Making a Vat

Shame on me for not keeping up with these posts.

To summarize, we finished the process and declared the sukumo ready sometime in October I think. I stuffed it into a pillow case and let it sit in a cool, dry place all winter.

During April I burned some fresh apple prunings, prune tree prunings, and fig prunings. I got about a half small bucket full of ash. 

A week ago I started making lye, following the instructions in The Way of Indigo book. That turned out to be very easy and as of today the pH of all the lye I made was between 11.3 and 12, so just perfect.

We ended up with 6.917 pounds of dry, crumbly sukumo, so we adjusted the amounts in the Way of Indigo recipe accordingly. That recipe was written for 7.7 pounds. We dumped it into our container, added 16.2 liters of lye water, 67.5 grams of lime, 45g of wheat bran boiled with .9 litter of lye water, and 135 ml of sake.

Now it sits, and I will stir it every 22 hours. We should see "indigo flower" within 5 days or so.

Pictures on next post.

It is 90 degrees today!