Yacon Water Kefir

I have had milk kefir grains for some time now, the kids love it, I like it but find it a bit too sour to drink by itself, and Tracey dislikes the taste of it.  Kefir is good for you so I wanted to try water kefir.  Perhaps that would be a way for the kids to get more of the kefir goodness into their diet.

Recently we obtained some water kefir grains.  Water kefir is different from milk kefir, it is still very good for you though.  The younger kids do not like water kefir all that much (mostly because it is a bit bubbly), Igloo loves it, I love it and Tracey thinks it is ok. 

Kefir
Both types of kefir contain live and beneficial probiotics.  Basically they consist of "good" bacteria, yeasts and other microbes. These good microbes are eaten by you and some will colonise in your digestive tract and continue to provide you with benefits long after you have finished consuming the kefir.  There are many recipes for water kefir on the internet but we have been mostly following the one that came with the grains.

Yacon
Yacon contains inulin and other sugars which are not digestible by humans.  Yacon is considered a prebiotic, this means that it contains things that feed the good bacteria etc in your digestive system which help to keep you healthy.  Yacon tubers also taste great, it is a vegetable that is eaten like a fruit and is loved by kids.  Yacon is my favourite vegetable.

Kefir & Yacon?
If water kefir contains probiotics, and yacon contains prebiotics which feed the probiotics, then it made me wonder if I could culture water kefir on yacon and leave out all of the other things.  After internet searching I found many people who claimed water kefir flourished when using yacon syrup instead of sugar.  Some people culture water kefir only on water and sugar, many of these people were the ones saying that the yacon syrup was great.

The only problem is that I do not have access to yacon syrup, I grow yacon plants and have access to the delicious yacon roots.  I do not know how to make the syrup and I do not intend to find out, I certainly have no intention of ever buying yacon syrup!  Nowhere on the internet seems to mention anything about yacon root (which I grow) being used in water kefir.  There is no one saying that they have tried this and failed or succeeded, someone needs to try this and let people know if it works or not.  That is why I am writing this post.

Yacon kefir - all the bubbles are gone because I carried the jar outside to take a picture

This is almost certainly not the best way to do this, but it is my first attempt so I will write what I did, and what I think should be done differently to make it better.  At some point in the future I may write another post and say what I changed and how it worked (or did not work).


Yacon Water Kefir

Ingredients:
1 small peeled yacon root (about the size of my thumb, perhaps a bit larger)
1 small peeled and grated yacon root (similar size to above)
1/2 cup water kefir grains
4 cups water

Method
1) add water kefir grains and water to a jar
2) squeeze the liquid out of the grated yacon root.  I put a strainer above the jar and squeezed above this so that the liquid would go in but not the solids.  Discard the squeezed and grated yacon
3) add the peeled yacon to the jar of liquid
4) wait 2 days for the kefir to do its thing.  I do not put a lid on the jar but you need some way to prevent insects and dust from entering
5) remove the yacon root, remove the kefir grains, drink the liquid.  Pretty simple


Even before the 2 days were up I noticed a few things.  Firstly, grated yacon is delicious!  I think it would go well in a salad being grated like this.  Secondly the kefir was bubbling a bit, this tends to indicate that the grains are working well.  If the jar had a lid we may have had issues with the pressure.


What does it taste like, Would I do this again

It tastes alright, but nothing to write home about.  It is similar to how water kefir tastes when it is made on sugar rather than adding any kind of fruit.  The water tastes like it is bubbling, even when it is not, other than that it does not have a strong taste.  I could barely taste the yacon, if I did not know that yacon was in there I would not have guessed it.  Kind of like soda water.

I dont think I will do this again, or if I do I will change things around and perhaps add some limes.  I love how water kefir normally turns out and found this yacon kefir to be less than exciting.  I also prefer to eat yacon normally rather than to eat it after it has been kefired.  The water kefir grains did not multiply as much as I had hoped.  They did multiply a bit, and the grains had been in the refrigerator for a week which generally means that they wont multiply a lot, but I had high hopes.  The water kefir grains have been multiplying slowly lately and I had hoped that the natural sugars in yacon would fix this, apparently we just have to wait for the weather to change.

Interestingly enough, the peeled yacon root also tasted like it was bubbling after it is removed from the completed kefir.  The kids thought that eating the yacon was fun as it did not taste much like yacon, it tasted like it was bubbling.

I also found it interesting that yacon normally discolours reasonably quickly after it has been peeled, but even after two days in the kefir the peeled yacon root looked much the same as when I put it in the jar.


