EATING FRESH ALL YEAR ROUND

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I wrote about root storage in the March issue. As with so much of gardening, there are a lot of different ways to get good results, from a hole in the ground to a humidity-controlled walk-in refrigerator. I like to eat low on the tech and energy hog. I also like to make things as easy as possible. I do most of my storage in wooden bins that are kept off the dirt floor of our cellar by resting on rocks.

CABBAGE

Cabbage is the transition vegetable from unprocessed storage to processed. Winter cabbage will last three to four months in cold high humidity, just the same as root crops. The only real difference is that root crops usually lose their goodness by getting dry and limp. Cabbage usually rots. Therefore, you don't want to fill a box with cabbage in your cellar and forget about it. Check your cabbage every now and then to make sure none are rotting, because if you don't discover it until you can smell it in the house, you are not going to be living with happy campers until the smell goes away. In fact, you may want to go away.

The beauty of cabbage is that it is the only green vegetable than can be stored for any length of time without being processed. If you are trying to eat as much as possible from your garden, this is a very important feature. Lettuce from June through November and coleslaw from November through February still leaves four months with no fresh green vegetables. Those four months are the period of the year when a died-in-the-wool self-sufficient gardener is building an appreciation for fresh vegetables. We process some vegetables to get through this period without feeling deprived. Cabbage is one of the vegetables we process.

Old-Fashioned Fermenting

Our first adventure into making sauerkraut lives on in our memories, especially Barbara's. Kraut is made with late cabbage and sea or pickling salt. That's it. On a beautiful crisp fall day I brought some firm heads of late cabbage in from the garden. The outer leaves had been eaten by cabbage worms but the heads looked great after the eaten leaves were removed. I quartered the cabbages and cut out the core. Barbara shredded them. I weighed the shredded cabbage and when I had five pounds I mixed it with three tablespoons of salt and let it sit for 10 or 15 minutes. Then I packed the cabbage into a large crock.

It was a lovely old crock which weighed probably 25 pounds and stood almost two feet high. We were going to have a lot of sauerkraut to go with the pork we were also raising that year.

Barbara kept shredding and I kept mixing and packing, making sure all the air was forced out of the kraut without breaking the shredded cabbage. When the kraut was up to about six inches from the top I covered it with cheesecloth. I had made a disk of oak that just fit into the crock. The idea was to hold down the cheesecloth so the brine that would form as the cabbage fermented would come up over the cover and seal off the kraut from the air. A rock on top of the oak finished the job.

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