WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK: ABOUT A HALF DOZEN OR OUR SHEEP ARE GOING OFF TO BE NUCLEI OF A NEW FLOCK IN HOPEWELL, NEW JERSEY.EGGS CONTINUE TO ABOUND, PLEASE ORDER. AND IF YOU WILL BE WANTING SEVERAL DOZENS FOR PASSOVER OR TO DYE EGGS FOR EASTER, PLEASE GIVE US SOME ADVANCE NOTICE

Time Sensitive Hi friends, It's Victoria Despite what last week’s reports may have lead you to believe, we’re having a typical season here at Turkana, gradually thawing and enjoying the slow, subtle hints of an imminent Spring. We’ve got crocuses popping out along the drive, trays of seedlings in the basement, and peas, beans, and radish seeds in the garden waiting to sprout. I’ve heard from my friends and family in the south that their gardens are already green and growing, and the yard behind my dad’s house in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, is carpeted in violets--the classic seasonal signal that my birthday has arrived. Every year when I was little, we’d bake a cake and cover it with variegated violet flowers (they’re mild in flavor and full of vitamin C; this isn’t an ad yet but may become one in the future). In our agricultural zone, however, we’re still quite a ways off from edible flower season, and I’m writing this as a less-than-charming sleet storm rattles our windows. So I’ve turned to a more unusual and elusive crop to promulgate as April begins: wild yeasts.I’ve long thought of fermented foods as largely the realm of grey-haired, tye-dye wearing, slightly unhinged hippies of my parent’s generation, like the lady on the bottle of Bragg’s Amino Acids, or the scribe who writes copy for the bottles of Dr. Bronner’s soap. This is due, not in small part, to a few adolescent years living in a small religious community that sprang out of the 1970s Jesus Movement. They first introduced me to kombucha in the dark, suffocating galley of a tall ship they docked off the coast of south Georgia, where a teenage friend in a long apron opened a cupboard door and revealed eight gallon jars of liquid gently sloshing with the current, each holding a viscous, alien-looking film. She took the lid off the closest jar, plunged her hand in and removed one of these eldritch creatures, which filled the small room with a pungent aroma. As she peeled it apart into two segments, she held one in her outstretched hand and asked “Do you want to hold the Mother?”I have yet to fully reckon with the Lovecraftian horror of that day, and in fact have no recollection of leaving the kitchen or exiting the ship, but I must have walked and kept walking, putting as much distance as I could between those jars and all other relics of my off-the-grid childhood.But then I went to Oberlin. To my consternation, the housing and dining co-ops at my shimmering new college were littered with all the sights and smells of my long-haired granola-eating past. You can take the child out of the Utopian commune, etc. On every table were the ubiquitous bottles of sriracha, the yogurt containers re-purposed as bowls for brown rice, even the Bragg’s lady! And here I encountered again the spectre of my youth, the mysterious, seething vats of unidentifiable ferments. Due to some kind of delightful cognitive dissonance practiced in the intervening years--or perhaps some unforeseen nostalgia?-- when my college roommate asked if I wanted to take a fermentation class with her, I said yes.It turns out that all it took to get me on board was to learn these secrets from a babe with a nose ring, or maybe it was the revelation that the last class would be on beer-making, but from then on I’ve kept a few jars of fermented pickles and kraut in whatever tiny apartment I’ve been living in. Now that I have access to nigh-infinite kitchen space and a world-class collection of antique crocks and jars, I’ve fully given myself over to the fermentation impulse. A few weeks after I got here I was gifted a “Mother” of my own from my friend Hannah, who calls them by their more standard name of “SCOBY”, which stands for ‘Symbiotic