I usually don’t make sauerkraut until October or so, when it’s cooler. I had planned to do the same thing this year but something decided a few days ago that our cabbage looked pretty darned tasty and commenced to eating it. Not just little nibbles, that I could have lived with. No, whatever this critter is, it takes big ol bites and can put away half a cabbage or two a night. We think it might be rabbits but we haven’t seen any evidence other than rapidly disappearing cabbages.

So instead of feeding the bunnies, I harvested all but 2 damaged plants and 2 small cabbages which are sheltered by our potato plants and seem to have escaped notice for the time being.

I ended up with 8 cabbages for my kraut.

If you’ve ever wondered how sauerkraut is made or wanted to try making it yourself, then this is your lucky day because I am going to show you!

How To Make Sauerkraut

Sauerkraut is made and put up in heavy ceramic crocks here in Germany. The crocks aren’t exactly cheap but they are wonderful for fermenting/pickling food and they will last forever if you handle them with care. I’ve also used them to make salted green beans and I am sure there are other things you could use them for but I’ve only done the kraut and beans. You can buy these crocks in the US. I don’t know anything about the company I just linked to, but their crocks look nice. You don’t have to use a crock to make sauerkraut but since that’s the only way I’ve done it, that’s how I’m going to show you.

The slicer I am using is a great time saver and cuts the cabbage nice and fine but it’s not necessary. You can use a knife and just cut the strips as thin as you can. You can buy slicers like mine in the US, do a Google search for cabbage cutter or kraut cutter. I found several on Ebay. Mine is about 2ft long 8″ wide and has 3 very sharp blades…did I mention these blades are sharp? They will take bits of your fingers off in a hurry so becareful if you use one. The stamper is a great tool to have also if you plan on doing this very often and especially if you are going to use a crock.

Here’s a picture of all the supplies you’ll need…

So other than crock, slicer and stamper, the only other supplies you’ll need is salt (I’m using course-grained kitchen salt but any kind will work). And you’ll need a scale. Mine is a cheap one from Ikea. And that’s it!

First step is to wash your crock with boiling hot water. Wash your cabbage, pick off any damaged leaves and let dry.

I lay my slicer across my sink with a large bowl underneath it. All you do is put a cabbage in the box and slide it back and forth across the blades until there is nothing left but the stem (watch the fingers!). I can slice and entire cabbage in about 30 seconds with this thing :O)

I layer my cabbage into the crock in 1 lb. layers. So weigh your sliced cabbage and put it into your crock.

You then add 1 TBLS. of salt on top of each new layer. Once the salt is added, it’s time to do some stamping. You need to break the fibers inside the cabbage so that it will release it’s liquid, which will mix with the salt and make brine. Stamp your cabbage until you see liquid developing. You need to stamp again after every new layer of cabbage and salt is added.

I ended up fitting 18 lbs (approx. 8kg.) of cabbage in my crock and I probably could have fit another cabbage but that’s all I had. So my crock will hold about 20lbs of cabbage…that’s a good winter’s supply for a small family. In the picture below you can see the accumulated liquid, it’s very soupy!

Once your crock is nearly full, put the lid on and fill the groove around the lid with water. The water makes a seal so that no bad stuff can get inside, but the gas can escape. The crock needs to sit in a warm place for about 2 weeks, during which time you need to check it every day. Make sure the water in the groove stays full. Don’t open the lid to look inside, you don’t want any bad beasties getting in there! Just keep the water full around the lid. You will hear little “Bloops” from the crock occasionally, this is a good thing, this is the gas escaping from the crock which means that fermentation is happening inside. After 2 weeks the crock needs to be moved to a cooler place (a cellar is good) to stop the fermentation process but to continue the preserving process. You can begin to eat it at this point.

Keep an eye on the water level even after you’ve stopped the fermenting process. Keep the water level up until you’ve finished eating all your sauerkraut or until it eventually goes bad. It should hold for a season if the temps are cool enough and you keep an eye on it.

Last night’s harvest…a basket full of spinach and radishes. I’m going to make a creamy spinach gorgonzola sauce and serve it over gnocchi….mmmmm….low in calories? No way, but…mmmmm!

This actually took place a few weeks ago on May 24th. I’m a bit late writing it up.

