By Aditi Gowri

How much should I garden? My answer has changed quite a bit in the last two years. It was fun to brag that I ate from my own (no-till, permaculturish, heavily mulched) soil every day in Texas. I also fed friends and an AIDS food pantry for much of the year.

Things are different in Centretown Ottawa, with only a 3 x 3 metre flower bed to replace a 20 x 40 metre property. Last year I was ready to break up our paved drive! This year I limited myself to
• One Sweet 100 tomato, on the black fence piece;
• Four mystery determinates;
• Four basil leftover from Sally’s 18-pack splurge, foreground;
• Two habaneros — my Southern pet;
• Small patch of mesclun that mostly bolted at the shift of seasons;
• Small patch of radish (ditto). I stir fried the seed pods;
• A few beets;
• One white Italian zucchini — friends told me not to, I had to clip it back often, but it fed me the most;
• A dozen multiplying onions;
• Sunflowers and coneflowers, technically edible though I don’t;
• One mystery gourd, purchased in a styrofoam coffee cup for a dollar, labelled only in Chinese characters;
• Two miniature round cucumbers. Seeds labelled only in Italian. These and the gourd are just visible in early August, climbing a string towards the juniper.

But then, there is a farmer’s market on the bus line that goes by my house, and lots of small Asian grocers in walking distance. We have libraries, community centres, public parks, indoor public sport and play areas, cultural sites and temples of every flavour in this dense, multi-ethnic urban residential neighbourhood. So my own garden isn’t the only fun that’s easy to get to.

And then there is Winter. We had frost last week, even right downtown. My habanero plants hang by their ankles from the kitchen ceiling, slowly ripening a second crop of fruit. The roommates consider things to do underneath that would be suitably hotter than mistletoe …

It’s not so much that Canadians and other Northern people lose interest in plant life and soil over the Winter. It’s that we must somehow sustain our souls, our sense of place, and not least our bodies for the 5 or 7 frozen months. So we grow in other ways. Growing by ourselves and for ourselves in January is just not possible — emotionally, physically or infrastructurally. We need each other more than we need Nature, and we know it. Nasty old bus drivers let people on without a ticket because it’s not conceivable to leave them in the cold.

We need fresh foods in Winter too. So imagine 50 families on an urban block, with 50 sprouters and 50 sets of grow lights for salad greens. Such was my ambition when I moved here. I’d be happier and healthier tending indoor crops than a television. But I’d still be isolated. And in Winter, that’s much less bearable.

So I let small local business do the greenhousing. The bean sprouts and watercress in Chinatown are not certified organic, but they smell very good. And instead of tending plants, I spend the dark season at potlucks, homebrew nights, living room song circles and local pub tune sessions. For me, it’s a saner life.

In Winter we need a collective infrastructure to sustain us. But then we can’t ask it to go away for half a year. It might not come back when we need it next Fall! Social sustainability means I must be there for people if I want them to be there for me when I need them. So I support the same social spaces and businesses in Summer, too.

There’s more to it than that. I’m not sure it’s green to garden a lot. I’m pretty sure it’s much more important that I live in a house shared with four other adults. And that we’ve chosen to live where transport means walk, bike or bus. Human sustainability on the planet is going to require almost everyone to live in dense urban environments where we use very little fuel.

Growing a lot of food “homestead” style in Texas gave me a feeling that I was connected to the earth. I was also proud of my self-sufficiency. But now I feel that I was lying to myself… because of course I used a set of metal tools, a car to carry supplies and deliver food, and a lawn mower for chopping leaves. Roads, fuel, water … I wonder if it took more or less of the planet’s energy overall for me to grow food or for it to be grown for me? When I ate “my own” crops, I didn’t think about the roads, fuel, city water, and other social systems I depended upon to raise them. But really, was it so different from depending on the economy of Chinatown for my greens in Winter?

So these days I garden less but I think and write more about sustainable living. I worry less about getting every bit of uneaten biomass from kitchen back to soil. I am less in touch with soil itself, but more in touch with the earth and the city as a human habitat. And even in August, I’d rather sing with my buddies than talk to my squash.

---

Photo credits: Thanks to Kara a.k.a. “Doc” for taking my picture (1) at 7:00 a.m. before leaving for a day’s hospital duties. She’s standing on top of her tiny sedan, blocking a lane of traffic. (2) The view from Sally’s balcony.

