you took it to bake would cause the sourdough bread to taste a little different than what you ate in San Francisco. 

I don't know nothing about no "wild yeast", but from all the odd things I've observed in the last decade it sorta makes sense. A friend likes to grow his own mushrooms. He has piles of stacked logs that have been doctored with portabella strains. Most impressive for me though was the extremes he had to go to in order to grow the common button type mushrooms in a terrarium. 

It was like sterilizing an operating room. He steamed everything. Used distilled water. Otherwise he said, the microbes floating in the air would infect the mushrooms he was trying to grow, and contaminate them. Sounds like "wild yeast" to me. 

This has to be why the experienced pundits who know kefir from a long time back, and have their own goats and cows to make sure they use only raw milk, say that their kefir grains they give away will produce a different kefir than their kefir because there are different "wild yeast" in your kitchen than in their kitchen. 

Purportedly these kefir mother culture grains will attract the local bacterial "wild yeast" to help them keep you healthy in order for them to continue to survive themselves, at least until you croak. Some say you get brownie points if you give their babies to your friends and family to spread the wealth. 

Have I been duped into raising and eating... aliens... to aid and abet them taking over the Earth? Oh, why the hell not? Nobody knows. '-)

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A Lack Of Couth

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The impression I had about cleanliness being next to godliness was not what I've acted like was true in the past. I've had to ignore both cleanliness and godliness merely to survive beyond right now. As in staying alive for supper that night behind the closed doors of some inside place to be. 

I have lain my body down in some filthy, heathen places that nobody in his right mind would consider doing unless at the point of a gun. In some cases I have done what I did because I didn't wanna get shot dead as a concession to honor among thieves. I bear shame, but I ain't dead yet. 

Nobody who visits me here seems to conclude that I deem cleanliness to be next to godliness. I never intended to keep house when I started building the barn I live in. I just needed some place to collect the stuff I had left from two failed marriages in one place, and call it home. 

I wanted to get inside, and out of the inept vagaries of weather and sleep behind a locked door for a change. As a homeless bum I was subject to whatever stumbled over my body where I lay sleeping. Shit happens. Things change.

To me, this rat hole of a house I constructed is merely a better hootch than sleeping on the ground in some hobo haven or worse, in the house of some do-gooder who insists on helping the poor like Jesus did. If I hadn't have been a bum I would have never known that there are an awful lot of people who secretly, and not-so-secretly, believe in their heart of hearts that they are in word and deed the returned Christ. Huzzah!

There are a lot of people out there who haven't the slightest intention of helping you or offering you hope, but seem hell-bent on destroying you for the good of the world. Both types of people are world saviors in their own perspective. The mean ones wanna save the world by saving it from people like you. Some weep and beg you to forgive them for being the instrument of some tribal god from the mideast. 

 In this place I have a bathroom with a shower that has hot and cold running water. That's better than in most of the places my family lived when I was a kid. A series of rental houses where one outdoor toilet served two adults and five children. I took my turn emptying the slop jars for the whole family in the outhouse. 

I use the way I've lived as the criteria for what I'm willing to settle for as a place to live today. Many people say they couldn't live in the house I now live, because they've never lived like I've lived before now. I'm literally ignorant about how to earn their respect. I don't try to keep up with the Jones' because I've never had nothing anybody else prized. 

I never had anything to lose in order to be sorry I don't have it now. Such a lack of ambition has possibly cost me a somethingness my slothful nothingness has never coveted. I know how to not want things with the best of 'em. My pride in my cultivated lack of desire is not to die for. I guess I started seeking nothingness because of my desire to be something. Unfortunately, an undefinable nothingness that gainsaid no true goal toward a pious end. 

The entire time I considered myself to be on some ill-defined spiritual quest I was clumsily learning how to be a miser. I was not and am not a natural miser. I am possessed by only a smidgen of avarice, and it's biased toward a sometime ignoble end, if indeed, I have one. I can do without most comforts of life, not because I'm an enlightened holy man, but because I am more ignobly like Scrooge. "Bah... Humbug!"

It is only within the last decade or so that I've realized my chief feature to overcome to be-co-me with some popular world savior is avarice or greed. Maybe that's why it took so long for me to accept my miserliness as a millstone around my neck. As a bum I constantly gave any abundance away if it was too heavy to tote. How could somebody with nothing have a greed problem? 

Self-deception is not an unlikely careactor trait for me to unknowingly exhibit. I constantly chastise myself for being the last to know stuff. Stuff that everyone else seems grimly aware of. It's a very tenuous position to try to turn into lemonade. 

