Culturing vegetables is a healthy practice, which makes raw vegetables easier to digest and supplies a generous serving of enzymes and beneficial microorganisms.  This is a good place to share our techniques, which vegetables we use, successes, problems and results.  

I'd especially like to hear about using other vegetables.  Cabbage and sometimes carrots are very familiar.  Anyone culturing other vegetables?  Some Blood types and Genotypes are not eating cabbage.

beets, jicama.....anything goes  

When you culture other vegetables than cabbage, do you add some cabbage to the mix, or can they stand alone?

I use bok choy it is like cabbage but OK for A's and maybe for every blood type?

I've done: Bok choy, Napa cabbage,  I do carrots, cucumbers and zucchini like sticks in water.  Like pickles basically.  But I, of course, don't use vinegar.  I just use the Body Ecology Diet cultured veggie starter.  I put garlic and ginger in almost everything.  I one time put a little bit of crushed up raspberries in with my cabbage.  That was a nice little zing in there.  

Ginger is always my favorite.  I eat the chunks by themselves sometimes.  Cultured or non cultured I eat lots of ginger.  Seems to help my stomach function.  And so does cultured veggies for sure!

Quoted from Andrea AWsec

I use bok choy it is like cabbage but OK for A's and maybe for every blood type?

Good idea.  I haven't read the blood type food lists recently, but it is good for every genotype except gatherers.  

Quoted from JJR

I've done: Bok choy, Napa cabbage,  I do carrots, cucumbers and zucchini like sticks in water.  Like pickles basically.  But I, of course, don't use vinegar.  I just use the Body Ecology Diet cultured veggie starter.

I wonder if this would work if we're using a brine solution instead of a starter culture.

I've done three batches of cultured veggies without a culture starter in the last month: the first was turnips, green onions, chili paste (an avoid, I know) to make turnip kimchee; the second was sliced carrots and ginger root in a salt-only brine; and the third was shredded carrots and shredded ginger root in a whey/salt brine. I have some beets, more carrots, and some turnips that I'm going to try next.

I have to say that I really liked the turnip kimchee, though it didn't seem to agree with me (probably the chili paste). I also really liked the sliced carrot/ginger in the salt-only brine. The whey was an experiment (the whey is supposed to speed up the fermenting process and allows one to use less salt) but I didn't find it as satisfying texturally to have the veggies shredded.

Drea, thanks a lot for starting this thread. For O's, cabbages are an avoid... I'll try bak choy or maybe the Chinese-style cabbages which are actually of the chicory family, I heard.
So you can culture veggies without a starter? Is salt enough? How do you make the brine? And how long do you keep the veggies in the fridge before they're ready to be consumed?

balletomane, I didn't start the thread (Victoria did), but I've had good luck with using salt-only brine. The first and second batches were followed loosely after a video I found on YouTube with Sandor Katz, author of Wild Fermentation. HERE'S a link to the video. The trick to fermenting is to keep the veggies at room temperature, and not to refrigerate them until they are "done" to your liking. The cold will inhibit the process, and the salt kills any "bad" bacteria.

Ooops, sorry... Thanks Victoria for taking the initiative!
Drea, thanks for the video and the tips! Very useful!!!  

Here's another good article on fermenting.

Drea, that's a great article at the Wild Fermentation site.  It answered a lot of my questions, and here is a paragraph on how much salt to use:

How much salt do you use? Traditionally vegetables have been fermented with lots of salt. In addition to pulling water from the vegetables, salt hardens pectins in the vegetables, rendering them crunchier, and discourages the growth of bacteria other than lactobacilli. By inhibiting competing bacteria, salt enables the vegetables to ferment and to be stored for longer periods of time. Since preservation has historically been one of the important motivations for fermentation, ferments have tended to be quite salty. But for health-conscious people interested primarily in flavor and nutrition, less salt can be better. Salt lightly, to taste.
It is easier to add salt than to take it away, but if you oversalt, you can dilute by adding water and/or more vegetables. There is no magic proportion of salt the process requires—it’s just personal preference. As a starting point, try 3 tablespoons of salt per 5 pound of vegetables. More salt will slow the fermentation process; less (or none) will speed it up. Ferments with less salt may be more prone to surface molds. You can leave out the salt or use various mineral-rich substitutes such as celery juice (my favorite salt-free variation) or seaweed. Just be sure the vegetables are submerged in the liquid.

The two batches of salt-only brine were made with 3 Tablespoons of salt per 4 cups of water. I would say it was a tad bit saltier than I usually like. The batch I made with whey, I cut back the salt to 1 Tbs for 1 quart of water and 3 Tbs of whey.

I grate carrots and ginger, squish them around with salt and stuff it into a jar...let it sit on the counter
for 3 days then refrigerate...  I eat it almost every day.

My brother in law just uses salt.  I prefer the starter because...  well, it just makes me feel safer I guess.  I've had his and they are fine, but they are a little on the salty side.  But still very good.  So, you don't NEED the culture starter.  I just like to use it.  But even with that, I've still had batches that I though might not be completely right, and threw it out.  It just tasted, not right.  But I could've been wrong about it.

At least some salt seems like a very good idea because salt discourages mold.

What method do you all use to cover your container while the vegetables are sitting at room temperature?

a cotton cloth

You make it sound so easy, Lola!  lol!!  

it sure is!!!

I read below one of the u tube videos I watched that someone uses seaweed instead of salt to ferment with, I found this interesting, it didn't say how much.

If we use a mason jar, can we use the self-seal type lid that comes with it?

I've used a canning jar, a jar with a screw on lid, and a glass jar with a clamp seal. All three work as well as the others.

Great! I'll give it a try