Cabbages!

Three giant harvest baskets full! With frosts coming regularly at night, I took a head lamp and a cleaver to the garden last night to finally harvest my cabbages. I recently finished a course of antibiotics, so the first place some of these beauties  are going is into the crock. Lacto-fermented Saurkraut, here I come. The second place they're going is into a giant bowl of a raw cabbage salad (with some hot peppers and oil and almonds). The micro biome isn't only inhabited by critters that are acid tolerant (cultivated in bulk via lacto-fermentation), but by others as well. My dad is a biology prof and we have long discussions on many subjects, the upshot of a recent one being that probably the microbes inhabiting veggies growing in the garden are a) super important and b) distinguish loca-votes from different places and c) probably a large part of the benefit of raw vs cooked veggies (cooked veggies have different benefits). In thinking about this, and about the way that eating local veggies and local (wild!) meats grounds me and connects me to this place I live, I think about the root chakra. About the way muladhara is nurtured by eating root crops -parsnip, potato, carrot, etc - and about how a good grounding practice for travelers is to eat local food. There's a power in place, y'all. And if the beings a place can live increasingly intimately, that's all to the best. So I'll be eating a few days worth of raw cabbage salad to ground me and to nurture my gut. Today I've got tabbouleh made with the last of the frostbit parsley and a homegrown tomato from a friend.  

The rest of this giant pile of cabbage, and the other large mound from the CSA (not pictured) will go into the freezer, to ground me and nourish me and mine this winter.