We made it, safe and sound, to Antigonish last evening after a nice drive that turned a little hairy on the back roads after dark BUT that's beside the point - we are really enjoying it here at Bluemoon already. Before we get into the stuff going on here though, we have a few more things to share from our time at Wild Roots.

Beer! We made beer. Well, kind of - we bottled beer made from a kit that Thom started a couple of weeks ago. It was a cream ale. Smelled delicious. It has to sit for another couple of weeks before it gets drunk (drank? drinked? whatever) so we didn't get to taste it but we did get to try a stout and a red ale that Thom had made earlier in the year and they were top notch.

About a week ago, Moragh and I noticed a large object on the counter that was covered with a pillowcase. It had been there our entire stay and we finally gave in to curiosity and peeked underneath. We found a rancid smelling ceramic bucket full of some fluid with chunky mold floating on top. There was a large maple syrup jug half-submerged in the centre. Horrified, we replaced the pillowcase and never spoke of it again. With some relief, we learned a few days ago that it was a completely normal step in the process of fermenting green beans in a delicious brine.

After scooping the mold out, we got to stick our hands down in the nasty smelling brine and pull out the beans. We sorted the soft ones from the firm and put the firm ones in jars, along with some fermented garlic cloves and fermented chilies. We know we're not really selling it, but these beans are the BEST. We ate them with every meal. 

We also made kraut! Sauerkraut from cabbage. We harvested all the cabbages in the garden for this endeavor....slugs and all.

We shaved the cabbages down on a bladed contraption similar to a washboard. It sliced them into very thin strips perfect for kraut, and took very little effort. You can see it sitting in the cooler beside Emily looking crazy.

We dumped the cabbage strips into an extremely large cistern to ferment.

We added rock salt, cloves, and peppercorns for flavour. Approximately 50 lbs of cabbage went into that bucket, squished down as tightly as we could. And that's it. The cabbage releases its own water and the salt does the rest. A month later, you have yummy kraut to eat on EVERYTHING.



And then we found some interesting stuff in the woods.

Strange place to park your car.

Old school Canada Dry ginger-ale bottle!

And, the fabled, long lost mass grave of shoes.

Moragh wanted to keep this.

But then we found the bigger version.

...time to break this into two posts. :D