Putting Food By - Janet Greene [190]
Choose the place for your pit on a rise of ground to avoid seepage. There, shovel out a pit about 1½ to 2 feet deep and 4 feet wide at the bottom, throwing dirt up all around to build a rim that will turn water away; dig a V-shaped drainage ditch around it for extra protection (see sketches). Take out any stones near the sides of the pit because frost will carry from one stone to another in rocky ground. The pit needn’t go below the deep frost-line if such frost conductors are removed. Pack the bottom of the pit with dry mortar sand 2 to 3 inches deep: the loam, having retained moisture, will freeze; the sand holds the food away from the loam.
On the layer of sand make a layer of vegetables not more than 1 foot deep; cover the vegetables with more fine sand, dribbling it in the crevices, to fill the pit nearly to ground level. Cover the sand with straw or nature-dried hardwood leaves, or mulch hay (hay that got rained on before it cured), mounded to shed the weather. Hold down this cover with a thin layer of sod—or, nowadays, plastic sheeting weighted down with 1 to 2 inches of earth. Cover one end of the mound with a door laid on its side and slanted back almost like a bulkhead entrance. In winter you’ll move the door away to dig in for the vegetables, and, as they’re taken out, move the door back along the mound.
Cold-climate storage in a pit.
(Drawing by Irving Perkins Associates)
This root-pit is best for beets, carrots, turnips, and potatoes.
Walter Needham’s Sunken Barrels
Again, these are for cold-winter areas with uneven temperature.
Into the face of a bank dig space to hold several well-scrubbed metal barrels with their heads removed—one barrel for apples, say; one for potatoes, one for turnips. Take out any large stones that would touch the barrels and conduct frost to them, and provide a bedding of straw/dry leaves, etc., for the barrels to rest on. Slant the open end of the barrels slightly downward, so water will tend to run out.
Cold-climate storage in sunken barrels.
(Drawing by living Perkins Associates)
Put straw or whatever in the barrels for the produce to lie on, and fill the barrels from back to front, using dry leaves or similar material to pack casually around the individual vegetables or fruits if they need it.
Over the opening put a snug cover propped against it—a stout wooden “door” with a wooden handle (did you ever have the skin of your palm freeze onto metal in bitterly cold weather?). Dig a shallow V-shaped drainage ditch to carry surface water away from the barrels (as in the sketch).
The snow will be added protection in the deepest cold of the winter. Shovel it back against the door after removing food from the barrels.
How to Ripen Fruit
Apples keep longer if they don’t touch each other, and apples and potatoes should never be stored close together. Reason: apples respire more than most fruits do; they seem to give off extra amounts of the gas ethylene—along with other gases—and this peculiarity allows them to help pears, peaches, and tomatoes to ripen. Use a heavy brown-paper bag from the supermarket, punch about half a dozen small holes in it (to let some of the gases escape); put pears, peaches, or tomatoes in the bag without crowding, and include one sound ripe apple. Bend over the top of the bag several times and hold it with a paperclip; set the bag on a shelf in the pantry where it will not be too warm. Check every day to make sure that no soft/rotten/mold spots are appearing, and that things are ripening well. It’s amazing what two days will do for ripening these fruits.
Avocados ripen well in a brown-paper bag; so do bananas; so do small melons. The brown paper is just porous enough to allow an exchange of fresh air and the gases from