VEGETABLE Self-Sufficiency

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Tomatoes are so good for so mane dishes. We have no preference over canned or frozen. When we were raising our own meat and the freezer was frequently full, we canned. Now we freeze. When there is danger of frost, some people cover their tomatoes. We used to. It was such a hassle and we were never sure we got much, if anything, for the effort. Now we bring in all the green tomatoes we think we can stand when frost threatens. We love fried green tomatoes and green tomato chutney is great, too. We have pickled green tomatoes, though other people's always seems better than ours somehow. The green tomatoes will ripen in the house. Though their flavor is not as good as vine-ripened they still beat store-bought. We have tried wrapping them in newspapers, keeping them in a cool place and various other suggestions we have read about. Last fall we just put a bushel basket full on the floor out of the way. We picked through the basket whenever we wanted tomatoes, moving ripe ones up or out onto the floor where they could be easily spotted by anyone with an appetite.

When we were heating with wood stoves in the house the cellar became a perfect place to store potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, and cabbage. It literally has water running through it. The floor is dirt and the temperature is below 50 degrees Fahrenheit most of the winter, and only goes below freezing in a couple of places where I have water pipes. The stored crops have never frozen. I made wooden boxes for each crop and set the boxes on blocks so they would not get wet. The humidity and temperature have been close to perfect: The crops always lasted through the year.

We have a furnace in the cellar now, and the conditions are not as good. Potatoes do well, but it is too dry for carrots. The trick with this crop is to experiment with storage solutions to find one that best fits your situation. The optimal temperature for potatoes is 38 degrees F to 40 degrees F with a relative humidity of 85 to 90 percent. For carrots the optimum is 32 degrees F and a humidity of 90 to 95 percent. (Handbook for Vegetable Growers by James Edward Knott, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., NYC)

One of the options is to keep them in the garden. Place bales of hay right over the rows of carrots where they are growing. The carrots should be at least eight inches from the edge of the bale in our climate-whatever it takes to insulate them from freezing. You can remove the bales in the winter and pull the carrots. Those orange carrots really look great lying on top of the snow. I just wish Barbara would tell me she has run out of the supply in the refrigerator before the blizzard rather than after.

The same could be done for potatoes, though I have never done it. There is a danger that some rodent gets in under the mulch and has a feast. The best winter storage potatoes I ever had late in the winter came out of a hole I dug in the woodshed, another dirt floor. I buried a wire basket full of potatoes in the dry sandy soil where I reasoned I would be able to dig it out any time. I reasoned correctly. Even though the woodshed had approximately the same temperature as outdoors, there was not enough moisture in the soil to freeze. When I dug the basket up, the top layer of potatoes had frozen and had to be thrown out. The rest were perfectly firm and tasted superb.

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