My ignorance of my chief feature being avarice was a big stumbling block for me. I use the term "ignorance" to indicate a severe ignoring. The kind of blatant ignoring that defiantly makes me the last to know what everybody else already seems to. 

Even after I somehow figured out that my real stopper for being an awakened human being was caused by my unrecognized greed, I couldn't remember in real time to act like that was so. I knew it was so. I learned the hard way. I'm trying to ring the bell with the big hammer of having a body as intensely as I can. But, as yet, the prizes I'm winning only stink up the place. Cheap thrills. I got no class... 

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From The Exotic To The Mundane

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Yesterday afternoon was a ring-pass-me-not in regard to making my own kefir. I drank both some water kefir and milk kefir I made myself. That is to say, I put all the raw materials together and observed what happened. I didn't actually do anything else to "make" kefir. It was the first non-commercial kefir I've tasted. All in all, it tasted okay. The water kefir may have tasted a bit better. 

Presently, I'm brewing up my third batch of water kefir. It's the first batch that I'm drinking. It had sit out on the counter in the ambient room temperature of my kitchen after "resting" in the refrigerator Thursday night. I don't know exactly why I decided to rest it, but I'm resting the second batch while the third batch is fermenting while sitting on the counter. 

The kefir grains I got from my friend in Texas (I sort of assume she's my friend because she acts friendly) doubled in number. It is exactly what I wanted to happen. I encouraged it to happen in my hapless way of doing what I did. I want to experiment some with the water kefir, but I don't wanna risk my healthy granules to do it. 

The first experiment will be to put part of a calcium capsule in the fermenting sugar water. The current method for getting calcium to get into the fermenting water is to put half an eggshell in it, and the lactic acid produced by the fermentation dissolves the calcium from off the exterior of the eggshell. I don't see why a capsule of the calcium capsules I get by prescription wouldn't work just fine.

My water kefir from the first batch has some baby grains in it from the fermentation. Since I have granules to spare now I left them in the kefir to drink them. I don't know if they will survive the stomach acid, the bile the breaks the food down I eat. That's an area I'll have to research. I think I read somewhere the probiotics are acid resistant, but I don't know for sure. The idea of drinking them is that if they survive they will eat and convert the sugar in my stomach and as they pass through my gut to my colon. 

The milk kefir is a whole new deal. I received the milk kefir grains from Michigan by Priority Mail on Thursday and immediately put them into a pint jar that was three-quarter filled with homogenized whole milk, purportedly "organic". That is all that needed to happen. Skim milk works too. Just put the kefir grains in the milk and wait for it to ferment. It did just that. 

Eventually, as I understand the process, at this early stage, the fermenting milk will separate into curds and whey. I didn't want that to happen yet, because that might make the kefir grains more difficult to strain from the fermented milk. I chose to not wait for that separation to occur, but to strain the grains from the milk after 12-15 hours. 

I was a little nervous when I went to do that because of my inexperience with this whole kefir deal, but it went well. The milk kefir grains look a lot different than the water kefir grains. The water kefir grains look more like cooked white rice, and they're separate from each other. The milk kefir grains are like globs of white cauliflower and drip. 

After I strained the mother culture globs from the fermented milk I decided to taste it right away. The milk had thickened considerably. It definitely had a tart taste without being really sour. I guess there was a cup of milk kefir after I poured it into a plastic cup. I covered it to keep the bugs out of it, and set it aside to put on my oatmeal this morning. 

When I went to do that I discovered that overnight it had gotten a lot thicker. Since I retrieved as many of the milk kefir grains as I saw from it, I knew there were lots of baby kefir grains left in the fermented milk, and it kept fermenting all night long. I put a generous amount on my oatmeal after it had cooled down from cooking it, and it had gone from tart last night to distinguishably sour this morning. 

In a way, I was delighted. It tasted like sour cream. I love sour cream. I'm looking forward to mixing some with the dried onion soup to make it into a dip. It is different than commercial sour cream, however, it is alive. I'm wondering if mixing the dried onion soup mix in it will harm the bacteria. It will still taste good either way. 

As soon as I strained the milk kefir granules out of the fermented milk I immediately started another culture. Milk kefir doesn't take but about half as long to make as water kefir. It will be ready to consume by late this afternoon if not earlier. The process with either water or milk kefir can be slowed down considerably by putting it in the refrigerator. 

I have to work out a schedule of some sort. It's more likely that I'll have more than I want or need by the looks of things. If I have more than I want I can either give it away or feed the excess milk kefir to my brother's dogs. It will be healthy for them too. The extra water kefir can be fed to my plants. At least, I think it can. The probiotics might break down the soil for the plant roots to get additional nutrition. I will pick out a plant to try it on. If it works I'll go from there. 

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