The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

I meant to post a couple weeks ago when I started a batch of sauerkraut, but never got around to it. We got a head of cabbage, and aside from the fish tacos Alicia loves, we don’t have a ton of uses for cabbage. For some reason, fermenting it seemed like a good idea.

Well, after a week or so, it really started to stink up the kitchen, so I moved it down to the basement thinking, “out of sight, out of mind.” But it never really left my mind because every time I went to the basement, it smelled like Hannah had hidden one of her dirty diapers somewhere down there. It smelled really bad, and Alicia was getting on my case about it.

Well, we got another cabbage in our produce box this week, and I thought I’d try it out again, paying more attention to cleanliness, etc. However, I discovered that under a nasty top layer of mold, the sauerkraut was looking (and tasting) really good. So I skimmed off a liberal amount from the top, and saved the rest of it to mix in with the fresh cabbage. On the first batch, and this new one I combined with it, I followed the recipe on you find on the 2nd hit if you Google “sauerkraut recipe.”

That is, I basically tossed the shreded cabbage with some salt, tossed it in a crock, and was ready to go. This time, though, I did add a ziplock bag filled with saltwater on top of the cabbage to act as an airlock to hopefully prevent too much mold from growing. I sealed the crock with plastic wrap for good measure, and if I can be patient and not peek, in a month or two, we should have some tasty sauerkraut. Which is funny, because I don’t really know what we’ll do with all of that sauerkraut. Oktoberfest in January, anyone?

Clipping the chicken's wings

The second night we had our new chickens, Alicia went out to close the coop door and keep them safe from predators. They still hadn’t quite figured out their new home, so two of them were sitting on the floor, rather than the nice nesting boxes I had built for them. The other two were nowhere to be seen, but the peeping of young chickens was coming from somewhere. Following her ears, Alicia found two of them roosting on top of the 6-foot fence.

When there’s dirty work to be done — in this case wing-clipping — it is passed on to me. The next day around lunchtime, I rounded up the chickens one by one and clipped off the big feathers from one of their wings. I was able to walk up and just grab the first one, but by the time I got to chicken #4, she gave me a real run for my money. They get really smart about using the chicken coop to hide under, around, and through. Plus they’re pretty quick when they want to be.

The theory is that clipping only one wing throws off their balance so they can’t fly straight, and thus, can’t “fly the coop.” When the first chicken hopped off my lap after her wing-clipping, she gave a couple big flaps and landed with a thud on her side on the ground, so I think it worked.

My dad has been at this farming business a lot longer than me, so when he says something, it’s usually because he has screwed something up in the past and learned his lesson. So when I told him about how we were mulching our garden beds, he said that he likes to run the lawn mower over his leaves before putting them on the garden for mulch. So I’m doing a comparison test on the back garden bed — just like in the front beds, I’m putting down leaves and coffee grounds, and then covering it with burlap for the winter. But this time I chopped up the leaves with the lawn mower. So we’ll know for next year what the best method is.

I put garlic in the ground today. I did this last fall but we moved before we got to reap the benefits of the winter planting, so hopefully this year we’ll have garlic to eat come summer. It grows over the winter and is ready by May or June to start picking. We’ll have to see if we can start another batch in early spring so we have successive plantings.

All I did was buy a couple heads from Madison Market and separate them into individual cloves. I planted 32 cloves in nice rows, about 6 inches apart. Alicia says you should always have a picture with your post, but I forgot, so just imagine: dirt. With garlic cloves in it.