What I would do differently

Yacon kefir tastes ok, but not great.  Adding some kind of fruit or berries or something may have made it much nicer.  Adding some sort of juice or something to the finished yacon kefir certainly makes it taste great.  I dont know, I may try a few different things and then write a post about them.


Where to get yacon and kefir grains

I sell yacon crowns on my for sale page over winter.  I may offer water kefir grains and milk kefir grains for sale, if I do they will be listed on the for sale page too.  Kefir grains sometimes reproduce slowly, other times quite fast, so you may need to contact me to see if they are available.  I also sell a few other organic perennial vegetables and some organic heirloom vegetable seeds.

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Yellow pear tomato

Yellow pear tomatoes are beautiful to look at and highly productive.  They are an old heirloom variety of tomato that dates back to the 1700s and it is still widely grown today.  They are reasonably common in Australia today and sometimes even appear in supermarkets.  Being so old and still being widely grown today means that this variety must have something going for it.  Each year after the season is over I kick myself for not taking photos as they are truly beautiful.

Yellow pear tomato

Yellow pear was one of the first yellow tomatoes that I ever grew back when I was a teenager, I also grew Banana legs and another one that I cant remember the name of.  Back then no one grew heirloom tomatoes and no one in my area knew that a tomato could be anything other than red.  In those days "Apollo" was new and was heralded as the best tomato variety.  Apollo did not perform well in my climate back then and in my opinion is a bland dogs breakfast of a tomato.

The year my first son was born I got some yellow pear tomato seeds.  The plants and fruit were amazing.  We have saved seed and planted them each year since then, partly out of sentiment and partly because I like this variety.

Yellow pear tomato seeds

My kids love the yellow pear tomatoes, they are sweet and delicious and the plants produce them by the bucketload.  When my second son was learning how to walk we had yellow pear tomatoes growing in a raised garden.  He used to walk around holding on to the garden edge with one hand and trying to feel for tomatoes with the other.  Now that my kids are older they gladly eat every yellow pear tomato that they can get their hands on.  If these tomatoes are put out in a bowl next to a bowl of chocolate the tomatoes are the first thing to be eaten.

Yellow Pear Tomatoes - I wish I took more pictures earlier in the season

One year we had a mouse plague, apparently it was the largest one since the 1980s.  During this plague I lost most of my tomato seeds and was left with a single precious yellow pear tomato seed.  I could easily buy more seeds if I wanted, but I have been caring for this strain since my kids were born so wanted to protect it.  I carefully grew it and saved a lot of seed that year.  That one plant survived right through two winters and proved its worth to me.  This year that plant died due to the frost.  This shows how hardy the yellow pear tomato plant is.  I assume in a frost free climate they can be grown as a short lived perennial.

The plants grow vigorously, we have had plants grow to well over 6 feet tall in the past.  We try to stake the plants as best we can, honestly I am a bit too relaxed with that kind of thing.  If you do not stake them the plants gladly root anywhere they touch the soil creating a giant patch of a tomato plant with tempting delicious fruit that is fairly inaccessible without stepping on the stems.

Yellow Pear Tomato flowers

Each plant will send up clusters of half a dozen or so flowers, these clusters will appear pretty much all over the plant.  As these tomatoes produce fruit and begin to ripen the plant will continue to grow and send up more flower clusters.  Like pretty much all tomatoes they are simple to grow from cuttings so you can increase your numbers easily even with a small number of seeds (or a single seed).

They taste rather sweet, but they do lack the rich taste of a nice paste tomato or something like that.  We mostly eat them raw in salads or out of hand while walking in the garden.  They can be cooked or turned into sauce but there are better varieties that have a deeper taste and darker colour if that is your plan.

Yellow pear tomatoes, slight variation in fruit shape

This one was a bit old so the colour is a little off

 Like many other things I grow I do sell seeds of the yellow pear tomatoes on my for sale page.  I plan to grow these each year so should have fresh seed each year.

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Newborns letter to mummy

Dear mummy

I like it when you wear me in your sling and hold me close to your heart.
I listen to you breathing where I feel safe and calm.
I love to fall asleep in my sling,
I listen to your heart and when my eyes start to wake I see your smiling face, it hasnt gone away.

Mummy did you know the world is very scary.
I hear so many sounds, I cannot see what or how big they are,
but when I hear your heart I know that you cannot be far
I know that you will keep me safe and I will not meet harm.

So mummy next time I fall asleep on your chest, please oh please keep me there. Let me listen to your heart and hear your gentle breath. Let my eyes peek open and see that you have stayed where you were left. I love being so close to you mummy and being where you are. You are my safe and gentle place in this very scary world. There is so much for me to learn mummy, please stay with me while I do. I promise one day I will run away and learn all by myself. So hold me close now while you can and smell my tiny head, kiss my cheeks and whisper in my ear.

