I travel a bit and can routinely be gone for 4-5 months. Being a sourdough enthusiast, I am often anxious that my starters (3 of them) survive. I build up their population and then dry some,take some with me and put some in long term refrigeration with my fingers crossed. Redundancy improves the survival odds but is a bit of a PIA. I decided it was time to try Dab's NMNF Starter maintenance method and see how it fared for my situation. So last May I built a small batch of Dabrownman's NoMussNoFuss (NMNF) Starter but with freshly ground whole wheat instead of rye flour and buried it in the back of my refrigerator.
But then I forgot about it-for 6 months!
I just "found" it, brought it out and fed it. No activity for 24 hours despite food and a nice warm environment. At about the 30 hour mark-LIFE! BUBBLES! HE LIVES! 6 months in hibernation in the bottom of the refrigerator and he survived! Now I have 4 starters! My plan is to work with this starter and get comfortable with it's capabilities and then start converting over my other starters to WW and eventually bring it down to 1 starter. They each have a story. We'll see.....
Don't forget Fred.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/44777/fred-dead-practical-starter-abuse
near by nuclear explosion might kill the wee beasties in the NMNF starter but now I'm not so sure:-) I have my last batch, not counting the black rice one, that I used up to make my last loaf of bread a few weeks ago and there was some crumbs left in the container. I usually just add some rye and water to these left overs to get another storage batch going but decided to just let them dry out completely in the fridge for a few months an see how that goes, I died some of that batch in the dehydrator and sent it to Dan in LA and it resuscitated just fine so it should be fine in a few more months this way too.