Garden Row Storage
The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.
Abraham Lincoln
Here are some simple ways to make all that garden goodness last for winter eating. Some of these tricks are hundreds of years old, but they’re still used because they work. Others make use of contemporary scrap materials and a few use plastic sheets, but all are low-technology methods that require no fueled energy to maintain. The nice thing about these kinds of decentralized food storage is that they’ll work for almost everyone. Even if you live in a rented house or grow your vegetables in a community garden or in a small backyard plot, you can build a clamp and dig a pit and stow some squash in the attic and eat well in a January blizzard from your own efforts. If you’re still saving up the cash to put in an underground root cellar or an insulated room in your basement, you can store plenty of vegetables right now while you make your plans.
When we told a friend that we were working on a root cellar book, he said “Well, I live in a slab-based house on a flat piece of land. No basement, no hills. How can I store root vegetables?” Our answer is in this chapter. Having fresh food to eat for most of the year doesn’t take a lot of land or equipment or dollars. Not even a whole lot of time, really — just some ingenuity and a ready acquaintance with the shovel.
You’ll adapt these suggestions to your own situation, of course. You might want to try making comparisons between carrots stored in the row and in a pit, for example, to decide which method works best in your garden, for your family. Make notes on the results and experiment again next year. Start small and make a game of it. You might decide, as we have, to use both methods. If you’re presently turning to frozen and canned vegetables in October or November, try one or two of these small-scale root cellaring tricks and see how much longer you can extend your fresh-vegetable season. Keep trying, keep experimenting, and before long you’ll wonder why you ever put carrots or beets or onions or squash or sweet potatoes or cabbage on the shopping list in February, or even in April.
You couldn’t ask for a simpler way to keep vegetables. Certain root vegetables will stay in fine shape all winter long when left right where they’re growing and covered with an 18-inch-thick layer of mulch, which may need to be held down by corn stalks or scrap boards. If you apply mulch before the ground freezes hard, it will often stay soft enough to dig for an additional month, and then all you must do to get fresh vegetables is to fork off the mulch, pry out a few roots, and replace the mulch on the row.
Soil in raised beds often freezes later than regular garden rows, and thus permits longer harvest of wintered-in crops. Homesteader’s News founders Norm and Sherrie Lee of Addison, New York, report that they were able to pull carrots and beets from their well-mulched, intensively planted, raised beds well after conventional garden rows had frozen solid. The light, friable soil of a raised bed releases the vegetables more readily than heavy clay, and the fact that the beds are higher than the surrounding ground permits good drainage of both rain water and cold air.
Any vegetables you don’t eat before the ground freezes closed will keep until spring, when they’ll be a special treat. There’s nothing to compare with the fresh carrot you munch on while working in the garden to get ready for a new season of growth.
Sometimes, though, mice work their way under the mulch and systematically destroy a whole planting, leaving a neat row of bare carrot-shaped holes — a spooky sight in early spring. You can discourage these little thieves by spreading a strip of hardware cloth or old screening down the row before putting on the mulch. And here’s another trick you might want to try: Put a strip of sheet plastic down the row on top of an 8-inch layer of leaves or hay and cover the strip with another 10 or 12 inches of mulch. The plastic helps to keep the bottom leaves dry, so digging is easier without a frozen mat of soaked leaves to chip away.
Garden row storage works well with kale (but don’t cover it), carrots, parsnips, salsify, Jerusalem artichokes, and often turnips in the north. Add beets, cabbage, winter radishes, celeriac, and so on in the mid- and upper-south. Be sure to mark the rows with stakes so you’ll know where to start digging. We know a northern gardener who dug up her carrot row and replanted the best roots in a deeply worked small square corner of the garden near the house, covering them in the usual way. They were easier to find, quicker to uncover, and more efficient to dig, she reported.
Build this to extend the life of otherwise perishable vegetables like lettuce, escarole, tomatoes, or to keep a prize broccoli or chard plant going even later into the winter than you normally could. It amounts to a temporary on-site cold frame. Just stack bales of hay about two deep around the plant or plants you want to protect, and cover the opening with an old storm window. On really cold nights, toss straw-filled bags or an old rug over the window. It’s worth the trouble when you can pick your own fresh lettuce for Christmas dinner.
