Root Cellaring

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Decentralized Storage

If you can muster the time, space, and materials to build a step-in root cellar, you'll probably be glad you did. Suppose, though, that you're living in a rented house, or have only a limited amount of surplus produce from your garden, or need all your cash for land payments. What can you do then with that extra row of carrots, the half-bushel of potatoes, or the baskets of beets or apples you'd like to save for winter munching? Cheer up—you still have plenty of options beyond the whole-hog, full-scale root cellar.

Begin by prowling around your house for likely closets and cubbyholes. An unheated porch is great for keeping onions and sweet potatoes until early winter. A spare bedroom or cold attic makes a fine winter-squash dormitory. Perhaps there is a space under your porch where produce could be cold-stored until subfreezing weather sets in. A north-side closet on an exterior wall could extend your apple-eating season by a month or two. One man we visited even built a drawer under each basement step to hold a small amount of potatoes or onions.

Sheds and garages are good places to store root and bulb vegetables in late fall. We keep our onions in our cool log garage until nights turn really cold in December and then bring them indoors to an unheated spare room where at least some of them keep until spring. In areas with moderate climates, baskets of apples buffered by hay bales on all sides will often keep until Christmas in a garage. And if you must save a late-ripening melon for your Thanksgiving fruit cup, stash it in a bin of oats in the barn—an old trick that still works.

Country folks who had open-topped wells would often hang buckets of apples above the water level in the cavity, suspended from 2 X 4's set across the top edges of the pit.

The simplest of all cold-storage schemes is to leave some root vegetables right in the row. An insulating layer of leaf-filled bags or of hay bales settled on top of the row will extend the digging season. Raised-bed gardeners have the advantage here because their well-drained garden soil stays diggable longer. Even after the ground freezes too hard to dig, your winter blanket will help preserve such roots as carrots, salsify, parsnips, and Hamburg rooted parsley until early spring. If you can plant your overwintering root crops in an intensively planted bed instead of in single rows, you'll find that they are easier to protect (and find!). Mice like these cozy set-ups too, so you might want to spread a sheet of hardware cloth over the crop before piling on the hay. Dig these root crops as early in spring as you can, because the quality of the food is best before new green tops start to sprout. If you've even eaten freshly dug parsnips in March, after a winter's worth of freezes has changed much of their starch to sugar, you know that's what sweet is!

An hour or so of digging will earn you another outdoor vegetable-storage space—the garden trench. This is especially useful for celery . . . and also for cabbages, which don't take kindly to being piled in a heap, and which tend to "perfume" the house with their distinctive aroma when kept indoors. Dig a trench about 2' deep and wide enough to allow room for the produce. Save the fine soil in a separate pile. Then dig up your celery, Chinese cabbage, and cabbage, and immediately replant them in the trench, using the fine soil to cover the roots. You could also place heads of cabbage on a 3" layer of straw in the bottom of the trench, keeping the roots upright but not backfilling the hollow with dirt. In either case, cover the trench with a board and then pile an 18" layer of organic insulation over this roof. Your effort will be rewarded when you dash out on a frosty day to grab a quick head of cabbage for a hearty early-winter soup.

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