Posted by at 2:34 PM | Permalink

By Marian Burros, published September 20, 2006 in the New York Times

If you crave spinach salad despite government warnings about possible contamination of spinach from California, buying local might do the trick.

The chances of buying uncooked spinach containing the deadly bacterium that has been making headlines for several days are significantly reduced if you know the farmer and how he farms, and if you wash the spinach thoroughly before eating it, a government official acknowledged.

The Food and Drug Administration has advised people not to eat any fresh spinach at all, not even cooked, although sufficient cooking (160 degrees for 15 seconds) kills E. coli O157:H7, the bacterium that has sickened scores of people around the country, including at least 18 who are critically ill, and killed at least one. The agency is concerned that even if the spinach is cooked, bacteria may have been left behind on a countertop or a knife, which could then contaminate another food being served raw.

Dr. David Acheson, chief medical officer of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the FDA, said the agency “wants to maintain a simple consumer message’’ and not confuse people by saying which circumstances are appropriate for eating uncooked spinach. But in a telephone conversation he acknowledged that it is less risky to eat locally grown spinach.

“Clearly the risk is significantly reduced if you know the farmer and know his farm,” he said, “particularly if you are on the East Coast,’’ far from the suspected source of the contamination.

Posted by at 6:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

To read the full newsletter, please go here:
http://www.kitchengardeners.org/newsletterseptember06.htm

Dear Kitchen Gardener,

Happy autumn or spring, depending on where you are in this big gardening world of ours. Today has a crisp ,fall-like feel to it in my neck of the woods with the temperature barely topping 60 degrees (16 C), if at all. Looking out my home office window towards my backyard, I see many of the telltale signs of a New England autumn: apples hanging from the tree, corn stalks, onions, pumpkins and winter squash curing in the sun, and the uppermost leaves of our white birch tree starting to change.

It is hard to believe that less than a month ago that same backyard space was filled Kitchen Garden Day (KGD) revelers thinking summer thoughts (to ward off the rain drops in our case) and enjoying the fragrant and juicy flavors of the season via a tomato tasting party. We had a good turnout of 30 people who toured 3 kitchen gardens in our neighborhood. Our celebration (see pictures here) was just one of many that took place. I want to share one KGD report I received by e-mail from Kirsty McKinnon of Norway (part of whose Kitchen Garden Day feast is captured in the photo above):

Kitchen Garden Day is over for this year. A great success according to ourselves! The weather was beautiful. More visitors than we had hoped for came and joined us to celebrate the Kitchen Garden. Everyone was delighted when invited to taste the various dishes we had prepared for the Kitchen Garden feast. We also displayed a family medicine chest made from ingredients from the garden and talked about medicinal herbs and their uses in our respective countries. Plants for vegetable dying were also exhibited. And of course we wandered in the garden and visitors were invited to collect seeds. We are very much inspired to continue the work and look forward to next year’s Kitchen Garden Day.

Well, Kirsty, your report and your beautiful photos have "inspired us back" to make next year's celebration even better. Please mark your calendars already for next year's party on August 26, 2007. My highly-biased opinion as a KGD event organizer is that the day offers a unique opportunity for local communities to gather around home-grown and home-made foods and that participants are delighted to peek into other people's gardens. As you may already know, we received some great press coverage this year and our sign campaign is off to a promising start. We're really making a difference in how people think about their food, so please keep it up and help us spread the word.

I had better wrap things up as my boys will soon be home from school and we'll need to start thinking about what's on the menu for dinner. Tonight is soccer night for my youngest son, so we'll need to come up with something fast and satisfying. We made up our yearly batch of freezer pesto a couple weeks back so that's always an option, but it seems a shame to tap into those winter reserves when there are fresh tomatoes and basil still coming out of the garden. Plus, we've got red peppers, zucchini and eggplant ready for harvesting so maybe it'll be ratatouille served over rice or couscous?

Anyway, I'll figure it out. This is one of those "good problems" we kitchen gardeners are happy to face.

All the best,

Posted by at 1:03 PM | Permalink

Architect Fritz Haeg is a man on a mission: he's looking to redefine the American lawn. Through his "Edible Estates" project and some good press coverage (see below), he's finding an audience for his delicious vision of what a frontyard could be.

