From Cabbage seed to Sauerkraut

Currently I have a batch of sauerkraut cooking on the stovetop with jars heating for a water bath. The cabbages and carrots came from, guess where? My garden. I did add two and a half heads from the grocery store but they're Alaska grown.

Some pictures may be confusing. They do not show my garden plot but my sister's. This spring I made a gift of half the cabbage plants to her and her boyfriend. The picture of the cabbages are theirs. Mine (the picture with just the hand) were much smaller but turned out denser heads.

My sister and I turned out a batch of kraut in late July. We had a pretty good time slicing cabbage and carrots while we chased after the baby.

She did give up on her batch of kraut (shown in the green bucket) because we were under the impression that you had to skim the top every day as well as washing the towel, plate, and rock we used to weight the cabbage down. It proved to be too much work for both our batches. I gave up on the skimming thing too when I dripped a bunch of stinky kraut juice all over the floor from the garage to the kitchen sink during my first and last rock/plate washing episode. So I got lazy. The kraut still turned out.

About three weeks ago I got busy - cutting off all of the cabbages that were big enough (some too big and splitting) for slicing. And pulled a whole row of wee carrots to add. After an afternoon shredding, salting and pressing, the final product was half a five gallon crock of unfermented sauerkraut. It spent three weeks in the same spot in the garage, being skimmed once. I had to add two quarts of salted water because the kraut was becoming mysteriously dry. That problem was solved when I moved the crock and discovered it had been seeping.

One other thing that I discovered; all that pressing misleads a person as to how much kraut is actually being made. Once I started stirring it around and loosening it up I discovered that I'll have way more than we could possibly eat in one year, possibly three. So all of my kraut loving family and friends are going to get a bag of home made sauerkraut.

On a side tangent. One year I had a co worker that insisted that sauerkraut was not fermented (all because I said it's fermented, just like kimchee and he really hated kimchee). He was a bit of an idiot anyway (one time he left our Government truck wipers running OVERNIGHT with the key in the ignition.) We didn't particularly care for each other and liked to duke it out over stupid things. We spent an entire afternoon arguing that real sauerkraut was fermented, not pickled. So we made a bet - $100 dollars in money I couldn't afford to wager, that I was right. Sauerkraut was fermented. I proved it by showing up with the Joy of Cooking. He showed up with a jar of boughten kraut from the grocery store. We wound up at a stalemate - neither being too eager to fork out a hundred bucks.

More pictures

Boletus Edulis a.k.a. King Bolete, Cep, Porcini, etc.


Note the bug holes. I had to to trim very carefully. It was hard to find fresh buttons but the larger ones had enough meat if bug holes were trimmed carefully.


My father discovered King boletes on an early August berry picking mission. We were determined to get all the blueberries in the patch when he shouted "King Boletes!"


Excited, the three of us finished picking and went hunting. That first night we fried up a small batch and ate them with some spaghetti. Since none of us died or got sick, we picked some more the next day for drying. Pictured are the results of our first foray into the woods around our home. The mushrooms also freeze nicely when sauteed with butter.

Random garden pictures

More wee carrots and golden nugget squash.


Strawberries from our patch.


Herbs for a bouquet garni.


Dahlia, potato, and cilantro flowers. Plus some cranberry foliage.


Red tomatoes for steak and mac n' cheese.

First frost!

This morning we had our first frost. It was on a low spot on our land - the temperature on our porch read 38 degrees but in some places it froze. All of the cranberry bushes are a brilliant red, the birch leaves are yellowing and falling. The garden had definitely reached the end of the growing season. Except the carrots. They could do with another two months of growing.

So this afternoon was devoted to digging up all the plants, throwing all into a wheel barrow to be added to the compost heap. Even the weakling carrots were tossed on the top. Save for these barely edible sized ones, all were puny weaklings. Very good size if you're about two feet tall. My son went for one of the wee carrots. He marched around the garden with the top sticking out of his mouth while he chewed on the minuscule root at the end.

Right now there is a batch of scalloped potatoes in the oven made from the french fingerling potatoes from the garden. I already harvested half of the plants about a month ago. Each plant had about a dozen decent sized potatoes ranging in size from a peanut to about four inches long. The purple potatoes were quite small - none over three inches (maybe barely two and a half.) So as novel as the purple potatoes sound, they were too small and yielded too little to warrant growing again. Pictured are the golden nugget squash, which are small but very tasty when baked with butter and brown sugar.

So it was a good garden year. Much better than previous. I laid in about a case of canned goodies from the garden. Don't forget the frozen turnip greens. Made several batches of zucchini bread (and cookies) and one case of zucchini relish, even giving some away. Not to mention the crock of sauerkraut fermenting in the garage. It was worth the effort. Now to plan the garden for next year.