PNW: June 2014

boffer, I love sauerkraut, but have never made it and as far as I know, don't have the tools. How are you making yours?

This will be our third year for making home grown cabbage into sauerkraut.  I followed the directions in Sandor Katz website: Wild Fermentation.  The best batch came from a variety called "Filderkraut" a (to me) very unusual looking cabbage.  Instead of being ball shaped, they came to a point on the top...and each head was huge (a couple weighed around 5 pounds! 
the seed packet from Territorial Seed Company reads: "160 days. This arrow-shaped variety was bred for the cold regions of Europe so that self-reliant gardeners could make batches of sauerkraut for winter consumption."  Nonna, who is hoping for another good crop of Filderkraut this year.

Marc,

I passed over this thread in 2011
https://squarefoot.forumotion.com/t8885-what-do-you-know-about-making-sauerkraut#82619

but this one got my attention (I guess I was ready!)
https://squarefoot.forumotion.com/t16659-seeking-recipe-for-fresh-sauerkraut-with-curry?highlight=sauerkraut

(both threads started by Nonna, thank you very much!)

Cabbage and non-iodized salt are all that's needed for basic kraut.  I made my first couple batches in Costco glass 1 gallon pickle jars that I had been using for sun tea.   Google for the process instructions.  Easy peasy.

Boffer I think you could start your cabbage seeds the same time you do your broccoli .....that's what we do    

happy gardening
rose

OK, thanks.  I just turned off the last of my grow lights a few weeks ago, and it will already be time to turn them back on in a few weeks!

boffer wrote:Marc,

I passed over this thread in 2011
https://squarefoot.forumotion.com/t8885-what-do-you-know-about-making-sauerkraut#82619

but this one got my attention (I guess I was ready!)
https://squarefoot.forumotion.com/t16659-seeking-recipe-for-fresh-sauerkraut-with-curry?highlight=sauerkraut

(both threads started by Nonna, thank you very much!)

Cabbage and non-iodized salt are all that's needed for basic kraut.  I made my first couple batches in Costco glass 1 gallon pickle jars that I had been using for sun tea.   Google for the process instructions.  Easy peasy.

Oh, that's cool. I thought you needed to get one of those hundred dollar crocks and such. Thanks!

boffer wrote:...Has anyone in the PNW grown fall cabbage, and if so, when do you recommend starting the seeds?  It would be for a late fall harvest, not over-wintering....

I finally got around to reading the new TSC fall and winter catalog, and it has excellent when to sow/harvest charts for various brassica  cultivars.  They recommend May/June for sowing broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage, and cauliflower.  I usually sow in late June and have always thought that  was early.  I guess I thought wrong!

Walked way up the hill to find again that rare sunny spot between the trees in our heavily forested back yard, which is really just a steep lumpy hill. Yesterday I planted three tomatoes there in the raw dirt, since I ran out of room in pots and beds and had extra tomato plants. I'm curious as to whether they'll do okay, and while I think their chances are slim in that lousy dirt, I have nothing to lose. But it's a bit hard to get up there, especially carrying water!

Picked a few dozen peas today! Woohoo! Dang I love those things. I wonder how long they'll keep producing for me. This is my first pea crop ever, and I'm finding they can be almost as hard to see as green beans, the way they hide in between the leaves and the drooping, twisting, tangled stalks.

Some of my pods are curled up a bit. Anyone know if that's a sign of anything, or just par for the course?

boffer wrote:I can't believe I'm this old and only learned last winter how easy to make, and how healthy to eat, sauerkraut is.  The difference between homemade and most store bought is nearly as large as the difference between store bought and home grown tomatoes.   I'm looking forward to making sauerkraut with my own cabbage.

Sauerkraut? I need an excuse to plan another trip up your way!  

Nonna.PapaVino wrote:Could your young lady have inadvertently tasted a dandelion leaf instead?  Even the youngest dandelion leaves are too bitter for my taste.  Nonna

Well I hope not, considering she tried the miner's lettuce as part of a survival course at outdoor school. Hopefully her instructor was able to correctly identify the plant; wouldn't want to be teaching kiddos they can eat just anything they pick out there in the woods.

Actually, what was funny about it was I had never even heard of miner's lettuce before Marc brought it up here on the forum. So for me it was quite a coincidence. I did explain to her about how plants can turn bitter and we should try it again in the spring.

We're entering a cooling period of only a few days that's dropping us back into the 40's at night, followed by a sudden leap into the real heat of summer come Wednesday, at 96 degrees! Yecch. Again a situation which makes it impossible for tomatoes to set fruit. But most of mine aren't far enough along that I'd even want them to, anyway. I started a little slow and buried most of them very deep, so they need to grow taller first. But some of my neighbors may lose some productivity. It got unusually windy too; gonna stake some of my plants tomorrow before I would have thought they'd need it.

