Fermenting Vegetables

"Getting the vegetables submerged is the most critical factor 

for success in vegetable fermentation."

Sandor Katz, THE ART OF FERMENTATION

Oh, this is a beautiful book.  Bruce loaned me his copy for a quick scan and we decided to try Katz's kraut-chi, a hybrid of German suaerkraut and Korean kimchi. At this most basic level, Katz has a nice way of making you feel that even if you stray from the step-by-step, your fermentation will turn out OK.

"...fermentation is the transformation of food by various bacteria, fungi, and the enzymes they produce."

Chop, salt, pack, wait: that's Katz's shorthand on how to ferment vegetables. So we did. Bag of organic carrots not shown.

CHOP
I used electricity to chop small...

...while Bruce worked a Sabatier to slice.

SALT
Katz recommends 3 tablespoons per 5 pounds of veg, a bit salty for our taste. Next time we'll cut back.

POUND
Not in Katz's quick list, but he recommends it to produce enough juice to submerge the vegetables.

PACK
Bruce's large-mouth funnel makes this step easy.

In the past, we've used the crock method, in which the vegetables and their juices are placed in a bowl or other vessel and weighed down with a plate and brick. I liked the idea of skipping this step, but Katz reminds us that the fermenting process produces considerable CO2, which creates pressure inside the jar. "Jars have been known to explode," says he.

The solution is to release any build-up daily, and while I did this several times on the first day, on Day 2 I wasn't so attentive and when I finally got to it the contents burped and overflowed their jars. ("Why does it smell in here?" Art asked.)

Leaving the lids slightly ajar for a couple days did the trick.  And now we wait. How long? Katz suggests tasting after a few days...and then again after two weeks and two months.

Look at what science is discovering about all this:

The traditional view is that a human body is a collection of 10 trillion cells which are themselves the products of 23,000 genes. If the revolutionaries are correct, these numbers radically underestimate the truth. For in the nooks and crannies of every human being, and especially in his or her guts, dwells the microbiome: 100 trillion bacteria of several hundred species bearing 3m non-human genes. The biological Robespierres believe these should count, too; that humans are not single organisms, but superorganisms made up of lots of smaller organisms working together.

Yes, you can buy probiotic supplements, but seeding your gut flora with fermented foods is more fun and delicious.

Urban Gardening - Minneapolis edition

It's been a while since I had my own garden. Many may remember my Chicago rooftop garden, where I used Earthboxes to grow a variety of vegetables with much success. I am a fan of Earthboxes as well as other SIPs - homemade or store bought. SIPs offer the urban gardener with a zero soil footprint an option to grow something on their roof or balcony. They work, they conserve water, and are relatively easy to maintain.

Two years ago, I moved to Minneapolis at the end of the summer. The summer in 2010, I was in Paris and although a great food city, I really missed the fresh, out-of-the-garden produce I had in Chicago. Last year, I rented a place while my house was being built, knowing that I had to move out August 1st, typically when all of my garden produce would be, well, producing. So I skipped trying to grow something and instead bought tomatoes at the farmer's market for about $4 per pound. This year, I'm in my new house and have a little land but not a lot of time. I had a multitude of little projects and two little guys that take up much of my free time.

By the end of May, I knew I had to get something in, so I planted six tomato plants - three cherry sized (Black Cherry, Sun Gold, Super 100's) and three large size (Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, and Better Boys). I had zero experience growing anything in the ground, zero experience with sandy soil, and zero experience with the zone 4 growing season, so I opted for a mix of hybrids and heirlooms and hoped for the best. Using my knowledge of SIPs, I knew that the soil was important. I have sandy soil - check that, I have sand for soil basically. Although I thought it would be great for the root systems of my tomatoes, I knew it wouldn't provide the nutrients or hold water well enough.

I amended the soil with some organic black dirt with manure. Easily enough, worked it into the sandy stuff and then placed my tomatoes where they would get full sun. I added some balanced organic fertilizer and some gardening lime to each area where the tomatoes would be planted and went for it. I then thought that I needed a staking system so I went the old fashioned route - tomato cages. I built simple cages out of concrete wire - about four or five feet high and staked those into the ground with rebar. I watered through the heat and realized how much I loved my automatic watering system and conservation of the SIPs but the plants were doing pretty well.

How well? It's August 15th now and I can't control these guys. The Brandywine is about 7 feet tall and the Black Cherry is about ten feet tall - yes - 10 FEET TALL! It has grown up and over the cages and onto the ground again. This is something I was not prepared for but certainly don't mind. The others are producing and I can't eat enough tomatoes. Gardening on the ground is different than in SIPs but the principles are the same - good growing medium, plenty of sun and water, maybe a nice fertilizer and watch out for pests. I didn't have many in Chicago, 40 feet in the air but here things are a little different.

The one thing I have to figure out next year is if I want to also keep feeding the chipmunks!

How Many Melons Do You Count?

Always a delight, three seeds growing into melons in sub-irrigated planters (SIPs).

All You Need Is Lunch

2012 summer is a lesson learning to be thankful for what we have. Like this perfect lunch box, picked from the roof a couple weeks ago...and many days since.

