
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.