For me, gardening often inspires me to try new ways to prepare and store the excess of nature. Right now, if you stayed on schedule and listened to Dan Gill and the LSU Ag Center, you likely have cabbage, broccoli, kale and their cruciferous cousins in your garden. And one of my favorite things to do with cabbage is to make sauerkraut.
I had several failures when I first tried to make sauerkraut. My piles of pounded cabbage turned into putrefied mush instead of fermenting into tart crispness. Disappointed but determined, I treid several more times. Finally, I added the fermentation liquid from a friend’s successful batch to my prepared cabbage and within a few weeks I had my first edible batch of homemade sauerkraut.
There are a lot of readily available recipes on the internet from people who are much more expert than me, but here is a link to a recipe that is similar to how I make my sauerkraut. I have a couple of personal recipe tweaks I like to make. I like my sauerkraut pink. I refer to it as Lilly Pulitzer sauerkraut because the pink and green reminds me of her signature colors. The pink tint comes from adding a thinly sliced, very small beet to about four heads of prepared cabbage. I also go easy on the salt–you can add more but trying to remove it if you get it too briny, well, if you figure out how to do that write it up and we’ll post it here.
Other than making sauerkraut, this time of year still has us weeding and mulching at a fevered pitch. At least I have an explanation for the constant dirt under my fingernails. We recently added 200 more blueberry bushes, all early varieties. We have also been planting flowers – – gladiolus, ranunculus , sunflowers, and zinnias. We want the farm sporting a riot of blooms by the time U-Pick season starts.
And U-Pick season is just around the corner, only about 60 days away if Nature cooperates. We plan on being open June 1st until the berries are done producing which, last year, was 4th of July.
Hope to see you out here!
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