Redefining American Beauty, by the Yard

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN, published in the New York Times, July 13, 2006

When Cecilia Foti, a seventh grader at the Bancroft Middle School here, was asked to write a “persuasive” essay for her English class in the spring semester, she did not choose a topic deeply in tune with her peers — the pros and cons of school uniforms, say, or the district’s retro policy on chewing gum and cellphones.

Instead, she addressed the neighborhood’s latest controversy: her family’s front yard. “The American lawn needs to be eradicated from our society and fast!” she wrote, explaining that her family had replaced its own with a fruit and vegetable garden. She argued for the importance of water conservation, the dangers of pesticides and the dietary benefits and visual appeal of an edible yard. “Was the Garden of Eden grass?” she reasoned. “No.”

In this quintessential 1950’s tract community about 25 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, the transformation of the Foti family’s front yard from one of grass to one dense with pattypan squash plants, cornstalks, millionaire eggplants, crimson sweet watermelons, dwarf curry trees and about 195 other edible varieties has been startling.

“The empty front lawn requiring mowing, watering and weeding previously on this location has been removed,” reads a placard set amid veggies in oval planting beds fronting the street.

The sign is a not-so-subtle bit of propaganda proclaiming the second and most recent installment of Edible Estates, an experimental project by Fritz Haeg, a 37-year-old Los Angeles architect and ersatz Frederick Law Olmsted. The project, which he inaugurated on the Fourth of July weekend in 2005 in a front yard in Salina, Kan., is part of a nascent “delawning” movement concerned with replacing lawns around the country with native plants, from prairie grasses in suburban Chicago to cactus gardens in Tucson.

It is a kind of high-minded version of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” As Mr. Haeg put it, “It’s about shifting ideas of what’s beautiful.

“It’s about what happens on that square of land between the public street and the private house. It’s about social engagement. I wanted to get away from the idea of home as an obsessive isolating cocoon.”

The Fotis volunteered for the project after reading about it in early 2006 at treehugger.com, an environmental Web site. Cecilia’s father, Michael Foti, a 36-year-old computer programmer and avid gardener who raises chickens in the backyard, was eager to put his environmental politics into practice.

“I am looking to think differently about this space,” Mr. Foti said of the family’s once-placid front yard. “I want to look outward rather than inward.”

The delawning was accomplished over Memorial Day weekend by a SWAT team of some 15 recruits who read about the project on Mr. Haeg’s Web site. Mr. Haeg arrived armed with three rented sod cutters , a roto-tiller and a dozen rakes and shovels, and within three days the yard was transformed.

The new garden has caused much rumbling in the neighborhood, a pin-neat community originally built after World War II for returning G.I.’s where colorful windsocks and plastic yard butterflies prevail. Some neighbors fret about a potential decline in property values, while others worry that all those succulent fruits and vegetables will attract drive-by thieves — as well as opossums and other vermin — in pursuit of Maui onions and Brandywine tomatoes.

But the biggest concern seems to be the breaching of an unspoken perimeter. “What happens in the backyard is their business,” said a 40-year-old high-voltage lineman who lives down the street and would give only his initials, Z.V. “But this doesn’t seem to me to be a front yard kind of a deal.”

In spite of its contemporary media-savvy title, Edible Estates is a throwback to the early 20th century, when yards were widely regarded as utilitarian spaces, particularly in working-class neighborhoods. As recently as the 1920’s and 1930’s, decorative lawns — which in this country date back at least to George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello — were still largely the province of the elite, according to Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve and the author of the new book “American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn” (W. W. Norton). The yard was for putting food on the table, Dr. Steinberg said, in the form of vegetables, goats, rabbits and small livestock.

It was not until the postwar period that the notion of the lawn as the “national landscape” developed as a vehicle for upward mobility, with zoning setbacks designed to encourage clover- and dandelion-free perfection — “the living version of broadloom carpeting,” Dr. Steinberg said.

While backyards remained private, the front yard evolved into “a ceremonial space that appears effortlessly and without labor,” said Margaret Crawford, a professor of urban design and planning theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “In middle-class neighborhoods,” she said, “the idea of actually using the front yard is extremely unusual.”

