Submerge them in brine for a few weeks. This creates an environment favouring lactic acid bacteria which will create pickling acid from the veggies that prevents mould.

You need to keep them submerged which you can do by putting a freezer bag full of brine on top.

It’ll release CO2 so if you don’t have airlocks you’ll need to seal the jars only loosely or burb them occasionally.

When you use the KDE Desktop Environment it will also show notifications from your phone and sync media controls (e.g. stop playback when you get a phone call). It’s great!

This looks great - thanks a lot!

Can you really isolate a single cell without a laboratory?! What sort of equipment? This sounds more involved than just innoculating some wort with a spoonful of yeast sediment…

I tried to look at yeast under a 40x-640x microscope but just saw a brown blur! I presumed you would need expensive stains/ growth media to experiment properly.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by “1-cell” steps?

I didn’t realise yeasts have “killing features” either… I thought the whole idea with fermentation was to create the right conditions for your favoured micro-organism to out compete the rest!

Brilliant. This looks great. Thanks for taking the time for a thorough write up!

Great idea! We’re overrun with Lemon Balm!

How did you extract the flavour? Did you add it to the boil or make a vodka tincture or something?

In fact I’d really be up for trying this out if you’d care to share your recipe?