Finally pulled my 3 red brussels sprouts out of the raised beds. No sense letting them hang around a whole year without doing anything. Pulled my daikon too, and they still hadn't formed any real root. I've got hundreds of their pods, though, mostly self-dried in the sun, so I can try again for free come fall. Now I have their bed free for the remainder of the summer, and have to decide what to plant there. Only 2x3, so choices are limited.

Picked my first elephant garlic, planted last fall. All were planted in buckets. Looks nice! Letting it dry out in a wire basket, along with the daikon pods.

Strawberries seem to have given up except for two plants. They were give-aways and nobody knew what kind they were, so maybe they were just June bearers? No idea.

Replanted some marigolds into larger pots. Some more beans are coming up. I'm going to try to sprout more of them inside my sprouting contraption, since that works so well on other types of seeds. Will do the same with malabar spinach and squash seeds. Tried a few rounds of germination attempts in jiffy pellets, with many different plants, and like last year, the germination rate was very poor. I think I've done what I need to do in terms of determining whether I've given them a fair chance. I'm done with them.

My sage has a couple of nice yellow flowers on it. Didn't do that last year. Cool and kinda surprising. Lemon thyme is flowering like mad. Up-potted a few herbs and such. Good day for it, only got to the high 70's. Love working when the temps aren't punishing.

Tomatillos surprised me -- one burst into bloom and already has a nice sized lantern or three on it. That was really quick. Most be the good MM in the 5-gallon bucket it's in, and the extra-sunny location I put it in. The other one is looking good, but not quite as vigorous as its sister. And a third one is sort of sitting about not doing much growing yet. We'll see.

So many plants are hovering between looking good and looking okay, or looking okay and looking not good. It's going to be another interesting season.

Marc, Congrats on the elephant garlic. My tomatillos havef lanterns, too. Two large pots, one with a single plant, second with 2 plants. All three doing good.

Ah, good. I know it can take a long time for them to fill out, so the big lanterns can be kind of a tease. Still, it's cool to see. Tomatillo is such an interesting-looking plant.

Oh yeah, I just remembered, thank goodness we're talking about this -- I need to go stake mine because of those high winds we were having.

Marc....eeek talk about the wind today.....blew over our three sisters corn in SFG bed #1....but they seem to be ok....we went ahead and put woodchips down and around them standing them back up



the other three sisters corn did just fine as they already had the woodchips as mulch and didn't seem to need anymore mulch around them....right now they are only a 2 sister as we still need to get a pumpkin or squash to plant in the middle....the yellow wax beans though are starting to come up



a peak into our SFG area   



our back patio container area where we end up planting our extra's, we still have a couple tomato starts that we took from our tomatoes suckers and rooted them in water in our kitchen window ceil to plant back here.....so far we have corn, Market Moore cucumbers, lemon cucumber, onions, carrots....



a peak into the green house, carrots doing great, volunteer celery galore!! with some lettuce and onions hiding in there someplace....we are letting the celery go crazy as we are feeding it to the chickens and they love it!...we still have a few beans and sunflower seedlings to plant



happy gardening
rose

Not much more than a noticeable breeze around here today. Your chickens like celery? I'll have to try it, although mine are picky eaters. They'll eat broccoli leaves but not cauliflower leaves. They had a feast when they snuck into my cabbage patch, but they wouldn't eat the leaves I gave them after I harvested a cabbage head!

Boffer we have been giving them the tops of celery as the celery them selves are not forming stalks just yet in the green house & don't think they will as they are very crowed in there...but the ones in our SFG bed #2 are starting to grow stalks  ....not sure if the girls will eat the stalks, as they seem not to like the bok choi and broccoli  stalks, but loooove the leaves....

it was great a couple of days ago when after we harvested all of the bush peas, we pulled out our bush sugar snap peas vines and gave them to the girls and they loved them....nothing left of the large pile.....

happy gardening
rose who loves to feed her girls left overs from the garden!

Rose, those wood chips in your garden sure make it look nice and neat.

Glad your corn survived that kind of rough handling from the wind. Grass is a tough plant.

Got a wave petunia and some regular cascading petunias today, which also trail but not as much as a wave petunia does. So far for flowers I have three different colors of marigolds, purple veronica, pink wave petunias, pink cascading petunias, trailing purple lobelias, and my sage is flowering with nice yellow flowers. The veronica flowers look pretty small and unexceptional, but this was one of the plants that was hit with late blight last year, and so not a lot can be expected of it I suppose. But the section of retaining wall they're decorating is looking less dreary now. And the butterflies and bees are lovin' it, as well as the stuff whose flowers are too small to appreciate without a microscope, like lamb's lettuce and thyme.