Mr. Haeg, who was raised in suburban Minneapolis, now lives in a geodesic dome in East Los Angeles with a subterranean sprayed-concrete cave worthy of Dr. No. Covered in mouse-brown asphalt shingles, it dates to 1984; he found it on the Internet in 2000. Soon after he moved in, he began cultivating edible plants like kale and pineapple guava in his terraced garden, and he surrounded the dome with trellises for grapevines.

Mr. Haeg is perhaps best known in Los Angeles for his Sundown Salons, which transform his three-level, shag-carpeted home into an alternative cultural space that attracts artists, other architects, recent M.F.A. graduates and assorted gadflies. The theme and tenor of the once-a-month gatherings, which began shortly after he moved in, have varied; they’ve included traditional literary gatherings as well as gay and lesbian performance art and all-night knitting and “make your own pasta animal” sessions.

Mr. Haeg has taught at several colleges, including the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., where he oversaw his students’ design and construction of Gardenlab, a campus community garden, beginning in 2001. He is now designing a house for a film executive in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles and a rooftop garden for an apartment complex in downtown Los Angeles.

Mr. Haeg selected Salina as his first Edible Estates site for its heartland symbolism — it is close to the geographic center of the country — and found his first subjects, Stan and Priti Cox, through the Land Institute, a Salina-based organization dedicated to ecologically sustainable agriculture, where Mr. Cox worked as a plant geneticist.

“I didn’t feel any emotion,” Ms. Cox, 38, said of her defunct sod expanse. “It was monotonous. Now my senses are stimulated.”

Mr. Haeg is planning seven more Edible Estates sites. (Coming soon: Baltimore and Minneapolis.) Though he lacks training in landscape architecture or horticulture, he has been shrewd in his recruitment of plant-literate people with sunny, treeless front yards.

So far each “estate” has been planted to reflect its region: the Cox garden in Kansas is heavy with okra and corn, with a smattering of bitter gourd, pimento and curry trees in deference to Ms. Cox’s Indian roots. The Fotis’ yard in California is resplendent with pomelos, oranges, mandarins and other citrus fruit.

Mr. Haeg regards the Edible Estates project as something of a manifesto. He fantasizes about setting off a “chain reaction” among gardeners that would challenge Americans to rethink their lawns — which he insists on calling “pre-edible” landscapes — though he knows the chances are slim. Still, he wants to make a point.

“Diversity is healthy,” he said. “The pioneers were ecologically-minded out of sheer necessity, because they had to eat what they grew. But we’ve lost touch with the garden as a food source.”

What is theoretical for Mr. Haeg, of course, has become everyday reality for Michael Foti, who must live with his edible estate and arrive home from a long day at the office to prune and weed and smite caterpillars into the wee hours — without pesticide, he is quick to note.

Mr. Foti is taking the garden one day at a time, A.A. style, a bit uneasy at the thought of waning daylight. The biggest pest, he noted, is “inertia.”

“We sometimes joke that it’s the garden that ate our marriage,” he said, then added wearily: “I do feel a certain pressure not to fail. The whole neighborhood is watching.”

Text source: New York Times
Photo source: Edible Estates

Posted by at 10:03 AM | Permalink

Save seeds for next year's crop

By Lee Reich, for the Associated Press

If you've been picking some particularly tasty tomatoes from your garden, get ready now for a repeat performance next summer by saving seeds.

Sure, next year you could order seeds and grow you own transplants or buy transplants, just as you did this year. But what if the place where you bought the transplants doesn't carry that particular variety next year, or the seed company no longer carries those seeds?

Newer varieties of tomatoes, just because they are new, often upstage older ones, sometimes making it difficult to buy transplants or seeds of some of the very tastiest heirloom tomato varieties. That's why seeds or transplants of delectable tomatoes such as Rose de Berne, Carbon, and Belgian Giant, for example, are hard or impossible to find.

Saving your own tomato seeds is an easy way to get around this problem. The only exceptions would be hybrid varieties and the few varieties that don't self-pollinate, such as potato-leaf types (Brandywine, for example) and small, delectably sweet currant tomatoes.

Hybrid types revert to their inferior parents, and tomatoes that don't self pollinate pick up genes from other varieties nearby. In the latter case, reduce chances for cross-pollination by not growing these varieties near other varieties.

For other tomatoes, look to the plants themselves in selecting fruit from which to save seed. If you have more than one plant of your favorite variety, look for the healthiest plant bearing fruit most typical of that variety.

