Category: Sustainable living

The sauerkraut was put into the crocks on Oct. 29, and the first tasting was yesterday, Dec. 3, when my mother and brother were here for lunch. At that point the sauerkraut was a little less than five weeks old. I would say that it is good sauerkraut, but not the best I’ve ever tasted. The flavor was a bit too mild, and the cabbage is a bit too tender.

As for the mildness of the flavor, I believe that will take care of itself. The fermentation process will continue, and the flavor should get stronger as the winter progresses. Also, the basement of my unfinished house, where the crocks are, has been pretty cold, so the kraut is probably fermenting fairly slowly.

As for the texture, I need to do more research on this. But at least one sauerkraut article on the Web says that this has to do with the amount of salt used. Salt may inhibit the enzyme that tenderizes the sauerkraut, so there may be a tradeoff between saltiness and crunchiness. If that’s the case, next time I make kraut I will raise the salt content by .001 percent or so and try to see if there’s a just-right balance between not-too-salty and not-too-soft.

Then again, making sauerkraut at home, like making wine, is not a repeatable process. Every vintage will be different. Maybe someday I will say that the sauerkraut of ’08 was delicate and modest, reminiscent of boiled cabbage, with hints of turnip and an aftertaste of applesauce. Whereas the sauerkraut of ’09 was sassy and crisp, with the faintest aroma of wild onion and rutabaga.

Odd, isn’t it, how winemaking and sauerkraut-making are, as domestic arts, close cousins. And yet society sees one as refined and the other as coarse. But who cares what society thinks. One needs to preserve the summer’s harvest and eat and drink during the winter. Let the record also show that both arts — winemaking and sauerkraut-making — were practiced on the family farm on which my mother grew up in Yadkin County. The Yadkin Valley is now a viticultural region, so, with wine, my mother’s family was ahead of its time. As for the sauerkraut, we’ll keep plugging away.

Now that the turnips and mustard are clear of the raised bed, I’ve planted the garlic. The burlap cover is to keep the cat out. After the garlic has a good start, I’ll remove the burlap. The cat, Lily, ruined a third of the turnip and mustard crop by flinging dirt before the plants were established.

This raised bed has been here only since spring, but this is the third crop to go into it. First it was tomatoes, peppers, etc. Then the mustard and turnips, and now the garlic. Before spring I have to build at least five more of these beds. It’s an incredibly easy and efficient way to garden.

The garlic bulbs came from the Garlic Store. I planted three varieties: California Early (the standard garlic of Gilroy, California); Transylvanian (for teasing vampires); and Stull (which according to the Garlic Store was discovered at a garlic festival in New York). I’m a little late planting the garlic, but I think it will be fine.

My pitiful turnip crop, 2008. That’s mustard on the right.

I head eaten turnip and mustard greens for weeks and weeks, but last night the poor turnips froze. I wasn’t careful enough. Turnips don’t mind frost, but they sure didn’t like the hard freeze we had last night. According to my outdoor thermometer, the low temperature last night was 17.8 degrees F. That’s unusually cold for this time of year.

I pulled all the turnips and threw away all the frozen turnip greens. The mustard greens didn’t freeze, but they’ve clearly stopped growing, so I pulled all the mustard too. Tomorrow I’ll clean up the plantbed and plant garlic in it.

I must have had 20 or more messes of fresh mustard greens from my small raised bed. I’d have had even more, had the cat not frolicked repeatedly in that pretty black dirt.

The frozen turnips will have to be cooked today instead of stored in the pumphouse for Thanksgiving.

Actually, after I cleaned them up, it appears that the turnips handled the freeze much better than the leaves.

An old-fashioned limbertwig

You’d think that for all the work I did planting apple trees this week that there’d be something more photogenic. But at this point there’s not really much to see. Each tree is four feet tall (with almost a foot of it underground). And each tree is heavily pruned.