From
your gorgeous little newborn who doesnt like to be put down.

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Yellow podded snow peas

We grow a few types of pea at the moment, one that gets a lot of nice comments from people are the yellow podded snow peas.

I have trouble seeing green pods in amongst green foliage, so I have to find ways to work around this.  You may not think that this would matter too much, but if you do not pick pods every day and one starts to get too old the yield is lowered considerably as the plant will stop putting energy into flowers/new pods and concentrate its energy on developing seeds.  The yellow pods are easy to see in amongst the green foliage, this makes harvest fast, easy, and increases productivity.

Yellow podded snow peas and flowers

The yellow podded snow peas are an old heirloom variety of pea dating back to at least 1860.  It is likely that this variety of pea was one of the ones used by Gregor Mendel when he was doing his famous pea breeding and working out the basics of genetics and inheritance.  A lot of the peas I grow have at least one trait that Mendel used in his pea inheritance trials, I find it very interesting.  I also like how simple it is to breed peas, especially when the genetics behind them is relatively well understood and is mostly not too complex.

For some reason yellow snow peas never really took off and no significant breeding work has been done with them.  This lack of serious selective pressure means that they have a lot of potential for anyone who wishes to breed them into something better.  I am doing a little pea breeding trying to make an improved yellow podded pea, but that is a long way off being completed (if I do continue to pursue it).  I keep the original pure strain isolated and am always careful when saving seed as I think that this strain is worth preserving.  I know that there are a few other people in the country who are using these to breed superior yellow podded snow peas, hopefully one day they produce something great and distribute it.

As a producer of food the yellow podded snow pea is superb.  It reaches five or six feet tall so it needs to be grown with some support.  It is a very vigorous grower, it is fast-growing and its yields are abundant.  Each plant seems to yield dozens of pods even with minimal effort on my behalf.  These peas are unlike many varieties in that they produce several flowers at some leaf axils, yet produce only one flower at others.  I do not understand why they do this or how to breed for more uniformity in double flowering.  At this stage it doesnt matter much as they do produce a lot of pods.  As well as producing a lot of pods they are rather tall plants, so at the end of the season they provide me with a decent amount of pea mulch to use on the vegetable garden (unlike the Lacy Lady peas that I mention in another post).

Yellow snow peas, so abundant and vigorous their weight broke the support stake

The plants are attractive from quite an early stage.  They have a pink/red splash in the leaf axils which is normally only seen in purple podded peas.  The leaves are also slightly yellow as opposed to the deep green of regular peas.  Once flowering has got underway, the stems, leaves and tendrils become increasingly yellow.  The flowers also seem to change colour as they grow older.  They start out pink, then go through purple to end up blue.  Again this is similar to the purple podded peas, but the yellow snow peas seem to be more vivid in their colour change.  The flowers are very beautiful, people often comment that they thought I was growing the ornamental sweet peas rather than something edible.  It is nice to grow something so beautiful that produces so much food, it also means that if you were to grow them in town people would be less likely to steal them.  Once the flower has begun to fade the yellow pod emerges. 

Several flowers and a young yellow pod - note the pink stem and purple splash on the leaf axil

This variety is usually grown as a snow pea, but could be used as a shelling pea or a dry pea if you wanted to.  If you harvest the pods while theyre still young and about half the size you would expect from a snow pea they are reasonably sweet and crunchy, so you can eat them raw straight off the plants or put them in a salad.  As the pods get bigger the colour fades to a pale greeny-yellow and they dont taste anywhere near as sweet .  I am told that they are still good for cooking at this stage, but am yet to try it as they are not so good raw so I normally either pick them small or let them go to seed.  Larger pods also start to develop string which is certainly not something that a great snow pea does.  Once the peas start bulging out visibly, youre better off leaving them to develop into seed for next years crop.

Yellow podded pea foliage, slightly yellow leaves and slightly pink stem

The seeds themselves go through amazing colour changes as they dry out and finish up with speckles and patterns, all different.  I have even had one seed that was completely purple!  I will try my best to grow this purple seed next time and see if that trait continues.  The colours of the seeds are at their most intense a few days after harvest.  They look as though theyve been splattered with ink.  The speckles are at their most sharply defined and intensely coloured when the pea is allowed to dry inside the pod, especially those parts which are in physical contact with the pod.  Any parts of the pea which are exposed to air (even inside the pod) develop a softer and more blurry speckling.  You get to see every pea within the pod developing its own unique pattern of coloured speckles while the peas themselves adopt various shades of green or tan.  I think that it is amazing and beautiful.