No need to sacrifice your best tomato fruits. Choose a fruit and slice it in half, not through the stem end but the other way. The seed-containing locules are now staring at you, so turn each fruit half upside down over a glass and squeeze enough to dribble out the seeds. Now go ahead and eat the tomato.

Sprouting inhibitors around the seeds are why tomato seeds don't germinate within the juicy fruits. You need to get rid of these inhibitors by adding a little water to the tomato mush and then letting it ferment. After two or three days, pour the seeds into a fine strainer, then rinse them and shake off the excess water.

Spread the moist seeds on a paper towel and leave them in a dry place. A protected spot in sunlight or a gentle fan will speed drying. After a couple more days, scrape the dry seeds off the paper towel and put them into a labeled envelope -- your ticket to another summer of tomato heaven.

Posted by at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

KGI harvested a bumper crop of media coverage and public awareness this past summer. We were featured in two local papers in Maine, the Maine Sunday Telegram (Maine's largest in terms of circulation), Maine television, two garden radio shows (WXTK - Boston and KDKA - Pittsburgh), calendar listings in many places including the Chicago Tribune and the American Gardener magazine, the progressive website CommonDreams.org, and - as the cherry on top - in Barbara Damrosch's column in the Washington Post (see below). We were also invited to speak by a number of different groups (local foods groups, a peak oil awarness group, gardening clubs, and a culinary group) and have other speaking engagements forthcoming. Please let us know if you are aware of an opportunity for getting our messages out to a larger group.

A Shrinking Homegrown Crop

By Barbara Damrosch
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, September 7, 2006

One of the Web sites I check out regularly, Kitchen Gardeners International ( http://www.kitchengardeners.org), is the work of an American named Roger Doiron. His stories are always interesting, but his news is not always good. In March, he posted a U.S. Department of Agriculture chart showing the decline of homegrown food from 33.45 percent of total consumed in 1894 to 1.5 percent in 2004. Undiscouraged, Doiron continued to rally his troops. "We know a good thing when we plant one," he cheered.

I knew I'd feel better if I reread one of my favorite books, "Paradise Out of a Common Field: The Pleasures and Plenty of the Victorian Garden," by Joan Morgan and Alison Richards. It portrays a lost age in which the great country houses of Britain were self-sustaining horticultural units, complete with game park, pastured livestock and many acres of fruits and vegetables grown within a brick or stone wall. This wall did more than just keep out prey; it also absorbed the sun's heat, thus speeding the growth and ripening of plants trained on it or grown near it. Additional heat from stoves could be introduced via chambers within the masonry. Lean-to glasshouses were arrayed along the property, one to a crop (the "fig house," the "apricot house," the "vinery"), and every horticultural trick was employed to produce an extended season of produce -- cold frames, manure-warmed "hot beds," pit greenhouses.

The result was garden produce of rare quality, not only because of the skill with which it was raised, but also because of its freshness and immediacy. During the 19th century, public markets were well stocked, and out-of-season fruits and vegetables were available, but these did not always meet, in the authors' words, "the essential country house criterion of surpassing anything commercially available."

To provide the best of flavors for an endless parade of guests, there had to be a seasonal (and often out-of-season) supply of asparagus, sea kale, globe artichokes, peas, asparagus, French beans, radishes, cauliflower, young carrots, salsify, cardoons, celery, celeriac, savoy cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cucumbers, beets, lettuce, endive, chicory and all the important herbs and fruits -- including pineapples and bananas. It was said that a head gardener's career might stand or fall on his continuous supply of fine celery, or his ability to produce strawberries for Easter and new potatoes for Christmas. For the end of a meal, just-picked fruits were arrayed like jewels, with the dewy bloom still on them. Shipping even as far as a family's London residence was an exacting task, requiring special boxes and hampers. Asparagus and beans were packed in spinach leaves, fruits in grape leaves or soft paper.

Few mourn the passing of the near-feudal social structure that produced these luxuries, but the discriminating palates that commanded them are an inspiration. It is fascinating to visit the few remaining examples of these estates -- such as West Dean, near Chichester -- that are open to the public. I've also noticed a movement in this country, among those with means, to set up self-sufficient farms at their own homes, born of the realization that superb fresh food is valuable, that what you put into your body is at least as important as what car you drive and what you pour into its tank.

