Sundy: Found signs of rabbit digging in disturbed soil where I had planted two of the rhizomes.  It had dug straight down to one of the rhizomes, but not actually bothered it.  Perhaps it was going for the bits of clover and dandelion that I dug up?  Re-buried the rhizome.

The cranberry kombucha is all gone.  It was lovely, but it tasted so unlike tea that I tended to foget there was caffeine in it.  I think next time I will not use black tea for this.

Meanwhile, I have a new 3-quart batch of rose hips kombucha that’s looking close to ready!

Below the cut, Weinkraut and Sourdough

Weinkraut

My parents got me a Harsch Crock for Christmas, so Adrienne and I put it to work last week.  I bought 15 pounds of cabbage for 10 liters of kraut, that was about 2.5 times as much as I needed.  We packed about 6 pounds of shredded cabbage into the crock with a head of lightly-smashed garlic and a few caraway seeds.  The cabbage was apparently quite dry, it took about 3 litres of bugundy wine to fill all of the interstices and cover the weights.  It has been fermenting for four days now; the Gospel According to Katz suggests it should be done in about a week.

I have never had weinkraut before, but I hear it is a German tradition and I look forward to trying it.  Then again, all of the (non-fermented) recipes I’ve seen online use white sauerkraut and white wine; I’m using Rotkohl (red cabbage) and red wine.

Sourdough

I had about a cup of leftover cooked rice getting stale on my kitchen counter, so I took a suggestion from Katz and mixed it up with a cup of whole wheat flour and two cups of water to make a sourdough starter.  He quite correctly points out that the yeasties will eat the rice carbs just as happily as the flour carbs, and by the time I go to make a loaf out of it, the original grains that I put in the starter will be fermented beyond recognition.  What a fabulous way to recyle stale rice!

*This post is tagged “locavoracious” even though none of the food involved was locally-sourced, because next season I hope to be fermenting my very own home-grown cabbages.  Eventually I’d like to be gowing my own wheat, too.

Ingredients:

Cranberry Kombucha!

1 bottle store-bought Kombucha, any flavor (buy it at whole foods or your local health-food store).
1 cup sugar (cane, beet, corn, maple, whatever)
4 tea bags (your choice) or equivalent amount of loose tea
1 gallon-size crock pot (or scale up)
5 fluid ounces cranberry cocktail concentrate (with real sugar, not HFCS.  You could use straight up cranberry juice to similar effect)

Protocol:

Brew tea.  Very strong.  In crock pot.
Add sugar
Cool to room temperature
Add half bottle of store-bought Kombucha.  Drink the rest.  If you drink too much, add whatever’s left.
Cover your crock pot with a towel (NOT the lid–this is supposed to be an aerobic fermentation!), and set aside in a place where it won’t be disturbed for a few weeks.

Let sit completely undisturbed for at least a month.  I mean don’t even move it across your counter.  If you do move it, it’s not the end of the world, but it will screw up the structural integrity of your Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast (SCOBY).

After your month is up there should be a mushroomy-looking film on top of your Kombucha.  This is the SCOBY.  It is good.  Take a teaspoon (well-washed) and taste the product.  If it is sour and tasty, you did it right.  If it smells repulsive or otherwise “off,” do not taste it–either throw it out or at least get a second opinion from somebody who knows Kombucha.  If there are bits of mold growing on top of the SCOBY your Kombucha may be fine, but you will not be able to use that SCOBY again.  If everything is shiny on top of the SCOBY, then gently lift it onto a plate, bottle your Kombucha (mason jars work fine), leaving a cup or two in the crockpot. This is where I add the cranberry.  I used a cranberry cocktail concentrate with added cane sugar to cut the tartness and make it fizzy.   Make a new batch of tea and start again, putting your new SCOBY on top.  Just be sure to cool the tea before you mix it with the old batch or put the SCOBY on, lest you kill your culture.

Can anybody explain how a 50 foot roll and a 25 foot roll of chicken wire only make it 3/4 of the way around a 60-foot perimeter garden?

Also, good news!  The potato that I thought was dead is not.  One stalk died, but the other one that was just emerging is still healthy, and a new one is emerging right next to the dead one.

Bad news: the things that I thought were volunteer lettuce may well be weeds after all, but I am going to keep them around until I can identify them.

More good news!  Ginger bailed out of her apartment for the summer and left her entire herb garden with me!  I now  have oodles and oodles of thyme and mint that need to be planted, plus a few other herbs including a horehound.  For now, they are all on my roof.  I think I am going to propagate the horehound and make some horehound ale or mead.  If anybody has a good recipe for such a thing, I would be much obliged if you would leave it in the comments.

The horseshoe of plants in the foreground are my pepper plants (aside: pepper plants produce peppers and gardeners gather garlic are two morse code exercises that I will never forget doing, although I have long since forgotten much of the code!), others are scattered throughout.  The herbs in the peat pots still haven’t sprouted, which is possibly related to my being injudicious about keeping the soil moist between rains last week.  The horehound is the white, scraggly thing on the left.  The Alberta Spruce in the background is not quite dead yet.  Possibly getting better.

Better news: Wordpress suddenly handles my image alignments properly!