Yellow snow peas and their flowers - yellow pods are easy to see and harvest

Overall I am happy with this type of snow pea and will continue to grow it unless  something better comes along.  There may be more tasty varieties of snow peas out there, but none I have grown are as beautiful and as productive as these.  As long as we eat them small they taste just as good as any other type of snow pea.

Some of the yellow snow pea seeds

I do sell seeds of the yellow podded snow peas on my for sale page whenever I have some to spare. 

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True potato onion seeds and other perennial alliums

True Potato Onion Seed

In 2013 some of my potato onions flowered.  It is the first time I have ever seen a potato onion flower so I was very excited, I wrote a little about it on a blog post called Potato onion seeds.  I planted about half of those seeds in Autumn and nothing germinated, I was more than a little disappointed but there was nothing I could do.

I planted the rest of the seeds in Spring and some of them have just begun to germinate.  I dont know how many will grow but at this stage it looks like only a small number.  I could not be more excited about this.  To make things even better, some of my original potato onions have begun to flower again this year!  This should hopefully give me some more seed to try and grow next year.  Hopefully they will flower more often so I can have seed grown potato onions to begin selecting for traits I want to see in them.

Tiny Potato Onion seedlings germinating

Once these seedlings grow a bit I will separate them and see what they turn into.  Apparently potato onions that are grown from seed exhibit a lot of variation.  I had many types of onion flower at the same time as these potato onions (potato onions, spring onions, everlasting onion, tree onions, several types of bulb onions) so whatever these seeds grow into each of them should be different from each other.  Fingers crossed something truly remarkable comes out of this lot.

Potato onion seedlings growing larger

Potato Onions flowering again

Potato onion seedlings - only the strong survived

Everlasting Onion Seed and Bulbils

Another perennial onion I grow are the amazing Everlasting onions.  They flower each year but never produce seeds.  They have been grown by many different people in many different climates for well over 30 years and have not set seed and do not produce top sets.  They rapidly split in half many times throughout the year so are simple to multiply without the need for seeds.

Everlasting onions flowering happily as usual

Last year one everlasting flower produced a bulbil, I planted this in a small 10cm pot and kind of forgot about it.  That one bulbil has split into 7 small plants over the year and they are now flowering.  That is pretty remarkable considering how little space is in that small pot.  Time will tell if this will be more inclined to produce topsets or if it was just a once off.  Topsets are fun so I would like this to happen more often.  If not the tree onions are flowering at the moment and they produce a lot of topsets.

Everlasting onions grown from one bulbil - starting to flower

Last year from several hundred flower heads my everlasting onions actually produced some viable seeds.  I planted most of the seeds and ended up with 7 seedlings.  So far I can not see a lot of variation between the seedlings which I find rather odd.  Some are slightly larger than others, some are slightly brown whereas others are slightly red, but this happens throughout the year with regular everlasting onions so is nothing different.  They are still very small so perhaps I will notice differences as they grow, or perhaps they will be very similar to the parent, only time will tell.  As mentioned above a lot of alliums were flowering at the same time so I would have expected them to cross a little and result in some unique perennial onions.

Everlasting onion seedlings, I have since planted them into separate pots

Babingtons Leek (Allium ampeloprasum var. babingtonii)

One of the perennial leeks I grow is Babingtons leek, I should write a blog post about them but probably wont for a while.  I am not aware of anyhere in Australia that currently sells Babingtons leek so if I ever have enough I plan to sell them so that more people can grow and experience these amazing plants.  They are a kind of wild leek that has been semi-domesticated, when it flowers it grows tiny bulbils on the flower head instead of flowers, kind of like the leek version of tree onions.

I heard of Babingtons leek years ago and tried to track down some to grow.  One place had them for sale for more than I was willing to pay, but I contacted them anyway and they had sold out.  That place stopped selling plants altogether shortly after.  I emailed them and asked if I could get in touch with their supplier and was told no.  They believed that this variety of leek had died out in Australia completely and they wished me luck in finding any.

Babingtons leek

As luck would have it some kind person traded some of my things for a few tiny Babingtons leek plants.  I planted them in 3 different places to help protect against disaster.  They grew slowly for me, then died down over the heat of summer.  I hoped they had died down to bulbs but was not overly confident that they were coming back as they were posted at an inconvenient time for them.

When the weather cooled and the plants began to grow I had increased my stock from 5 tiny plants to 6 plants which ranged in size from tiny to reasonably large.  I had hoped that more would have grown from the roots, but that was not to be this year.  I am told that they will divide a bit each time they die down and many people increase their numbers in this way.  I am assuming that mine did not increase in number much as they were posted late in their season so they put their energy into establishing rather than dividing.

