Floods and sauerkraut

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating—I am not liking this new climate. We did go all summer without a flood. Last weekend, we got 8” of rain in 48 hours. The first 3” filled the creek. The second 5” went everywhere. The field was covered with water Saturday morning.

Shortly after Terry went outside, he called to tell me here was a dog penis mushroom growing under one of the oak tree. That’s really one of the common names for Mutinus caninus. It’s also known as a dog stinkhorn. I don’t make this stuff up.

The water receded fairly quickly. Once I started looking, I realized that the flood crested in the middle of the night. The bottom row of solar panels was covered in silt to a depth that measured to the top of my leg, just about 3 feet. The garden shed showed a waterline above the lower shelf. The wooden bench on which the row cover rested had floated out of place; the row cover was soaked. The kitchen-sized wastebasket in the corner was filled with water to the top.

Terry brought down the saw horses and some boards, and we commenced taking everything out to dry. Flood damage is profoundly demoralizing and emotionally exhausting. While this would have been a good opportunity to clean the whole shed out and organize it, it was all I could do to find the mates to each of about a dozen pairs of gloves. One might think the gloves would live happily in pairs. I feel like I usually take them off and put them together on the shelf, but the evidence did not support this. Sure, two or three pairs were together, but it took some looking to find the right and left of all the gloves. I took them in the house and put them in the washer.

Terry swept out the shed. We didn’t have to hose it down because it wasn’t very muddy. Upon reflection, I thought that this might be because this flood happened when the crops of the fields around us were full grown. When we had floods earlier in the summer, the crops were not big enough to prevent the top soil from washing away.

When we were done with the shed, I walked down to the creek. Terry had walked into one of his nurseries earlier in the day. While we were cleaning the shed, he told me that he had sunk in the mud to the top of his Wellies. When he tried to extract his feet, he landed on his butt. He instinctively put his hands down to lift himself up and went in to his elbows. He didn’t explain how he got himself out, but I found the prints in the ground, sort of like the lower half of a snow angel done in mud.

The imprint of Terry's legs in the mud

The flood had knocked over a deer fence.

Flood damage on the deer fence

I saw a yellow composite flower that I didn’t recognize. The composite (or daisy) family is huge, which makes species identification a challenge. The best I can do is that it is some kind of bur marigold, a.k.a. sticktight.

Putative bur marigold, covered in mud

There was an odd patch of smooth stones on the bank above the creek. Floods usually leave behind sandy silt. These rocks seemed too high to have been deposited by the flood. Perhaps the stones had once been the creek bottom. The recent flood, then, had merely washed the silt off the top of the rocks. Very weird.

A patch of smooth stones amidst the sandy silt

Detail of the stones

The only obvious survivor of my woodland garden is Joe Pyeweed. I must clean out all the weeds before next spring in case some of the other perennials survived my neglect.

Joe Pyeweed, the apparent lone survivor of my woodland garden

Sunday morning, the turkey hen came around with her poults. They still didn’t get near, but the light was better. I got a photo that was clear enough to count 5 younguns.

Turkey hen with 5 poults--there are two close together in the front, as evidenced by the two tails

Sunday was sauerkraut day. Hilda asked me if we needed to buy sauerkraut. I gave her an emphatic no. We only had 5 cabbages, but they were huge. I estimated an average of 5 pounds each. Plus we still had a good deal of sauerkraut left from last year.

Pat, Nancy, and Jane came out to help. This was Jane’s first sauerkraut experience. Hilda was running behind with her preparations for dinner and had to excuse herself. We took our usual positions, with Nancy cleaning the cabbage.

Nancy cleans the cabbage

Me slicing the cabbage.

I sliced the cabbage, wearing a protective glove

And Pat weighing, salting, and packing the cabbage in the crocks.

Pat weighs the cabbage

I assigned Jane to take pictures and count how many half-pound increments Pat put into the large bowl. Each 2.5 pounds of cabbage got 1/8 cup of salt.

At the end of the day, our crock had 20 pounds of cabbage, and Pat and Nancy went home with 10. The cabbages weighed, on average, 6 pounds, and that doesn’t include the cores and outer leaves that we put in the compost bin.

In honor of Pat’s birthday as well as raspberry season, I made a raspberry pie.

Raspberry pie

Here’s the birthday girl enjoying her dessert.

Pat with her birthday pie

By the next day, the sauerkraut was bubbling nicely.

Sauerkraut fermenting

We’re in for another heavy rain tonight. We took the precaution of moving the storage bin that we keep the chicken food and wood chips in to higher ground outside the orchard. I checked to be sure that everything in the garden shed was well off the floor.

Terry picked all the pumpkins and squash that were ready. He didn’t want them submerged again.

I picked all the red and yellow bell peppers and poblano peppers yesterday. I started two chimneys full of charcoals to roast them. It was not enough. I did the poblanos first.

Poblanos on the grill

And then the red and yellow bell peppers.

Sweet peppers next

Conventional wisdom suggests that when the pepper skin is well-blackened, one should put the pepper in a paper bag to steam. Over the years, I have discovered that a stock pot works just as well. It holds a lot of peppers and is reusable.

About 40 minutes into the process, the coals suddenly disappeared. The grill still seemed plenty hot. I tried moving the remaining coals together with the charcoal shovel, but only succeeded in knocking them through the grate. I got the last batch mostly done and hoped that the skins would come loose in the stock pot.

I had to put everything in the refrigerator and rush off to a meeting. I had a busy week. This morning, I tackled the task of skinning and deseeding the peppers. My, there were a lot of peppers. As I always do in these situations, I thought back to an important lesson of dissertation research: as long as there are a finite number of things, if you do one at a time, you can finish the job.  After two hours, I was done.

All the peppers skinned, deseeded and stacked for the freezer

And then I had to take a nap.