A boat garden

This month, we've been busy with our new boat garden, centered around mini-crops of sprouts. After reading Sailing the Farm by Kenneth Neumeyer, we started growing lentil and fenugreek microgreens.

Sprouting and growing microgreens is a good way to have a stable and nutrient-rich source of fresh foods, for both sailors and land dwellers. Seeds keep for a long time (if stored well), and are inexpensive when purchased in bulk. 

Easy for Beginners:

wheat, sunflower, almonds, lentil, mung

Basic steps in sprouting are:

• Measure out appropriate amount of seed, visually inspect and remove stones, sticks, weed seed, broken seeds, etc.
• Rinse seed (if seed is small and clean, can usually skip this rinse)
• Soak seed in water for appropriate time
• Rinse soaked seed, put in sprouting environment for appropriate time
• Service seeds (rinse) in sprouting environment as needed
• When ready, rinse seeds. Store in refrigerator, in sprouting  environment or in other suitable container until ready to use. If not  used within 12 hours, seeds should be serviced (rinsed) every 24 hours  in refrigerator. Best to eat as soon as possible, as freshness is what  makes sprouts special!

Read more about sprouting here, on our Gemini space. This page is best viewed with a Gemini client, like Kristall, LaGrange or Gmni.

Our aim is to buy and keep many kinds of whole seeds and grains aboard Pino, and to eliminate redundancies (e.g., keeping chickpea flour AND whole chickpeas, or whole peanuts AND peanut butter).

(image from Sailing the farm, Kenneth Neumeyer)

With a well-stocked pantry of basic dried goods, and the right tools (e.g., grain grinder, food chopper) to grind them up, there's no reason for us to keep both. 

We found an old Spong meat grinder (pictured below) at a thrift store, and we've been using it to grind nuts and soaked legumes. We hope to find a used manual grain mill too (like the one pictured above), so we can grind whole corn kernels, chickpeas and wheat berries.

We used our 10$ grinder for peanut butter with very good results. The best part about using these types of tools, is that they're easy to service, and require no electricity to function.

That's it for food-related announcements. The book Sailing the Farm guided much of our experiments this month, give it a read if you can, we highly recommend it. 

What else is new? We released our monthly list of updates, you can check them out on our website directly now, on a page called update logs.

That's all for now! Keep healthy, and remember, small spaces can have gardens too~

Best,
Rek & Dev