An Attempt at Lactofermentation

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With harvest season upon us, the fields are generating a variety of fruits and vegetables. It is now time to seriously begin preserving this food for the Winter.

Over the past few months, we have been making jams and preserves of all sorts. One common denominator to this work is an attempt to bring the acidity of our produce to high enough a level to achieve shelf stability. With most fruits this is readily achieved since they are for the most parts high in Citric Acid. If not, we tend to add Lemon juice to the mix to both achieve the right Ph and ensure jelling with our Apple pectin. With most vegetables this is achieved by making a brine with a sufficient amount of vinegar.

There is another natural manner to achieve acidity and that is Lacto-fermentation. This process uses a naturally occurring bacteria on the surface of most vegetables to ferment and achieve an acidic brine. The most common vegetables used would be for example pickling cucumbers or cabbage (ie. Sauerkraut). Since we had a good harvest of small cabbages from our raised beds, we decided to attempt our first Sauerkraut.

Beautiful little cabbages ready for Lacto-fermnetation

The first step is to simply shred the Cabbage. This can be done with a Mandoline, but another easy way is to simply quarter the cabbage and core it. All it takes then is to thinly slice the Cabbage quarters.

Shredding Cabbage is not all that difficult nor time consuming

The next step is to blend the shredded Cabbage with salt. For about 25 lbs of Cabbage, one cup of salt should do. The salt is used to extract the juices from the Cabbage and you will be surprised as to how much juice they contain.

To obtain this juice, you typically need a little bit of resourcefulness. In the old days, crocks were specifically designed for this purpose. Today, these crocks are hard to come by. The idea is to place your cabbage in a container and press it until the juice is released.

In our case, we decided to make a Ukrainian style Sauerkraut, combining the Cabbage with one third by weight shredded Carrots. We jerry-rigged our Sauerkraut crock using a plastic food container, a lid to press the shredded vegetables, and a pot full of water to weigh down on the lid.

Within a day, the vegetable juices overcome the shredded mixture

It is important to use sanitized instruments for this process. You do not want to grow any other type of bacteria but the Lactobacillus. A cloth cover is also important. This mixture will readily attract fruit flies.

Over time, the juices will show signs of fermentation. They will bubble and begin to create a foam which can be regularly skimmed off the top.

Within 3-5 weeks, the process is completed and the Sauerkraut should be ready. It can be placed as is in a cold cellar for storage and used as needed, or it can be packed.

We canned ours in mason jars for storage and added a vinegar brine to ensure shelf stability (although not necessary if the right level of acidity is already achieved). We took the opportunity to add a few spices.

Sauerkraut for the Winter months

Elsewhere on the farm. we were quite surprised to see that our wax beans are doing extremely well in the Growing Dome's hydroponic tables. We are just about ready to make our first harvest.

Given up for dead, the wax beans have come back with a vengeance

Also ready to pick were our Polish hot peppers.

Growing Dome hot peppers ready to pick

This was all the impetus we needed to process our first Hot Pepper jelly. The resulting fiery red jelly goes really well with cheese and crackers.

Red Hot Pepper jelly ready for our Tea Room gift baskets

We are always looking to identify the flora and fauna of the farm, so this week will end with a caterpillar which we spotted on our Raspberry plants.

The Tiger Moth Caterpillar or "Woolly Bear" Caterpillar

Folklore dictates that the more black on a "Woolly Bear" caterpillar, the harsher the Winter. Let's hope this is the sign of an easy Winter!

It's Grape Season in Niagara

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Now that Fall has officially arrived, our latest foraging trip resulted in an amazing find of wild Grapes. These small fruits with a rather large seed are now fully ripe and can be found covering the odd tree and bush throughout the farm. It was obviously time to pick them.

Wild Grapes atop a Mulberry tree

This Grape is easy to steam juice. The result is a very dark, tart and sweet drink. For us, it makes one of the best jellies.

Dark and delicious wild Grape juice

Having collected as much wild Grape as we can process this time of year, it reminded us of our row of old Concords.

We found these Grapes just over a year ago. We cleared the rows but have not yet been able to re-trellis them.

This Spring we crudely pruned them in the hope of generating more fruit. Since then, we have pretty much forgotten about them. We eventually let the weeds take over.

Going back to the Concords this week, we noticed quite a few were well developed and ripe as well. So it was now time to weed and see what we could harvest.

Time to pick the Concords

The results were surprising. Within the fast growing weeds, primarily Golden Rod, we found a "ton" of Grapes. It seems our pruning really awakened these plants. Although most were ripe, there was still a good amount of green unripened fruit, particularly where the Grapes were not exposed to the Sun.

Hidden from the Sun, some Grapes are still green

The Concords make a great juice and jelly. But the amount of green Grapes works out perfectly well for us since we have more than a couple of uses for this great fruit.

Last year, we experimented with the making of verjus (literally French for "green juice"). The juice of unripened Grapes is very tart with a hint of Grape flavour. It is actually ideal for use wherever you would normally use Lemon juice.

Selected unripened Grapes ready to make verjus

Since last year's verjus lasted no more than a month, we decided to make a lot more.