A definite shortage of tomatoes could make one mororse (OK, trust me it has), but there were serious weather reasons for it. We think the hellish heat early in the season caused tomato flowers to drop before fruiting occurred. As a result we missed the first round, except for a few early ones--Whippersnapper, Glacier, and Stupice among them--that somehow got established before being blasted.

Locally, my brother's in-ground garden and Debbie and Little Green Girl's tomats tell the same story: very low yields.

Eggs from Bruce's hens and a Jimmy Nardello pepper remind us: 

all you need is lunch

Plus, the eggplant are prolific, and beautifully so.

Two weeks ago it was nearly 100 degrees F again with enormous humidities. Today 79 and heaven. The tomatoes have set up a nice crop of flowers and fruit at last. Will they flourish in the late-season light? Stay tuned.

Rise of Planet Lady Beetle

 Heard a tiny voice in the garden… “Come on guys! Let’s feast to the end!”

Some days ago our friends helped us release some common “bug busters.” These beneficial insects are types of ladybugs, but these buddies are convergent lady beetles also known as  Hippodamia convergens. And here’s some great news: they don’t bite!

 

The lady beetle’s main food source is the aphid. But when the aphid population goes down, so does the lady beetle’s. When there aren’t enough aphids, the lady beetles go from aphid eaters to cannibals.

When there are enough aphids the lady beetles hunt for them. They might even run into some unfriendly ants that like eating the aphid’s leftovers

 

The lady beetle blood is toxic to predators so they are at the top of the food chain (from an aphid’s point of view, of course!). Lady beetles are pretty gross when it comes to feeding. The lady beetle takes a bite of the aphid and sucks the juices out. Then they spit the fluid back in to the body, suck, and spit it out again and again. The adult lady beetle repeats this process about 60 times a day.

This sugary drink will attract lady beetles and convince them to hang around. 

 

Releasing the lady beetles was awesome. We set out a piece of wood and poured a sugary drink on it. Most of the lady beetles went to the wood for a sweet sensation. The lady beetles love sweets. So instead of eating nectar, they let the aphids do the work and then eat the bug that ate the nectar. That’s what I call a lazy bug!

The next morning we found some huddled together.

This one is sucking out the juices of an aphid.
 

The Singing Seed Jr blog team: Jay, Max, and Little Green Girl.

 

Tomato Optimism

After our wicked recent hot spell, it's (only) 88 degrees today, more than ten degrees cooler than yesterday. And I see a few more tomato blooms setting up.

Sub Irrigation and Chicago's Wicked Hot Spell

We had to be away for a long week, during which Chicago temps played out like this:

Wed 6/27/2012	90°	64°
Thu 6/28/2012	101°	77°
Fri 6/29/2012	88°	70°
Sat 6/30/2012	89°	70°

 

7/1/2012	90°	66°
Mon 7/2/2012	97°	74°
Tue 7/3/2012	95°	77°
Wed 7/4/2012	101°	80°
Thu 7/5/2012	102°	79°
Fri 7/6/2012	104°	83°

Sub irrigated planters (SIPs) and Art's auto watering system saved our produce. I wasn't sure what I'd see the morning I crawled up the ladder at 6:59 to beat the day's heat. Among other things I found an early-producing Glacier tomato that had set fruit. Happy day.

The green beans in their Earthbox were also thriving.

Flowers on the eggplant too.

Little Bells sweet peppers love the heat

(and yes I dispatched that one down my gullet for breakfast)

As do these Jimmy Nardellos

The Whippersnapper tomato from Bountiful Gardens, a new variety for us this year, had also set fruit and is loaded with flowers. What a sweet little tomato.

 

But clearly some of the later-developing varieties were crushed by the temperatures. Note the flowers on this Valencia that failed to thrive in all that nighttime heat. We learned last year that hot nighttime temps (see this post about our resulting light harvest) inhibit fertilization.

Optimum fruit set occurs within a very narrow night temperature range of between 60° F and 70° F. When tomato plants experience night temperatures lower than 55° F or above 75° F, interference with the growth of pollen tubes prevents normal fertilization. The pollen may even become sterile, thus causing the blossoms to drop.

Still, the vegetables were thriving, relatively speaking, because they had a steady water supply. Tom Skilling spells out just how dry Chicago's been:

While temp relief is underway, the precipitation picture is an entirely different story. It's abysmal. Since June 1, O'Hare's recorded 29% of its normal rain: 1.18" versus the normal 4.06". 

Happiest were these SIPs,

sitting partly under the gazebo cover

Happier still the malabar spinach, twining up the trellis. What and exceptional supply of nutritious green this spinach provides in extreme heat.

I picked some for our noon salad, along with the tailings of the lacinato kale and collards. Time to replant the latter two.

We can't control the weather, but we can control the water supply with sub irrigation (written with the clear understanding that living next to one of the world's largest freshwater lakes helps...a lot).

We lost power last night and into today, the grid clearly challenged by the hellish heat. Cooling breezes have arrived, with luck in time for the later tomatoes to set up for a bountiful August/Sept harvest.