This year one of the plants is beginning to send up a flower stalk.  I have told the kids not to go near this plant and am concerned that they may remove it or damage it and I will have to wait another year to see what happens next.  Regardless, I have at least one plant of flowering size and it should flower each year from here on.  I am guessing that if all goes well the other plants will be flowering size next year as each of them is now larger than the ones I started with.

Not a great picture of Babingtons leek starting to flower

I do not know how many bulbils to expect from one flower stalk.  I know of no one here who has grown these and have to rely on the internet for information.  Some internet sites say three of four large bulbils will be produced, others say a few dozen, while others say several hundred tiny bulbils.  I have no option but to wait and see.  I find all of this to be very exciting.  Judging by the size of the flower I am guessing not many bulbils will be produced this year, next year the plant may be larger and produce more.


Chives (Allium schoenoprasum)

I dont have a lot to say about these little guys.  They are nothing special, they are not even a special type of chives, but I like them.  They die down to tiny bulbs each winter and grow again when the weather warms up a little.  Apparently they are the smallest species of edible onions.  I would like more of them so am letting some of them flower in the hope of either collecting the seeds or just letting the seeds fall and grow by themselves.

Chives starting to flower

Spring onions (Allium fistulosum)

Spring onions are, in my opinion, the poor cousin of the everlasting onion.  They are edible, useful, hardy and perennial so are not without their charm.  I had some plants at our previous house that were 3 or so years old.  Prior to moving here I saved their seed to bring with us.  I planted them during the first few weeks after we moved in and they have been growing ever since.  I do not have the heart to kill them as they are perennial and require very little looking after, so they have stayed where they are not doing too much.  They produce viable seed each year, I used to collect the seed but recently have not bothered as everlasting onions are far superior.

Spring onions are perennial onions, we used to eat their leaves and white shanks.  The problem is that their leaves get too thick and coarse after their first year and I do not know how to fix that other than planting new seed each year and killing the parent stock.  I have cut some to the ground, when they sprout they are think again.

Everlasting onions have far thinner foliage and it is never course.  Spring onions do not have the ability to produce bulbs whereas everlasting onions die to bulbs each year if I want them to and will keep growing if I water them a lot over summer.

Tree onions are an interspecific hybrid between spring onions and bulb onions that was made accidentally hundreds of years ago.  I have often thought of trying to recreate tree onions with better parents but I doubt I will ever try to do that as I have a lot of other, more deserving things going on in the vegetable garden.

Spring Onions flowering - these are almost 4 years old now

Giant Russian Garlic (Allium ampeloprasum var. ampeloprasum)

This is great stuff.  Botanically it is a type of perennial leek, but for everyone else it is a massive garlic that is mild in taste.  Apparently this can grow in more tropical places where regular garlic can not.

Many people say that they can not produce seed but this is not true, each year mine produce a tiny amount of seed which grows into new plants.  The seed seems to grow true to type even when there are other types of leek flowering at the same time.

Russian Garlic almost ready to flower and die down

At the moment my plants are looking shabby as they are almost ready to flower, after they have done so they will die down to bulbs.  This normally happens around Christmas/New Year.  I will dig them up after this and have them for sale again, digging them up now does not go so well for them.

Some people complain that Giant Russian garlic is too mild.  I have found that if I plant them early and they grow through some frost the taste is a lot more intense.  Apparently putting them in the fridge a few weeks prior to planting can have the same result if they are grown in frost free areas.

I have successfully (and accidentally) stored the bulbs for over 18 months before we moved here.  I stored the cloves somewhere and forgot about them, by the time I noticed them it was too late to plant and I had no more garden space so I waited for the following year.  From those, 100% grew and the plants were indistinguishable from the fresh ones.  While this is far from ideal, it shows how easy these things are to grow.

One single giant Russian garlic clove, they do get a lot larger than this in good years

Perennial vegetables for sale in Australia

If you are interested in growing some of these I do sell everlasting onions, tree onions, perennial leeks, giant Russian garlic, garlic chives, two types of potato onions and a bunch of other perennial vegetables (and some heirloom vegetable seed) on my for sale page.  When I have enough I plan to also offer Babingtons leeks but that will have to wait for at least a few months to see what happens with this flower.  If the potato onion seedlings or the everlasting onion seedlings end up as anything remarkable I will sell them too, but I dare say that is a while off as I would like to grow them out for a few seasons to see how they perform and evaluate if they are worth keeping.

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