A year of the market stall: what goes into jars each month

i. Winter: cabbage, cauliflower and the long jars

From December into February the stalls at the top of my street are heavy with brassicas, and this is the only part of the year that feels like home. Big flat white cabbages, the dark crinkled ones, cauliflower in three colours and the long thin turnips that sellers here call by a name I still mispronounce. The kitchen is cool, the balcony is cooler, and anything I put up in these months ferments slowly and keeps well for weeks.

Sauerkraut is the backbone of the season, dry-salted at two percent of the cabbage weight and packed into the biggest jar I own. Cauliflower florets in three percent brine with garlic and a few slices of fresh chilli are the jar people ask about most. Turnip sticks with a bay leaf are the quiet success: sharp, crisp for a month, and good cut small over lentils on a cold evening.

The one winter disappointment is the red cabbage, which ferments well enough but turns the brine and everything else in the jar a lurid violet that fades to an unappetising grey-blue after a few weeks. I still make it, because it is the best thing I know on a plate of cold roast pork, but it goes in a small jar on its own and gets eaten within the month. Beetroot has the same problem in a gentler form. A little of it in a jar of turnips turns them a deep pink that people either love or refuse to touch, and I have stopped trying to predict which.

ii. Spring: carrots, beans and the first mistakes of the year

Around March the cabbages thin out and the stalls fill with bunched carrots with their tops on, green beans, the first artichokes and a great deal of spring garlic. Carrots are the most forgiving vegetable I know for fermenting, and I use them to test new brine figures before I risk anything I care about more. Green beans ferment beautifully for about ten days and then go limp within the space of a weekend, so they are a small jar, eaten quickly.

Spring is also when I start getting careless. The flat warms up faster than I expect, usually in the last week of April, and every year I lose at least one jar to the gap between what the calendar says and what the thermometer says. The fix is dull and reliable. On the first morning the balcony reads over twenty degrees before nine, every new batch moves up to three percent without discussion.

Artichokes I have tried twice as a ferment and do not recommend. They blacken where they are cut, even under brine, and the choke turns woolly. Spring garlic is the opposite: a small jar of the green shoots, cut into short lengths in three percent brine, is ready in a week and lasts until the summer, and a spoonful of it chopped into a dressing does more than any amount of raw garlic.

iii. Summer: peppers, cucumbers and the balcony at full heat

From late June the stalls are almost all peppers, aubergines, tomatoes and small ridged cucumbers. The long green frying peppers ferment well whole if they are pricked with a skewer, and the small hot ones ferment fiercely into a sauce base. Cucumbers are the heartbreak of the season. They need to be very fresh, bought that morning and still stiff, and even then they soften fast in the heat unless I add a vine leaf or an oak leaf for its tannins.

Aubergines I have given up on as a lacto-ferment. They either go slimy or take on a bitterness that no amount of rinsing removes, and the traditional preserved aubergines I like are cooked first and kept in oil, which is a different kind of keeping and outside this notebook. Tomatoes I ferment only green, at the very end of the season, when a stallholder will sell me a bag of the unripe ones she would otherwise throw away.

• Green frying peppers, whole and pricked: four percent, ready in about two weeks
• Small hot peppers, stems off: five percent, left a month and then blended
• Ridged cucumbers: three and a half percent, plus a leaf, eaten within ten days
• Green tomatoes in late September: three percent with garlic and dill

iv. Autumn: olives, quinces and back to the cool

September and October bring the fresh olive crates, which are a project of their own and have their own entry. Beside them come quinces, late peppers, the first cabbages again and pomegranates, which I do not ferment but which end up scattered over nearly everything I do. Autumn is the best season for fermenting in the city, because the market is generous and the kitchen falls back into the low twenties, where most vegetables behave.

Looking at four years of tape strips, the pattern is that I make the most jars in autumn and winter and the most mistakes in late spring. The English habit of treating fermenting as a winter activity is not wrong here, it just misses the best months. If someone in the city asked me when to start, I would tell them to buy two kilos of carrots in October and a cheap scale, and to leave the peppers until they have a summer's worth of notes behind them.