Why a Five-Gallon Bucket
A food-grade five-gallon bucket holds roughly four gallons of packed vegetable. That is enough to put up a serious share of a garden glut in one vessel, using equipment that costs a few dollars and stores nested in a corner. It is the scale that turns preservation from a weekend of small jars into a single afternoon.
The method is lactic acid fermentation: salt draws water out of the vegetable, and the brine that forms favors the bacteria you want while excluding the ones you do not. No canner, no pressure gauge, no electricity. The bucket sits in a cool corner and the work happens on its own.
Pick a Vegetable
Carrots
Sand clamping, root cellaring, jangajji, kvass, and drying. Every traditional method for keeping carrots through winter.
Read the guide →Cucumbers
Sauergurken, oi jangajji, malosolnye, ogorki kiszone, and tursu. Pickling traditions from every continent.
Read the guide →Tomatoes
Passata, salca, matbucha, achaar, and sun-drying. Putting up the summer glut without a canner.
Read the guide →Sauerkraut & Cabbage
Twenty traditions, from German Sauerkraut to Korean kimchi to Chinese suan cai.
Read the guide →Bush Beans
Dilly beans, jangajji, suan dou jiao, and Appalachian leather britches. Green beans and dried beans.
Read the guide →The Non-Negotiables
Keep it submerged. Anything above the brine can grow mold. Weigh the vegetables down with a plate, a clean stone, or a bag of brine.
Salt by weight, not by guess. Two to three percent of the vegetable's weight is the usual range for a dry-salt ferment. A kitchen scale is the one piece of equipment worth buying.
Stay in the temperature band. Cool and steady is what you want. Too warm and the ferment goes soft before it goes sour.
Taste as you go. Fermentation is a range, not a timer. When it tastes right to you, it is done.
For Standard Canning
Water bath and pressure canning are a different set of techniques with their own safety rules, including altitude-adjusted processing times. For those, see Canning and Preserving Food at Home.