The Bacteria Farm

Dave and I have decided to make our own kombucha - an effervescent, probiotic beverage that we mutually enjoy. A bottle of bubbling intestinal regularity costs about four dollars, but if you brew it yourself in a big glass jar or a claw-foot tub it costs fifty cents a serving. We purchased a gallon glass jar from the Container Store, a box of organic green tea, a bag of sugar and a bottle of commercial kombucha.

Once we began boiling the sugar and water, Dave referred back to his directions and realized that we needed to grow a scoby before we could brew the kombucha. A scoby is a slimy bacteria culture that resembles a mushroom or a soggy pancake.

This is not a pancake. This is also not a picture of me holding a pancake. I don't know who this is.

You need scoby to start brewing kombucha and every finished jar of kombucha produces a new scoby that you can give as a gift to a confused friend. So why not give the gift of digestive balance this holiday season? There’s no cure for the nausea caused by receiving a scoby like a tall glass of probiotic drink.

We found detailed directions for making a scoby using a bottle of kombucha online. It appears that you brew a saucepan of sweet tea and pour it into a jar with twelve cups of water and a bottle of finished kombucha from the grocery store. Then you cap it with a towel secured with a rubber band and watch it grow for three weeks. When the time comes, you lift out the glob of bacteria and use it to brew a jar of delicious kombucha. The rest of the jar goes down the drain.

If you like instant gratification and want to produce a jar of kombucha sometime within the next month, you could buy a designer scoby online or get one from a kombucha chemist you know and trust. Or put it on your Christmas list. Maybe Santa will take note of your need for a doughy disc of single-celled organisms.

Valentine's Day isn't too far away.

Fit for a Fungus

Before I moved into the new apartment, I bought a rosemary bush that was shaped like a Christmas tree. I had every intention of stringing it up with lights and beads like a Christmas tree. Then December came around and I had a brown, spiky bush-skeleton shedding its needles on my windowsill. It wasn't as festive as I had hoped.

What went wrong?

My apartment is in a dusty basement. The last renters were eyeless mole-people. Prehistoric insects creep out of the cracks in the molding and the spaces where the pipes go through the ceiling, the wiggling ancestors of the centipede and mutant spiders that I catch in old ricotta cheese tubs and shake onto the driveway.

The windows are small, but at least there are windows. My landlords left wooden planks stacked in front of the kitchen windows to make me feel like I live in an 1850’s tenement, so very little natural light shines in. I have become a mole-person.

Yet I am not bereft of hope. Angelina, my pitcher plant, is thriving in the window beside this very desk, in full view of a creepy boarded-up garage. The little hairs that are springing up on her lips - her mustache, if you will - remind me of the tiny flesh-scraping hooks on a cat's tongue.

The day I moved in, I announced that I wanted to immediately procure a plant. Having a plant gives me the illusion that I am a responsible adult. “What could you possibly grow in here?” my mom asked.

“Mushrooms,” I declared.

I may have suggested mushrooms in jest, but now I’m completely serious. I stumbled upon this mushroom kit from Back to the Roots. This mushroom garden, which resembles a happy meal for gnomes, purportedly produces a sprawling mass of oyster mushrooms in ten days and produces at least two crops. The spore-filled soil inside of the happy meal box is made of recycled coffee grounds.

The process seems fool-proof, even for one prone to causing small forest fires in terrariums. You spray the coffee ground soil with the spritzer and mushrooms will grow. I may have found the ideal plant (or in this case, fungus) to grow in the dark.