Chapter 10: Storage Season: Winter Comes Again
Chapter 10: Storage Season: Winter Comes Again
Congratulations! You have made it to the one-year mark and are now a true root cellar owner. This time last year, you were planning your design, looking for materials, and mapping out your strategy for building this thing. You put in a lot of time and money to develop your own produce mini-market, and you can finally enjoy the fruits of your labor. You will be amazed by how good these stores taste on those cold, chilly nights and by how rewarding it is to create meals from your own produce.
Keeping the Root Cellar Running Smoothly
Winter does bring a few challenges to the root cellar keeper who strives to maintain the perfect storage conditions for all his or her treasures. Harsh winter conditions outside can quickly affect the inside of your root cellar and cause rapid spoilage if inside temperatures dip below freezing. Regular temperature monitoring and humidity are critical at this time of year and should be done at least every other day if not daily.
Controlling root cellar temperatures in the winter
As the mercury drops, you might see a decrease in your root cellar's average temperature. The colder it gets outside, the faster your temperature will drop inside. With careful venting or no venting, you can keep your cellar temperature even and constant. Your goal is to allow air in for circulation but not so much that the colder outdoor air affects your inside temperature. On days when the outdoor temperature is in the upper 20s, open the vents to circulate the air and help vent any accumulated ethylene gasses or condensation. If the outdoor temperature is in the 10- to 20-degree range, barely open your vents during the day and close them at night. The amount of time you leave the vents open should decrease with each 5-degree temperature drop.
Once the outside thermometer reads in the single digits or below zero, keep the vents closed. This frigid air will only decrease your humidity and potentially freeze your produce. Especially on cold days, open and shut the door quickly when entering so you do not inject a blast of cold, dry air into the cellar. If you have a long spell of subzero days, you might need to use alternate heat sources such as lights or portable heaters to keep the temperatures up in your root cellar. Use artificial heat sources with caution because they can raise the temperature too high and are a potential fire hazard when left unattended. Make sure to cover your potatoes because exposure to light will make them turn green and go bad.
TIP! If you have to leave your vents closed for more than a few days, use a household fan in your cellar to get air circulating. This will move any trapped air around and dry out condensation.
If after trying these methods to control your temperature, you find wide ranges or steady decreases, you might have an undetected leak in your structure or vent seams through which heat is escaping. Look around the outside your cellar for areas of unusually melted snow to find leaks. For this season, you can seal leaks from the inside, and make note for spring that you will need to do some caulking after the snow melts.
As the season moves into later winter, those surprising warm days can also wreak havoc with your cellar by raising its temperature. If the outdoor air is warmer than your indoor temperature, keep your vents closed to trap the cool air. Try to open the vents when outdoor temperatures cool in the evening so you pull in a little fresh air and vent trapped gasses. If you have a large spike in temperature, bring in a bucket of snow, ice, or cold rocks to cool the space down quickly. Be careful the snow does not boost the humidity as it melts. Manipulating your ventilation to control temperature is an easy-to-learn skill, and after one season, you will know exactly how to use your vents to control your root cellar conditions.
Raising humidity levels in the winter
The dip in outdoor temperature also creates drier air. When this air enters your root cellar, it will mix with the humid air and lower the relative humidity. Keeping your humidity in that desirable 70- to 90-percent range is crucial to long-term storage, but it also the most difficult obstacle to contend with in the winter. The first line of defense is ventilation. If your humidity is too low, close the vents for one or two days to trap the moist air in your cellar, but do not go too long without allowing a little air circulation. If this does not work, use some of these tried-and-true techniques to help increase humidity:
If some of your produce is shriveling or drying out and these humidity-raising methods are not working, try using a sand can. The previous chapter described how to place your produce in a can filled with moist sand. This is especially effective for apples, potatoes, and beets.
Condensation
In some cellars, condensation can become an issue, especially if there are any spots where the air gets trapped and cannot circulate well. This happens in areas where walls and ceilings come together, where beams or shelving meet the wall, or around anything that juts out from the wall, such as light fixtures or upper vents. Condensation is undesirable because it will linger in the areas in which it builds up and eventually cause mold or rot. Inspect these areas, your walls, and even the produce itself for signs of condensation. Wipe off produce and eliminate these air traps whenever possible. To immediately remove condensation, drape dry burlap sacks or sheets of newspaper over the bins of produce and remove the sacks after they become moist.