In the early spring our bees begin their busy season by collecting pollen from nearby willow trees. Next comes blackthorn and soon after comes dandelions, with several other early blooming things added to the mix.

If we had neighbors, I’m sure they would probably hate us because we never cut down our dandelions until they have gone to seed. In early spring, our yard is a blanket of golden yellow filled with happy buzzing bees. They need the pollen and we just happen to like dandelions :O)

Here in our village we are literally surrounded by fields which is common in Germany, crops are planted on nearly every patch of ground that isn’t used for housing, or forest land, or grazing land, that’s the only way to support such a huge population in such a relatively small country. Here in our village the main crops are wheat, oats, rye, barley, corn, rapeseed, potatoes and sugar beets. Rapeseed is the earliest flowering crop and it makes up a large percentage of what our honey is made of.

This is a shot of the fields just on the other side of our fence, just behind our berry patch. Just one of many rapeseed fields in full flower.

I did a post last year which shows more of the actual honey extracting process, you can find it in my old blog, here (scroll down to the May 22nd entry). This year I was out of town when Peer harvested the honey but a friend took a few pictures for me.

Many of the beekeepers in our area do 2 harvests a year, they harvest in the spring and then again in the summer. We did that last year but we ended up having to feed our bees with commercial “sugar water” so that they could survive over the winter. That didn’t make a whole lotta sense to us, for one thing it’s expensive to buy, it’s not sustainable, not to mention that we don’t need all that honey so why not let the bees keep it? From now on, we’ll only harvest once a year, in the spring.

Anyway, here is the honey after it has been extracted from the comb and filtered. Peer is pouring it into a large bucket which has a spigot at the bottom designed for filling small jars.

Peer’s assembly line :o)

Since we don’t sell our honey, we don’t need a special room for this, our honey is only for us and our friends and family, so we do it the old fashioned way and just use our kitchen..

Mmmm, honey….

We ended up with 80 jars from 3 hives which is not necessarily a big harvest, but it’s more than plenty for us!

We finally had a break in the weather and also had enough rain to nearly fill both of our rain barrels! We really needed the rain, the garden looks much happier now

Today I worked in our tiny berry patch, we’ve got raspberries, gooseberries and black currants, all of which are just beginning to ripen. I hadn’t set up a trellis for them yet and so that’s what I did today, a bit late but better late than never. The one I set up today is only temporary, next year I want to set up a more permanent wire and pole trellis.

On a slightly embarrassing note, I found a corner of the yard today, near the bee hives, which is just crawling with ladybug larvae…Doh!! Since I bought some a few weeks ago, I see them literally everywhere now…Peer calls this whole misadventure my 14 Euro lesson in the life-cycle of the ladybug…

One other project that we are working on this summer is the preperation of an herb garden. I’m not talking about some dinky kitchen garden I’m talking a big and intricate garden

Here is where the garden will go, Peer is still working on turning the soil…

And here is roughly what I want it to look like…

The black outlines show where there will be a brick border. The brown area is a walkway, it will either be gravel or bark, I would love to use crushed hazel nut shells like I saw on the foot paths of the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, but I don’t think I will find them available here. In the very center will be a bird bath. I’m not sure exactly how the herbs will be arranged just yet, but that’s the basic design. I eventually want to have a good supply of kitchen as well as medicinal herbs, many will go in the garden and others will be planted on the slopes.

Woo-hoo! Who’d of thought that I’d ever get this excited about a radish? This is our first tiny harvest of the year. This is the first time we’ve grown these and they are super easy to grow! This year we planted everything all at one time so once our small crop of radishes are gone, that’s it for this year. Next year, after we’ve gotten a bit more experience and our soil is even better, we’ll try putting in new plants/seeds every few weeks, so that we’ll have the harvest time spaced out a bit more and have enough to last the whole season without everything popping up all at the same time.

Well, I don’t know… I went out this evening and checked all the little baggies. They were all empty except for one which had one larvae still inside. I don’t see any sign of them on the plants so I can only hope that they are there.

