Christopher Weeks

Lindsay, I verified your pickled garlic and pushed some buttons, so you have the air badge in food now.

Roasted poblano stuffed with overly fluid black bean sauce.

Carmen, what time-frame are you thinking of when you say temporary? We might all mean different things by that.

Oh, yeah, you didn't do any harm topping off with brine. But I've done experimental fermentations that lasted years and you can tip the balance given enough time. Mostly I'm just letting you know you can top off with fresh water and not worry about the salt.

I went to a university with something like 40,000 students. I list the most useful skill I got as "navigating a giant bureaucracy." There have been many times that getting a action or information out of a government agency or major corporation would have been impossibly exasperating if it hadn't been for spending nine years at a giant uni.

Second most important skill was learning to write. I was literate when I entered college, but it took several years of writing to their high standards before I feel like was actually a decent writer.

Third was using the library, which includes several subskills: 1) make friends with the librarians, 2) ask the reference desk anything, 3) use the hell out of inter-library loan, 4) access ALL the scholarly journals for free that now cost an arm and a leg to get at, 5) walk around the stacks and just explore, 6) use microfiche (no idea if that's still a thing), 7) in the early '90s when I was in college, card catalogs had been put online, but sometimes when you couldn't find something, if you went to the paper card catalog, you could, 8) etc.

I still don't regret having gone to college, but the calculus today is different.

Nancy Reading wrote:...so I have topped the jars off with some fresh brine at the original concentration.

Keep in mind, the water is evaporating but the salt is not. You could be topping off with distilled water to maintain salinity. And topping off with brine will increase salinity.

I just want to add some related threads for anyone wanting to see more about keyholes:
- https://permies.com/t/12429/Interesting-keyhole-hugelkultur-design
- https://permies.com/t/68883/permaculture/keyhole-garden-summer-drought
- https://permies.com/t/360024/Permaculture-patterns-Lobes

Another tangent: sake lees make a nice vegetable fermentation medium. I never thought to try it as a levain.

You're not limited to food scraps, right? You can use leaves and weeds and all the normal stuff.