Leafy vegetables protected by tents will often give you a good extra month of fresh picking — just when you need them most, during the cold days of early winter. Some of our favorite city gardeners have kept themselves in Swiss chard most of the year with a simple improvised tent. Use clear plastic for these tunnellike tents. Doubled cleaners’ bags will last a few weeks, or use heavier plastic in which manufactured goods are often wrapped. You’ll need a framework to support the plastic. Stiff wire bent into a U-shape and poked into the ground at two-foot intervals in the row works fine. Or you could use bent green twigs from tree brush, with both ends buried in the ground. Stretch the plastic over the framework and anchor it down at the sides with earth or rocks. A continuous band of soil is better because there will be no gaps for the wind to catch and tear the plastic.
You’ll need to ventilate your tunnel-tent, or the vegetables may cook when the sun shines. The open ends make good vents, but during very cold weather you might want to close over all but the bottom few inches of the tent ends at night. Don’t leave the vent open at the top, or all the warm air will rise and drift away. Another alternative is to make a portable cold frame from an old storm sash, with carrying handles attached to the ends. You can set this plant protector right over the portion of the row from which you want to keep on harvesting.
Spun-bonded row covers like Reemay, Harvestguard Agronet, and Tufbell offer several degrees of frost protection while admitting air, light, and moisture. In most cases, these materials don’t need any support; just drape them over the plants. It is important to anchor them, though, to keep cold air out and prevent wind disturbance. Cover the edges with soil or batten them down with boards or spare bean poles.
Broccoli, chard, escarole, endive, spinach, and turnip greens are good candidates for these techniques.
Mounds or clamps have been relied on for centuries to feed land-based people through the winter. (A clamp is simply an above-ground mound of vegetables set out in the open and covered with earth and insulation.) These vegetable storage mounds have several advantages: They are not difficult to construct, they take very little material, and a whole row of mounds will fit handily in even a small backyard.
Mound storage isn’t practical for the far north or for areas where winter temperatures average much above 30 degrees F.
Although making a winter-vegetable mound is not an arduous task, it is a job that must be done right. There are a good many mistakes you can make if you don’t know just what is important in making a good mound. So take it from mike, who grew up eating potatoes from clamps his mother built: here’s what you need to do to build a good, workable clamp:
Choosing the Site. Build the clamp on land that is dry and well drained, preferably slightly elevated with a natural slope for drainage, but certainly not a spot where ground water is high or where water tends to puddle. Don’t worry about not having a slope — you can remedy that — but if you have one, use it.
Soil quality, while not a factor you can change quickly, does influence the effectiveness of the clamp. The ideal soil to use is a light, sandy loam, because it sifts well between the vegetables and is easy to dig into. Heavy clay which breaks up only into rough clods doesn’t cover vegetables well and packs hard, making digging difficult. The soil on which you build the clamp should be free of raw organic matter which could spoil your produce as it decomposes. And if you built a clamp last year, put this year’s clamp in a different spot if at all possible, to avoid building up healthy populations of the kinds of pests that thrive on storage vegetables, especially potatoes. If rotation isn’t practical for you, then just clean off and compost all the old straw, spoiled vegetables, and such from the previous year’s mound and air out the spot for two days before rebuilding on it.
Another site factor to consider is protection from prevailing winds. Wind that whips unimpeded across three cornfields before it hits your place will put a heavy chill on anything that sticks up out of the ground. If you can, construct your clamps in a spot that is sheltered from wind by trees, buildings, hedges, or fences; or, if necessary, devise a hay-bale or burlap-screen windbreak. The mound shouldn’t be too close to sheds or other buildings, though, or rodents may find it an easy mark.
Laying the Foundation. Rake leaves and garden debris from the spot you’ve chosen for your clamp and dig out 8 to 12 inches of soil, saving it separately to cover the pile later. Pack a mat of straw, hay, or leaves about 3 inches deep into this shallow pit. (Some gardeners start the mound right on the ground surface without digging out any soil.)