Meanwhile, I found a few places in the city where they fall from the trees like rain…naturally I find them AFTER I bought mine. So next year, if they are needed, I’ll take a paper bag and head for the city….in 10 minutes time I bet I’ll have enough larvae for the whole village :O)

We had our second swarm of the season yesterday. It came out of the same hive that swarmed last weekend, this one was much larger. This time the bees settled in a blackthorn tree just behind our house, about 10 feet above the level of our roof.

If you click on the picture you will get a larger view.

Peer couldn’t reach them from this side of the tree so he had to go around back and using a ladder he cut away some of the branches and then tried to knock them into a swarm catching bag. Unfortunately it didn’t work, he needed about 3 other hands to do the sawing, hold on the the ladder, grab the branch and balance it, etc. We had to go to a dinner party so we had to leave them….when we came home, unfortunately they were long gone.

An update on the artificial swarm that I told you about a few days ago…

The day after we added the queen, the bees were able to set her free and became quite happy and content once again. Peer moved them from the cellar, into their new home yesterday and they are doing really well. They are beginning to fly and to do all the usual “bee stuff” so all is well once again, in our little kingdom :O)

Rising fuel prices is something that affects us all, no matter what country we live in. Fuel has always been nearly 4 times higher here in Europe than it is in the US so things like bikes, trains, buses, and even walking, have always been common forms of transportation. We’ve wanted to do away with our car for a long time now, not only because of the high fuel prices but just because we hate being tied down with a car and everything that comes as a result of owning one. Now that we are paying $9.50 a gallon here for fuel, we have re-doubled our efforts and are only using the car when absolutely necessary.

Since I work at home, we only really need the car for the weekly grocery shopping, or for when we need to transport something big, or the occasional trip out of town. Peer also uses it to get to work.

It was about 4 years ago that we bought our bikes, it was a first step toward our dream of someday  becoming totally car-free. Peer now rides his bike fairly often to work which is about 10 miles from here but the problem is that it is so easy to revert to the car when faced with things like cold, rainy and icky weather or just when you are feeling tired and don’t wanna pedal. But he keeps at it and eventually he hopes to be able to ride his bike to work every day with only the occasional exception.

Last week we took our next step toward becoming car free. We bought a bike trailer.

The trailer is fairly lightweight and sturdy. It weights about 25lb. It should hold up to 6 full grocery bags which is much more than we need in a week. The front and back will collapse so we can carry things that are longer and the whole thing collapses for storage. Peer has ridden a bit with it and says he doesn’t really notice the weight or that it is even back there. We’ll see how it goes with our first shopping experience. We have 2 grocery stores that are within about 6 miles of us, the only difficulty is that they are both down hill from our house meaning that the trip home will not only include more weight, but will be more strenuous and might even require that he gets off and does a bit of pushing at the steepest parts…it will certainly take a bit of training.

As for me and my bike? Well, I am definitely out of shape so no trailer pulling for me until I do quite a bit of training…I plan to work on it though! :O)

While I was playing with my new leetle friends the other evening, Peer was creating an artificial swarm…

In our little village of 400, there are 2 beekeepers. Peer, who has 5 hives (soon to be 6) and the other beekeeper, who has kept bees here for about 30 years and has on average, about 15 hives. His bees are about a 1/4 of a mile away from us.

The other beekeeper stopped the other night and offered Peer one of his queens which he was going to kill off in order to replace her with a stronger one. She’s a good queen, but this beekeeper, who does quite a bit of experimenting with breeding, etc., likes queens who can produce huge colonies…this little queen apparently doesn’t.

Perfect! This would allow us to fill another one of the new hives.

Since the queen would come to us without any other bees at all, we needed to collect enough bees from our own hives to make a good sized colony for her. You can do this by creating an artificial swarm.

This is our swarm box, it’s what you catch swarms in and where they can stay for a short time until you get a real hive ready for them. The hole on the top is where you can put a jar of honey so they have something to eat. We poked lots of tiny holes in the lid of the jar so the honey will drip out very slowly. The screening in the front is a queen excluder. The worker bees can crawl through and into the box, but the queen and the drones are too big and can’t fit through. We need to use the queen excluder to make sure we don’t accidentally add a queen from one of the established hives into the swarm.

