Putting Food By - Janet Greene [188]
Equipment for Root-Cellaring
Storage place, indoor or outdoor.
Clean wooden boxes/lugs/crates or barrels; or stout large cardboard cartons
(for produce that wants to be dry, not damp).
Plenty of clean paper for wrapping individually, or shredding.
Plenty of clean dry leaves, sphagnum, peat moss, or sand.
A tub of sand to keep moistened to provide extra humidity if needed.
A simple wall thermometer certainly; humidity gauge (optional).
INDOOR STORAGE
The Classic Root Cellar Downstairs
There are fewer of these to be found as the years go by, even in historic house. Usually located in a corner of the cellar, they have two outside walls of masonry (part of the foundation), the floor is packed earth, and any partitions are designed more to support shelving than to keep out warmth from a furnace. They include at least one of the small windows that provide cross-ventilation for the whole cellar so that moisture from stored foods does not rot overhead floor joists. Propped open occasionally during the winter, the window is the answer or regulating temperature and humidity.
Darken the window(s)—potatoes turn green in light when they’re stored, and this isn’t good. If necessary, clear snow from the below-ground area leading to the window. And check the whole thing for places where field mice can get in and feast on your crops during the lean winter months, and stop them up.
Using a Bulkhead
Many middle-aged houses have an outside entrance to the cellar: a flight of concrete steps down to the cellar wall, in which a wide door is hung to give access to the cellar. The top entrance to the steps—the hatch—is a door laid at an angle 45 degrees to the ground.
On the stairway, which probably is closed from the outside during the coldest months anyway, you can store barrels/boxes of produce. You could put up rough, temporary, wooden side walls along the steps; but certainly lay planks on the steps to set your containers on. Insulate the door into the cellar proper with glass batts. If you need to, keep a pail of dampened sand on one of the steps to add humidity. You’re likely to be propping the hatchway door open a few inches from time to time to help maintain proper temperature on the steps. This means shoveling snow from the bulkhead, and piling it back on when this outside door is closed again.
A Dry Shed
This takes the place of the garage advocated by some people—but not by us: too much oil and gasoline odor (some produce soaks stray odors up like a sponge), and far too great a quantity of lead-filled emissions from running motors. And anyway, temperature is often uncontrollable.
Instead of using the garage, partition off storage space in the wood-floored shed leading into the kitchen, if you have an old house in the country. Or segregate a storage area in a cold, seldom-used passageway.
Storage areas like these are usually not fit for such long-term storage as the basement root cellar or store room is.
Up Attic
An old-fashioned attic generally is the last place in the house to cool off naturally as cold weather sets in; and unless the roof is well insulated, the attic temperature rises on sunny winter days. This fluctuation doesn’t matter much for some foods, however (see the chart on page 410), though it does for onions, say. The answer is to wall-off, and ceil, a northeast corner for anything that needs sustained low temperature and dryness. Then you can put pumpkins and such near the stairway leading to the attic—and leave the hall door downstairs open whenever you need to.
In Picnic Chests/Hampers
Harvest carrots, beets, turnips, etc., late in the fall. The handling described for carrots works well for the others too.
Cut tops off carrots, leaving about ½ inch of stem. Wash away garden soil, then wipe fairly dry—“fairly dry” because you want a little moisture; but not wet, lest the vegetables mold. Sack them 4 to 5 pounds at a crack in the largest food-grade freezer bags (see Using Space-Age Plastics in Chapter 4, for the warning against using trash or