Toward Ecosophy

A few posts back, the benefits of natto on covid had a small but lively thread. One person asked about fermenting natto without using commercial spores. I'd like to share my experience. After falling down the YouTube rabbit hole of watching umpteen "how to make natto" videos using plants as a source of the Bacillus subtilis, I used celery stalks as my bacillus source. I have celery growing in my garden, so I cut a few stems, stripped off the leaves, boiled them for a minute to get rid of any other bacteria. The fermentation was successful, but the natto sticky threads were not as strong as the commercial natto spore batch. I did find one source that used fig leaves and stated that the natto threads were as strong as commercially made natto. That will be my next batch since I have fig trees in our garden. I encourage any one who wants to try natto, but doesn't or can't get the spores to give a plant source of natto spores a try. Some videos I watched used mint stems, basil leaves and celery stalks.