So Peer began by smoking the hives really heavily which causes the bees to immediately take up as much honey as they can carry (they think it’s a forest fire and so load up with honey before they are forced to leave their home). In a real swarm the bees are all loaded up with as much honey as they can carry which they will use to feed the hive until they can begin producing food for themselves again. In an artificial swarm you have to fool them into loading up with honey.

After giving them a few minutes to load with honey, he opened our strongest hive and lifting out each comb from the honey room box, he gently brushed the bees into the plastic container and then sprayed them with a mist of water so they couldn’t fly back into the hive. He did this with our 2 strongest hives until he had collected a good amount of bees.

He dumped the bees into the swarm box…

And then the real fun began…

The bees couldn’t fly but that didn’t stop them from wandering all over the place. Peer sat here with his bee brush and his water bottle and waited patiently while they slowly crawled into the box.

This is after 1 hour…

After 2 hours….

I finally went in at this point. Peer ended up waiting for 3 hours before everyone except the drones were in. The drones he dumped back into the hives. The artificial swarm went into the cellar for the night. They need to realize that they don’t have a queen anymore which they definitely realize after a night in the cellar all alone! I checked in on them yesterday morning and they were furious, very agitated and very loud!

When Peer came home yesterday evening he went with the other beekeeper to catch the queen. They then brought her back here and put her into a small cage with a piece of candy to block the entrance. Then they set the cage into the swarm box and put them back into the cellar.

The reason that the bees needed to spend the first night alone is that they have to know they don’t have a queen, if we would have put the new queen in right way, they might have killed her. By the next morning they knew and so were ready to accept a new queen. But still it is best to let them get acquainted slowly. With the queen in a cage, they can sense her and touch her and begin caring for her, but she is still sheltered a bit from them. They will spend the next day or so eating the candy away so they can free her, by then, the hive has bonded and can be put into a real hive together. I peeked in on them again this morning and it is like a totally different group. They are very calm, quiet and content now that they have a queen again.

I think tomorrow they will be ready to transfer into their new home.

As the title implies, we will NOT do this again. While it does work, it is a real pain in the butt and pretty stressful for the bees too. In future I think we will rely on natural swarms to fill the new hives.

I think that bringing about a balance between beneficial critters and the not so beneficial critters can certainly be done, in fact people are doing it all the time. I think that it just takes a bit more thought and consideration before acting, it takes patience and also a bit of creative planning or thinking outside the box. It’s easy to drive down to the local garden center and buy just the right pesticide for what is ailing you, but the long term consequences can be huge, while the fix is generally pretty short term. Once you begin using these pesticides you have to keep using them because you are completely destroying the natural balance, not to mention killing many critters that you never intended to kill in the first place.

So my first step in bringing about a balance has been to just sit back and see what’s going on in our garden and on our tiny patch of land. What is out of control, what seems to be missing? What can I do to bring in or attract the things that are missing?

We currently have tons of aphids for example. Three weeks ago they were so heavy on my rose and berry bushes I thought I might lose them. I watched for several days and did nothing. I discovered that we do have a few natural eaters of aphids here that I didn’t know about including; green lacewing flies, a green beetle that I haven’t been able to identify yet and some small green caterpillars that I also haven’t identified. So the aphids began disappearing although not quite as much as I’d like. I decided to bring in some re-enforcements…

Ok, I must admit this is not exactly what I expected when I ordered lady bugs. I knew I would be receiving lady bug larvae but I thought somehow that they would be larger…you know, at least larger than the aphids they were suppose to eat!

I have no idea what lady bugs cost in other parts of the world, these little guys cost me $24.00 USD for 60 flea-sized larvae. I’m ok with that, so long as they actually live long enough to establish.

Here is a closer look at one of these little beasties….

Aphids, be afraid…be very afraid!

The larvae came with a supply of small paper bags which the company recommends that you place the larvae, along with all the wood shavings, into. So I did…while holding my breath so as not to blow them all away!

I ended up with 5 baggies full of larvae and shavings which I clipped around the yard onto plants that had a good supply of aphids.

These guys supposedly eat about 100 aphids a day each (I assume that is when they get a bit larger!) and are much more voracious hunters than the adult lady bugs…but now we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. I hope they’ll survive and become a welcome part of our little eco-system :o)

]]> http://lavendercreek.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/say-hello-to-my-leetle-friends/feed/ lavendercreek