Unlike the steam juicing process we use for all our Grapes, in this case we need to be a bit more forceful to fully extract the juice. As a result, we crush them (using a food processor) and we press them through a cheese cloth. We then filter the resulting "sludge" to get a clear liquid.

Our process is still not ideal; we are aiming to eventually get a clear liquid. For the time being however this will do the trick.

A glass of this year's verjus...a little tart for drinking but perfect to use instead of Lemon juice

This may be dreaming, but we think that eventually we might actually be able to replace all Lemon juice in our Tea Room and canning activities with verjus. This would be a great way to keep our work local and perhaps more sustainable.

We'll close this week with a picture of the next crop: Kiwis. The trellised Kiwis have done surprisingly well this year. The berries are large and growing in beautiful clusters.

The Kiwis are looking promising

Interestingly, the plants that are now trellised seem further ahead of their counterparts which are growing amid the wild Grapes, wild Roses and the odd Mulberry tree that cover most of our untamed land. Even their leaves are now turning yellow and beginning to fall. It seems that the invasive plants provide a certain amount of cover and protection for the Kiwis. Regrettably these same Kiwis however are much harder to pick and have less fruit and less developed fruit...so definitely not a permaculture solution.

Another Dome Tragedy

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This week's cold, grey and wet weather kept us indoors for a bit (and by that we also mean inside our Growing Dome). It has felt more like mid-Autumn rather than the end of Summer...thank God we did not have a freak snow storm like Calgary. As a result, we'll spend this blog entry on our Growing Dome progress.

For just over a month now, it seems we had everything under some level of control.

The Tomato plants in what we now call our "Kratky buckets" have exceeded all expectations. They seem years ahead of their raised bed counterparts. They are now well over 5 feet tall. They have been blooming for some time and quite a few heirloom Tomatoes are developing quite well.

The roots of the Tomato plant now occupy half of the bucket and the water has been topped up twice in some cases. For this, we use our fish tank water and we fill the buckets back up to 2/3 of their volume.

Healthy Growing Dome Tomato plants

Even the Tomatoes on the Aquaponic beds are doing well. So well in fact, that we did not really think how we would manage the growth of Tomato pants at such a height while they are mounted on a Styrofoam board. The root mass is so significant that we cannot remove the plants without breaking the board. Furthermore the plants have grown like typical vines, laterally with blooming branches extended upward. These would now prove difficult to cage so we decided to see what will happen as they extend their "territory".

One of our many dome tomatoes now ripening

The peppers on the Aquaponic tables are also proving very fruitful. Our hot Polish purple peppers (sounds like a tongue twister) are now taking colour.

Hot Peppers are ripening

Even our bell peppers are prolific.

A bounty of bell peppers

Even the struggling wax beans are back in shape. They are flowering and producing some beans.

Originally presumed dead, the yellow beans are back in shape.

So much has now gone right that we were really due for a nasty surprise. It came this week, courtesy of our fish...once again.

It seems that plants are a lot more forgiving than animals.

One morning we arrived to feed the fish and found very little interest in our food pellets. By the end of the day, half our fish were floating on the surface of the water. By the next morning, it looked like the other half had succumbed as well.

Another tragedy...a dead Rock Bass (one of many)

At this point we were quite bewildered as to why this might have happened.

The acidity of the water looked fine (the PH has not changed and is similar to our ponds).

Once again we were forced to consider aeration. This time, we have been keeping to a schedule of hydroponic pumping in the morning and aeration pumping in the afternoon. This is done manually since  we hooked up both pumps to the same storage battery (which is itself recharged from a 100 Watt solar panel).

Doing this manually while we maintain our other work schedule around the farm has proven difficult to maintain. We have to admit that we were not always consistent in our timing.

It turns out that after a few hot days last week, the water temperature had climbed to above 26 degrees C. At this point not only will water be difficult to aerate, but Bass will become highly stressed. Adding a delinquent aeration cycle to the mix and the result is a lot of dead fish.

Since the new solar panel and battery system are working out really well, it is definitely time to consider rigging up an automated controller.

In the hope of keeping our plant/fish ecosystem balanced, we decided to go back to our fishing pond to catch a few more fish. To our dismay, we were faced with a Comorant. These birds are not only big fish eaters (upwards of 1 pound a day), but their feces are also deadly to trees and brush.

A Double Crested Cormorant dashed all hopes of catching more fish for the Dome.

This species of Cormorant is the Double Crested Cormorant. In the past, this is not something you would normally see in the Great Lakes region, however it has now become quite a regular site in the area.

For us, it was an indication that we would not do well in our fishing exploits. We were right. Since sighting that bird, we do not even get a single bite on our lines.

We do have a tinge of hope however. Since the recent death of some 22 fish, we noticed that our Dome's Duckweed was still under control (normally it would double in coverage every 36 hours or so).

What we discovered is that there are at least two reasonably sized fish in our tank. We had stopped throwing feed in the tank and they had resorted to eating the Duckweed. Not only that, but we have now seen tiny fish at the surface of the water (could they have multiplied?).