Dealing with high humidity in the late winter
As winter continues, the outdoor temperature will slowly creep up, and by late winter, the temperature just might be slightly warmer than your cellar’s indoor temperature. This can cause the humidity to get too high, and your first step is to try to adjust the humidity level with more aggressive venting. On warm, sunny winter days, open the intake vent and the exhaust vent in the morning to circulate air through the cellar. The cold air will absorb moisture from your cellar and push the hotter, more humid air out the exhaust vent. Keep an eye on your temperatures so you do not drop the inside temperature too low. By early afternoon, the humidity should be in a more desirable range. Close the intake vent, but leave the exhaust slightly ajar until nightfall.
If venting does not work to remove some of the humidity, try using hydrated lime. Hydrated lime, also called calcium hydroxide, is available at most building supply centers and can absorb a large amount of moisture. Just set out an open container, but make sure the product does not come into contact with produce or your skin. After a few days or when your humidity is back to a desirable range, cover the container or remove it from your cellar. After the storage season, you can spread this lime on your garden as a beneficial soil additive. Wear gloves and a mask when handling hydrated lime because it is powdery and can irritate skin and nasal passages. Read the label for application levels per square foot of soil because hydrated lime is more neutralizing than standard gardener’s lime.
Using Stores from Your Root Cellar
Even on the dreariest, coldest winter days, you will have a small slice of summer as you dip into your garden stores. Bringing this stored bounty to your table is simple and requires only a good recipe and a sturdy carrying basket. The key to tasty meals is handling the produce properly as you remove it from storage. Just as you would when shopping, choose only healthy looking produce. As you choose items each day for dinner, inspect your produce for these signs of spoilage:
Items that are mushy, soft, or shriveled might still be edible and can be eaten immediately or preserved through canning or freezing. Just be sure to cut out any bad parts before eating. If you are not sure, throw it out. Eating a questionable piece of produce is not worth the risk of food poisoning. Be sure to discard any produce with moldy or slimy skin. Also look for signs of insect damage because you might have inadvertently brought some hitchhikers in this fall.
Are you using outdoor trenches or pits? Be sure to use pitted, mounded, or buried produce before you dip into the root cellar stores. Produce stored with these outdoor methods are most susceptible to decay and rodent damage and will not last the entire winter. If room opens up in your root cellar, transfer the outdoor produce.
As you remove vegetables or fruit from each bin, be gentle with the remaining produce. Too much bumping can cause bruising and start decay. Inspect all your produce at least once per week. Be sure to remove any decaying or damaged produce you find from your storage bins so it does not affect the quality of what remains. It is inevitable that some of your stored produce will go bad before you are able to eat it. This is natural in a root cellar, so do not fret if you end up throwing a few things on the compost pile. You will end up with tastier, more nutritious, fresher produce than if you relied on buying produce at the store.
Case Study: Winter Grocery Shopping Begins at Home
Rachel Tayse Baillieul
Hounds in the Kitchen
349 Tibet Road
Columbus OH 43202
614-598-3559
Rachel Tayse Baillieul lives with her husband, daughter, and two dogs in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. Despite living on a small urban lot, they grow an organic garden large enough to feed their family and friends all year. Rachel is a well-established locavore who loves a locally grown meal. She also teaches hands-on cooking classes, is a frequent seminar speaker, and hosts tours of area heirloom garden crops.
Meal planning at our house begins with a trip to our grocery store. The trip is short because the store is located right downstairs in our basement. Once a week, I plan out our dinners and begin the shopping in the cellar. I despise wasting food, especially food we have grown ourselves, so I always choose the ingredients that need to be used first. In our cellar, this means we eat a lot of potatoes early in the winter and have garlic well into spring.
Unlike trips to a real grocery store, trips to my root cellar save money. Because the items we grow are heirloom varieties that are of such a higher quality than store-bought, it is hard to compare to grocery store prices. I would estimate our cellared items save about $500 annually. Plus, we have year-round access to homegrown produce that tastes better, is organic, and has higher nutrition value that mass-produced and packaged veggies.
Our root cellar is about 20 square feet, and we are able to store enough to eat from the cellar during four to six months out of the year. We raise as much as we can and buy in bulk from local suppliers and cooperatives. We store a wide variety of items in our basement root cellar, including garlic, onions, potatoes, winter squash, flour, canned goods, home-pressed hard cider, and even some home-cured meats we hang from the rafters. We built our shelves from the plastic units available at most hardware stores for an inexpensive price. Our storage bins are wood, plastic, or metal with slats or holes in the side to allow air to circulate around the produce.
