Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Boy, do I love thrift stores. "The Drunken Botanist."

My latest foray to the various doctors left me with some time to kill between appointments and although my pockets were light there was a thrift store between them. Well, with my devotion to (and, it must be admitted, my addiction to) the best source of militia logistics and procurement, of course I had to stop. And what did I chance upon? Why this remarkable book that I had never heard of, but was instantly intrigued by: The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks by Amy Stewart. It set me back, after my old fart's discount, to the tune of 92 cents.
Just leafing through it and picking out topics taught me more than I had ever known about everything from molasses to monkey puzzle trees. I am looking forward to absorbing it from cover to cover in my insomniac reading program, but I have skimmed enough to know that this is a useful work for those of us looking for guidance in post-apocalyptic business ventures like moonshining, beer brewing, wine making and, in the case of the monkey puzzle tree, mudai fermenting.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Being a grower of most of the family vegetables i have twenty years experience. The main thing to remember when planning on growing necessities sometime in the future is to have the seeds available. Once that's done you can move on to the finer points of growing whatever it is you want to grow. Like climate & soil conditions. Anything will grow almost anywhere, but how well will it grow. Take opium poppies for instance. Something like that only likes water when it's in it's small stages of growth and once it passes into "adulthood" it no longer wants any water at all. And to get the highest morphology from the plant it must be ready to "milk" around the summer solstice. So if it's grown in an area that's still receiving high rainfall (or worse, severe thunderstorms) in early June it will not be all it can be...Another thing to consider is the "wetness" of the soil when planting certain seeds. If an area stays fairly wet during planting season, a seed like beans will rot in the ground and produce nothing. A "heavy" soil isn't conducive to root crops like potato or radish...I suggest always experimenting with different plants in your soil before the day of reckoning comes. Read plenty. See how other growers in your area operate. Practice, practice; before necessity comes. Soil and ignorance don't mix..