When stocking a tank with schools of fish, it is not easy to count them. With the dark waters of our tank (caused by the Humic Acid), we cannot really see what is left in there. However, somehow, we definitely have created some sort of aquatic ecosystem over which it seems we have little control.

We do not know how the water temperatures will change in the Winter, however having no control over temperature is presenting a real challenge in defining the species of fish we use. In the long run, we are still considering the Catfish...perhaps the hardiest of all edible species.

We'll close this week's entry with foraging. It was time to go back to our Carolinian forest and look for one of our favourite foods: the Hickory nut. They have started to fall and we were determined to get our fair share from the squirrels and chipmunks.

A nice basket of Hickory nuts

The Hickory nut is small and hard to crack open, but it is worth every effort. Our aim is to turn these nuts into a seasonal Hickory nut pie.

It's Canning Season

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Now that the school year has started, things have become a lot quieter at the farm. We are nevertheless extremely busy keeping track of all the fruits and vegetables that now need to be harvested...and somehow preserved. It's clearly canning season.

Canning is tedious and can be messy, particularly if you attempt to process bushels of produce at a time. However, it is also a very fulfilling activity. Once finished, you can be proud of your work. It's also great to know that the results contain no artificial preservatives, flavours or colours.

In our case, we've been collecting a lot of pickling cucumbers from our vines. We've also harvested our garlic and we already have some well established dill in our raised bed. The first canning of the season had to be a Kosher style pickle.

Just about everything we need to start pickling.

Creating a tasty pickle is a rather easy thing to do and we would highly recommend it for anyone wishing to start canning.

The first step is to clean your pickling cucumbers and cut the ends. The flower end of the cucumber contains certain enzymes that make the pickle wilt or go soft..not a good thing for that great crunchy taste.

The small pickling cucumbers need no further processing. However, you can be certain that some of the cucumbers will be large and oddly shaped. These we simply cut into strips no taller than our canning jars.

We sanitize our jars and lids by boiling them for 10 minutes (time needs to be altered if you are processing at an altitude well above sea level). Then we begin to pack our jars. In each jar we first insert a clove of garlic and a few dill blooms.  We then pack as tightly as possible our cucumber spears. We top this with another garlic clove and more dill blooms as well as a couple of pepper corns.

Spicing is really up to one's imagination here.

On the side, we prepare enough brine to fill our jars and cover the ingredients. In our case, we made 3 litres of brine which consisted of: 1 1/2 litres of vinegar, 1 1/2 litres of water, 8 Tbsp of Kosher salt, and 4 Tbsp of sugar.

We use Kosher salt because it does not have any additives. Conventional table salt has some additives which will turn your brine cloudy when packing. Alternatively, you can use a salt specifically marketed for canning.

Since Kosher salt is a large grain salt, recipes using conventional table salt should use half the quoted amount.

We bring the brine to a boil; pour into our jars; and seal them. The jars are placed back into their water bath for another boiling period of 10 minutes and we're done.. It's that easy!

The finished product....the"industrial" size jar is for the Polish member of the family.

This time of year, great deals can be had on bushels of vegetables of all kind. From market stalls to farmers' markets, there is an abundance of local fruits and vegetables waiting to be processed.

One local market offering a lot of Ontario local produce is Gallagher's on Highway 20. There, we were enticed to buy a bushel of pickling beets. These always make a great side dish and can liven up a salad.

Pickling beets is a bit more work but nevertheless worthwhile.

The first step in the process is to peel the beets. To do this, we first cook the beets by boiling them for some 15 minutes (they should  be easily pierced by a fork, and the skin should be easy to "rub" off with one's fingers). If you are faced with dramatically different sizes of beets, the small and large beets can be boiled separately.

Although not necessary, we cut the ends (root and leaf end) of the beets prior to boiling. We do this because the "knotty" leafy end tends to collect dirt and is difficult to clean. Since we will be using the beet juice from our boiled beets, we want this juice as clean as possible.

Cleaned beets ready for cooking.

Once cooked, the most tedious part of the process begins: peeling. Technically, you should be able to "rub" the skins off by applying pressure against the beet with your fingers and thumb. We found the most effective means of peeling is by rubbing the surface of the beet with the back blade of a knife.

We like our pickled beets in large chunks (allowing us to slice or cube them for whatever application). So at most, we will halve the larger beets to ensure we can pack as much as possible into each jar.

Peeled and ready for packing.

On the side, we prepared our brine. In this case, we used 2 1/2 litres of vinegar, 1 litre of the beet juice (drained from the cooking process); 1 litre of sugar, and 8 Tbsp of Kosher salt.

Again spicing is up to taste. In our case, we like the light taste of cinnamon with our beets. So we pack a bit of cinnamon stick into each jar.

Canning beets

We bring the brine to a boil and pour it into each jar until the beets are covered.

The final step is pasteurization; as before we seal the jars and boil them for another 10 minutes.

Will end this week with an odd sight.

Herons are often present on the farm. We always see them fishing in the ponds of the property.

This week, a Heron actually came much closer to the house and perched himself on a pine tree next to our kitchen.

We don't often see something like that out of our kitchen window.