... when it comes to humidity in a trashcan.
Continuing with my experiments looking for the optimal tobacco fermentation chamber, I ran two more over the past week. In the first, I put 10 gallons of water in a 33-gallon trashcan and covered it with a sheet of glass to make a greenhouse. My two sensors were stuck to the side of the trashcan, one about 1/3 of the way up, the other 2/3 of the way up the side. The trashcan was put out in the backyard on a partly sunny day. Here's the data for that one.
You definitely need to click on that one to make sense of it.
First off, the humidity had nothing to do with the placement of the sensors. Second, the humidity was plenty high, over a significant portion of the time, to accomplish the fermentation. Third, when the sun came out, the temperature shot up 60 degrees in a matter of minutes.
When the temperature jumped, the humidity fell until evaporation could catch up with it, at least partially.
Conclusion: The greenhouse is simply too unstable to serve as a fermentation method. The leaves need to slowly ferment not shoot from one temperature extreme to another.
In the second experiment, I had the trashcan with its glass lid in the garage. The sensors were in the same places, but this time there was only an inch of water in the bottom of the can. Here's the data for that one.
The temperature followed the ambient temperature in the garage. I opened the garage door once the sun came up to let in the day's heat. The humidity went to 100% and stayed there. Perfection.
Conclusion: All I really need is a trashcan with a lid, not a glass one, and a 40W incandescent bulb to make this work. I can easily rig that and we can see if a small bulb will keep the temperature at 70 degrees or higher. We can try a 25W bulb if necessary. I'm thinking that a computer-controlled system might be fun and sophisticated, but it's probably overkill. If the local temperature here in San Diego gets above 80, I can just turn the bulb off manually.
This thing is just about ready to rock.
Unfortunately, we were gone over the last two weekends and while people came over to take care of the dogs and water the plants, something went wrong with the tobacco seedlings and they all died. Not to worry, more seeds are on the way. The plants only take 60-90 days to be ready for harvest, so it's no big deal.
Too bad about your seedlings, hope the next batch works out.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to your humidity, I'm wondering whether humidity control is actually your primary problem as far as keeping the leaves from getting moldy. I mean, fermentation is done by living things too, and so if the humidity is right for whatever organisms are doing your fermentation, then it should also be right for growing mold.
When I want things in the lab to ferment rather than getting moldy, the key thing seems to be access to oxygen. In my cattail-decomposer tanks, mold only grows on the surface where it has at least a little access to fresh air. Even slightly underwater where the water is stagnant and the oxygen is all used up, there is obvious activity going on, but no mold.
I'm wondering whether the thing that really encouraged the mold in your previous batch was opening the lid to moisten it, which would have let in fresh air. Molds don't need much oxygen to grow, but they are aerobic organisms and do need at least a little.
This is clearly something that would benefit from some experiments with your collard greens as a stand-in for tobacco leaves. You might even still be able to eat them afterwards!
https://myfermentedfoods.com/how-make-fermented-greens/