We run a dehumidifier to keep the humidity low, and our temperature stays at about 50 degrees. We found apples especially prefer a lower temperature, and we end up keeping them in a refrigerator for longer storage. Our root cellar generally works well, but I think ideally we would add more insulation and install a fan to keep our temperatures a little lower.
Take-Away Tip from Rachel:
Test produce before you cook it. One night I baked a beautiful winter squash for dinner. It wasn’t until we started eating that we noticed the squash was off. Now we know to take at least a nibble of the raw ingredient before cooking to make sure it stored well.
Keeping the root cellar organized
Keeping order in your root cellar as you use up your stores will make your spring cleaning fast and easy. As you empty bins, stack them out of the way, and rearrange the full crates into more reachable locations. Be sure to keep space between each bin for air circulation, and do not stack the empty crates in an area in which you will create dead air space. If you started the year with overly full bins, you can also carefully rearrange your produce into the empty bins and place them back on the shelves. As you empty the bins, keep track of how much produce you used and how much spoiled. Combine these notes with the root cellar storage map you created in the fall. Look at your map for problem areas that might have caused this faster decay.
TIP! Stay vigilant on rodent patrol. Check your traps often, and look for droppings or signs of chewing and nesting.
Moving forced items into the light
By midwinter, the items you are forcing should be ready to move into their next phase. If you planted endive or rhubarb, it might be ready to harvest, and you might even have time to start a second forced crop. If you are planning on forcing blooms, your first pottings should be ready to bring into sunshine. In most cases, you only need to bring the pot into a warm room with sunshine and water and wait for sprouts to appear. Keep the bulbs watered and well-lit, and you will have indoor blooms long before the snow melts.
What’s Going On in the Garden?
For gardeners, winter is the time of waiting, waiting, and more waiting. You might be itching to get your fingers in the dirt, but all you can do now is thumb through the gardening catalogs and dream about your spring garden. Of course, you can start mapping out your garden and order all the seeds, bushes, and plants you will need to make it a reality. Winter is the time to educate yourself about growing methods and gardening techniques. If you are interested in learning more, visit your local library, look for a community education class, or visit one of the many educational websites now available. A handy list of gardening resources, including links for the beginning gardener, is listed in Appendix C.
When planning next year’s garden, start with all the notes you took over the past year. Look at where you planted everything so you can adequately rotate crops. Each type of produce takes a different nutrient from the soil, and if the same crop is planted in the same space each year, the soil will become depleted, and the plant will not produce good harvests. For the best yield, rearrange your plants. If your garden is large enough, plant in a three-year cycle to give the soil plenty of time to recover its nutrients. The variety of plants you put in will affect your planting cycles. Some plants make compatible neighbors and can share the same soil each year, but others will struggle if planted near one another. Refer to a gardening book for information on companion planting and crop rotation.
Also review your garden and harvest notes so you can avoid any problem crops or varieties in the coming year. Look at your storage notes to determine whether you need to plant more or less of each type of produce. Also, consider your harvest times this past season. Did they coincide well with your root cellar readiness, or do you need to delay your planting so the crops mature later in the fall? Map everything out in the same manner described in the “Early Winter” section of Chapter 3. Once you have everything mapped out, start searching for seeds. Order early so you have the best choices of varieties.
TIP! Late winter means it is time once again to start seeds for this spring. Plan ahead if you want to grow your own.
Journaling and Assessing Your First Year
You have made it through an entire growing season and most of your winter storage season. You have a good idea of what it takes to plan, grow, harvest, and store enough produce to feed your family throughout the winter. Take time before spring comes to objectively assess your life with a root cellar. Go through all the notes you kept and consider how things worked. Record all your likes and dislikes from the actual building to the accessibility to the amount of storage. Consider what you would recommend to a friend thinking about root cellaring, and make those changes to your own storage system.
Look over every element of your system, including ventilation, monitors, gauges, alarms, shelves, storage crates and general layout. Did these systems make it easy to operate and maintain your root cellar, or do you need to make some improvements or upgrades this summer? Were you able to keep the humidity and temperature at the proper levels?
Review your garden, harvest, and usage notes. Did you have enough produce to get you through the winter? Did you have enough room to store it all, or do you need to add extra room? Did you have any problems with spoilage or overcrowding? Which items were successful, and which items would you like to repeat for this year?
With all these answers, you can develop a plan for next year that might include updating structures, adding storage systems, or increasing garden crops. Now is the time to plan because once spring rolls around, you will be busy again with gardening and yard work. You can take your time over the summer to complete your upgrades, but starting with a good plan will help you manage the workload and get your supplies lined up ahead of time.