There is also a small but growing sector of city dwellers who raise food in community plots, and surely some rural families who never lost their food-raising skills and can thereby survive better than most on little money. And what about the new health-conscious eaters, striving for their five fruits and vegetables per day, or all the gourmet foodies cranking out linguini by hand? Don't they want fresh-picked tomatoes to go on top? Some foodies are also gardeners, to be sure, but most regard themselves as highly skilled shoppers and, to be fair, there are excellent farmers markets to supply them.

Recently I came across a study by USDA agricultural economist Susan L. Pollack titled "Consumer Demand for Fruit and Vegetables: The U.S. Example." People are eating more fruits and vegetables, she says, and more of it is fresh, but she ascribes much of this trend to "convenience" produce -- bagged salad mixes, easy-to-peel clementines, and those baby carrots called "grinders" in the trade because they're actually big carrots cut up and tumbled to look like small ones. If people aren't ready to chop up a head of lettuce, are they ready to grow one?

On July 26, Doiron posted an update. The 2005 table was out, and homegrown food had sunk to 1.26 percent. Who's growing it? The rich, the poor, Doiron and I, and anyone else who knows what it's like to pick an ear of corn and scrape the living kernels into pancake batter as I did this morning. And if I have learned one thing in life, it is that good things do not remain secret forever.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Posted by at 5:41 AM | Permalink

The German word sauerkraut literally means "sour cabbage" and is the word used most often in the west for cabbage that has been pickled. To know sauerkraut, one must know something about its main ingredient, the humble and ever dependable cabbage. The cultivation of cabbage goes back 4000 years. Horsemen from China and Mongolia learned to preserve this vegetable in brine and it became the main nourishment of the builders of the Great Wall of China in the third century BC. Later, pickled cabbage arrived in Europe from the East, carried by Hun
and Mongol cavalcades.

While these horsemen introduced a new conservation method and Barbarian flavor to Europe, cabbage had long been the favorite vegetable of an entire continent, particularly until the introduction of the potato. In fact, the Celts may have introduced cabbage to the British Isles as early as the 4th century BC.

For centuries, cabbage was a staple that sustained European populations during great famines. During the Hundred Years War, battles were won or lost depending on whether fresh provisions of cabbage had arrived at the soldiers' camps. Similarly, when General Lee took possession of Chambersburg on his way to Gettysburg, among the first things he demanded for his army was twenty-five barrels of sauerkraut. More recently, during WWII, sauerkraut, despite its German name, was considered a patriotic food in the US. Citizens were encouraged to make their own as a way of contributing to the war effort.

Sandorkraut's Sauerkraut Recipe
Most of today's commercially available sauerkraut is clinically "dead" which is how most people prefer their food. Not the kitchen gardener. If kitchen gardeners grow and cook their own, it's because they want to experience food in all its vitality. The solution for enjoying sauerkraut that is alive and tangy is simple: make it yourself. By making your own unpasteurized kraut, you take in all the beneficial bacterial cultures that make it so good for us.

This recipe and the images on this page come courtesy of Sandor Ellix Katz (aka Sandorkraut) and his great book "Wild Fermentation" (Chelsea Green). If you're interested in exploring the wild world of home fermentation, please check out his site and buy his book. He knows of what he speaks.

Timeframe: 1-4 weeks (or more)

Special Equipment:-large ceramic crock or food-grade plastic bucket
-Plate that fits inside crock or bucket
-One-gallon jug filled with water
-Cloth cover (like a pillowcase or towel)