Planted borage several times, and only recently got it to germinate, so those are just seedlings.

Think I'm going to go hunting for worms tomorrow and bring some up to the flower area by the retaining wall to enrich the soil. Already had some there from my little in-the-ground worm pot experiment last year, but I can't say their number was anywhere near as thick as I hear some people describe having them in their soil.

Experimenting with mass germination of MO4S lettuce in a tupperware container with an inch of vermiculite in it. Densely enough planted that I'd have to finger through the seedlings carefully to hand-separate them. We'll see. I don't have a heat mat, so germination is usually pretty dicey. But lettuce seeds are as cheap as it gets.

Marc Iverson wrote:...
Experimenting with mass germination of MO4S lettuce in a tupperware container with an inch of vermiculite in it.  We'll see.  I don't have a heat mat, so germination is usually pretty dicey.  But lettuce seeds are as cheap as it gets.

Some folks swear the top of the fridge is just as effective as a heat mat.

Marc your flowers sound wonderful!   I was hoping to get in more flowers....we did plant some seeds and I did see a few poking up thru the woodchips out front....but most of our flowers this year are from herbs and volunteers....when we lost all of our tomato and pepper seedlings this year....it really turned me off from wanting to start much more this year....we did start some beans and sunflowers and they are up and doing good and some are still waiting to be transplanted....now I need to get up the courage to start some fall crops soon....eek...I just want to direct sow them but I know the slugs will get them.....

happy gardening
rose

Some folks swear the top of the fridge is just as effective as a heat mat.

You know, I read that here, and it sounds like a great idea for a frugal gardener like me, but neither of our fridge tops gets noticeably warm. When I tried it, unfortunately I didn't see any difference.

FamilyGardening wrote:Marc your flowers sound wonderful!   I was hoping to get in more flowers....we did plant some seeds and I did see a few poking up thru the woodchips out front....but most of our flowers this year are from herbs and volunteers....when we lost all of our tomato and pepper seedlings this year....it really turned me off from wanting to start much more this year....we did start some beans and sunflowers and they are up and doing good and some are still waiting to be transplanted....now I need to get up the courage to start some fall crops soon....eek...I just want to direct sow them but I know the slugs will get them.....

happy gardening
rose

Sorry you got discouraged re your summer veggies, Rose. But eeek! it's hard to envision planting fall crops when we're not even fully into summer yet down here. I got an e-mail from Territorial Seeds talking about direct-sowing fall crops already, though, and have been thinking about it. They say now is exactly the time for brussels sprouts and broccoli. I love both.

Do you think there is any way you could protect them from the slugs?

I'm having really bad whitefly and leaf miner attacks now. Earlier the cabbage worms were bad, but they've slowed down a lot. And I've just started to see my horrible nemesis of last summer, spotted cucumber beetles! I won't even grow cucumbers anywhere near where I grew them last year.

I have seen a few snails, but not a slug in sight. *crosses fingers*

Did see a big garter snake last week, and a cute silver-dollar-sized froggie sleeping in the bottom of one of the pots I planted today. I took him over to my flower area and shook him out onto a shady spot.

Marc Iverson wrote:

Some folks swear the top of the fridge is just as effective as a heat mat.

You know, I read that here, and it sounds like a great idea for a frugal gardener like me, but neither of our fridge tops gets noticeably warm.  When I tried it, unfortunately I didn't see any difference.

Marc,
I have used my electric water heater to sprout warm weather crops such as tomatoes, peppers, & zucchini 
by placing them on top of it. Not sure about cool weather seeds like lettuce though, never have tried that.

Electric water heater? Hmm, that's an idea. I'll have to try it, thanks!

Marc Iverson wrote:

Some folks swear the top of the fridge is just as effective as a heat mat.

You know, I read that here, and it sounds like a great idea for a frugal gardener like me, but neither of our fridge tops gets noticeably warm.  When I tried it, unfortunately I didn't see any difference.

I use a drugstore heating pad. You know, the kind you use on your back after you turn your compost pile? The low setting works perfectly and everything germinates before the package says it will.

CC

CapeCoddess wrote:

Marc Iverson wrote:

Some folks swear the top of the fridge is just as effective as a heat mat.

You know, I read that here, and it sounds like a great idea for a frugal gardener like me, but neither of our fridge tops gets noticeably warm.  When I tried it, unfortunately I didn't see any difference.

I use a drugstore heating pad. You know, the kind you use on your back after you turn your compost pile? The low setting works perfectly and everything germinates before the package says it will.

CC

+1  Get  the one without the automatic shutoff

Kay