I planted nine apple trees and one pear tree. The trees came from Century Farm Orchards, which specializes in old Southern apple trees. I planted nine different varieties of apples. I tried to select varieties that would extend the season from early to late (July to November or so), and apples that store well. For the record, here are the varieties:

Arkansas black (2)

Kinnaird’s choice (1)

Old fashioned limbertwig (1)

Mary Reid (1)

Smokehouse (1)

Summer banana (1)

William’s favorite (1)

Yellow June (1)

Plumblee pear (1)

Though the trees are all old-fashioned varieties, they were grown on MM.111 rootstock, a hardy rootstock.

With luck, I’ll have apples in three to six years.

Of all the low-intensity gardening I did this year, the mustard greens probably were the most productive for the least effort. I just sprinkled some seeds in the raised bed, and, ka-boom, instant greens.

The rain of the last three days has rejuvenated them. I think I’ll harvest all the turnips next week.

After Monday’s cabbage-buying expedition to the Virginia mountains, Wednesday was sauerkraut-making day. To make sauerkraut, you need:

1. Cabbage. I bought cabbage in 50-pound sacks close to the farm in Carroll County, Virginia.

2. Sea salt. I used refined sea salt bought in bulk at Whole Foods. I would have preferred to use a really premium salt like Celtic sea salt. Any good salt will work, though, as long as it’s not iodized.

3. Something to slice the cabbage with. We used a wooden box slicer made in Eastern Europe that I bought at an on-line store. This slicer is pretty efficient, and it slices the cabbage nice and uniformly thin, which is essential for good sauerkraut.

4. A crock to ferment the sauerkraut in. I used Harsch No. 15 crocks. These crocks are made in Germany especially for fermenting vegetables. They’re not cheap.

5. A friend to help with all the work. A friend from California is visiting this week. We made 30 pounds of sauerkraut in about 3.5 hours. Hard work, but not that bad.

About kraut recipes and the amount of salt: The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends way too much salt in homemade sauerkraut. According to the article about sauerkraut at Wikipedia, this is because, if the fermentation temperature is too high, the wrong kind of bacteria will grow. Most sauerkraut recipes on the web call for 6 tablespoons of salt for 10 pounds of cabbage. The recipe that comes with the Harsch crocks calls for 5 to 8 grams of salt for 1 kilogram of cabbage, far less than the USDA number. After much deliberation, I decided to use 2.5 tablespoons of salt for 10 pounds of cabbage, in the range recommended by Harsch. I believe this is a ratio of about .008, in the low end of the acceptable ratios given by Wikipedia — .006 to .020. If you use a larger amount of salt in the sauerkraut, the kraut is too salty to eat and must be washed before eating. That washes away the nutrients — bad idea.

Why canned sauerkraut isn’t as good for you: There are some good brands of sauerkraut on the market in glass jars. But if you put the sauerkraut in jars, you have to heat it, killing off the beneficial bacteria and enzymes. To get the full health benefits of sauerkraut, it must be eaten from the crock, unheated and unwashed. In other words, you have to make your own sauerkraut.

Washing the cabbage

Some of the sauerkraut-making apparatus

Slicing the cabbage

The crock filled with salted cabbage

The cabbage with the weights on top. These weights come with the Harsch crocks. They hold the cabbage down so that it stays covered with brine.

The crocks all filled and ready to start fermenting. These crocks are in the cellar of my new house.

Wednesday was to be sauerkraut-making day, so Monday’s chore was to go to the mountains and get the cabbage. In Carroll County and Patrick County, Virginia, cabbage is a major crop. That’s about 45 miles from my place in Stokes County, N.C. This time of year the quality of the cabbage is high, and the price is low. At farmside stands, it was selling for $8 for a 50-pound sack. At roadside produce stands, it was selling for $10 for a 50-pound sack. I bought two sacks of cabbage.

The trip to cabbage country goes right past Mabry Mill on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The water trace

An old wagon, part of the Mabry Mill museum of old mountain technology

A small whiskey still, also part of Mabry Mill’s museum