Ingredients (for 1 gallon):-5 pounds cabbage
-3 tablespoons sea salt

Process:
1. Chop or grate cabbage, finely or coarsely, with or without hearts, however you like it. I love to mix green and red cabbage to end up with bright pink kraut. Place cabbage in a large bowl as you chop it.
2. Sprinkle salt on the cabbage as you go. The salt pulls water out of the cabbage (through osmosis), and this creates the brine in which the cabbage can ferment and sour without rotting. The salt also has the effect of keeping the cabbage crunchy, by inhibiting organisms and enzymes that soften it. 3 tablespoons of salt is a rough guideline for 5 pounds of cabbage. I never measure the salt; I just shake some on after I chop up each cabbage. I use more salt in summer, less in winter.
3. Add other vegetables. Grate carrots for a coleslaw-like kraut. Other vegetables I’ve added include onions, garlic, seaweed, greens, Brussels sprouts, small whole heads of cabbage, turnips, beets, and burdock roots. You can also add fruits (apples, whole or sliced, are classic), and herbs and spices (garlic, bay leaf, caraway seeds, dill seeds, celery seeds, and juniper berries are classic, but anything you like will work). Experiment.
4. Mix ingredients together and pack into crock. Pack just a bit into the crock at a time and tamp it down hard using your fists or any (other) sturdy kitchen implement. The tamping packs the kraut tight in the crock and helps force water out of the cabbage.
5. Cover kraut with a plate or some other lid that fits snugly inside the crock. Place a clean weight (a glass jug filled with water) on the cover. This weight is to force water out of the cabbage and then keep the cabbage submerged under the brine. Cover the whole thing with a cloth to keep dust and flies out.
6. Press down on the weight to add pressure to the cabbage and help force water out of it. Continue doing this periodically (as often as you think of it, every few hours), until the brine rises above the cover. This can take up to about 24 hours, as the salt draws water out of the cabbage slowly. Some cabbage, particularly if it is old, simply
contains less water. If the brine does not rise above the plate level by the next day, add enough salt water to bring the brine level above the plate. Add about a teaspoon of salt to a cup of water and stir until it’s completely dissolved.
7. Leave the crock to ferment. I generally store the crock in an unobtrusive corner of the kitchen where I won’t forget about it, but where it won’t be in anybody’s way. You could also store it in a cool basement if you want a slower fermentation that will preserve for longer.
8. Check the kraut every day or two. The volume reduces as the fermentation proceeds. Sometimes mold appears on the surface. Many books refer to this mold as “scum,” but I prefer to think of it as a bloom. Skim what you can off of the surface; it will break up and you will probably not be able to remove all of it. Don’t worry about this. It’s just a surface phenomenon, a result of contact with the air. The kraut itself is under the anaerobic protection of the brine. Rinse off the plate and the weight. Taste the kraut. Generally it starts to be tangy after a few days, and the taste gets stronger as time passes. In the cool temperatures of a cellar in winter, kraut can keep improving for months and months. In the summer or in a heated room, its life cycle is more rapid. Eventually it becomes soft and the flavor turns less pleasant.
9. Enjoy. I generally scoop out a bowl- or jarful at a time and keep it in the fridge. I start when the kraut is young and enjoy its evolving flavor over the course of a few weeks. Try the sauerkraut juice that will be left in the bowl after the kraut is eaten. Sauerkraut juice is a rare delicacy and unparalleled digestive tonic. Each time you scoop some kraut out of the crock, you have to repack it carefully. Make sure the kraut is packed tight in the crock, the surface is level, and the cover and weight are clean. Sometimes brine evaporates, so if the kraut is not submerged below brine just add salted water as necessary. Some people preserve kraut by canning and heat-processing it. This can be done; but so much of the power of sauerkraut is its aliveness that I wonder: Why kill it?
10. Develop a rhythm. I try to start a new batch before the previous batch runs out. I remove the remaining kraut from the crock, repack it with fresh salted cabbage, then pour the old kraut and its juices over the new kraut. This gives the new batch a boost with an active culture starter.

Enjoying your Feast
In addition to being good for you, sauerkraut is just plain good. A nourishing, peasant food at heart, pickled cabbage has earned its way to international culinary respectability by offering a versatile canvas for diverse flavors and spices. A few of its most loved manifestations are "choucroute garni" (Alsace), "kimchi" (Korea),
sauerkraut soup (Eastern Europe), and the Reuben Sandwich (US). Below you'll find links to a few of its best known and loved incarnations:

Choucroute Garnie à l'Alsacienne

Choucroute Garnie à l'Alsacienne (2)

Austrian Kucherlkraut (Beef and Sauerkraut)

Polish Pierogies with Sauerkraut and Mushrooms

German-style Beer-braised sauerkraut with Sausage

James Beard's Choucroute with Champagne

Slovak Sauerkraut Christmas Soup

Japanese-style Pickled Cabbage

Pickled Cabbage El Salvador Style

Korean Kimchi

Georgian Pickled Cabbage with Beets

Classic Reuben Sandwich