Stacking the Vegetables. Carefully stack your vegetables on the hay or straw mat, aiming for a cone-shaped pile. You can make the pile two or three feet high if you like, but it’s important to remember that once opened, the clamp must usually be emptied because it can be very difficult to close over securely in freezing weather. The vegetables you remove would keep well in a cold, damp place, but if you have only a warm house to bring them to, they’ll spoil soon. So you’d probably be wise to make several small clamps rather than one big one.
Can you mix the vegetables? Yes, indeed, in fact this is a practical idea that will help you to get more value from your free cold-storage arrangement. When you open up a cache of assorted good keepers — carrots, turnips, rutabagas, beets, and potatoes — you have ready the fixings for a variety of meals. But don’t store fruits and vegetables together. When mixing vegetables, you might find it helpful to remember that the highest temperature in a clamp will be toward the top.
As you arrange the vegetables, pile them around a small bundle of straw or brushwood, or a perforated pipe poked into the center of the heap. This acts as a ventilating shaft, admitting fresh air from above to circulate among the stored vegetables. Piled-up vegetables often tend to heat early in the storage period, so ventilation is necessary to draw off this heat and prevent spoilage.
Before you begin to cover the clamp, dig a shallow trench all around the pile of vegetables (or do this before stacking them). This provides extra drainage insurance.
Covering the Clamp. Now you’re ready to complete the clamp. Pack a generous blanket of straw or hay over the whole surface of the mound of vegetables. Leaves may be used but they’re difficult to anchor in place unless you stuff them in bags — and then you must be sure there are no exposed gaps. Stiff straw is the best material to use, because it leaves plenty of tiny air spaces and doesn’t mat down. Position the bundles of straw the long way with their ends at the top of the pile. Straw that comes in bales is often short. The straw that Mike’s mother hand-sickled from the rye field was perfect for this purpose — long, strong, airy, and springy. Use what you have, but make it a good thick layer — 6 to 12 inches. Form the straw into a thin point at the top of the pile — a continuation of the natural ventilating system. You can cover the straw with a board to keep mice out.
Then shovel on a three- to four-inch outer layer of dirt, covering the whole pile except for the tip of the straw vent on top. Build the dirt layer up gradually and pack it down well with the back of your shovel so it’s firm. Finally, make a second trench around the mound to drain off rain and snow melt. Don’t surround the pile with mulch, or mice may decide you meant it just for them.
European gardeners sometimes use boards to form a vent instead of straw or fine brushwood. In this case, they nail two boards together forming an inverted “V” and place this frame over the vegetable cone before covering the vegetables with straw and soil. Both ends of the board should be long enough to extend beyond the edge of the straw-dirt cover on both sides of the mound.
You don’t want to make your clamp covering completely airtight. Never cover the pile with plastic. If ice forms on the mound, the lack of air exchange can make the vegetables heat up. An ice-glazed mound is also difficult — and sometimes impossible — to break into.
Unlike refrigerators and freezers, clamps don’t come with any guarantees. You can’t control the temperature and the thing may be a bit unwieldy to dig into when the weather’s fierce. Sometimes you even need a pick to pry it open. But you never owe anyone a penny on a clamp, and it never raises your gas or electric bill, either.
Vegetables to store in clamps are potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, winter radishes, cabbage, rutabagas, celeriac, and parsnips. Fruits are apples and quinces.
A dead refrigerator can be turned into a fine vegetable storage vault if you’re willing to dig a hole for it. We trued keeping carrots in an above-ground frig insulated with hay packed around it and on top of it, but when the thermometer went below zero, the carrots froze. We should have put more hay on top of the box than the eight inches or so that we used — whole bales would have been better. Burying the frig is the thing to do. That way you get the advantage of the more constant and moderate temperature of the earth under the soil surface.
If you have an unused refrigerator you’d like to make into a garden root cellar, remove the motor and shelves and crisper drawers. Be very sure to knock off the lock so that no child can be accidentally locked in the box. Dig a big hole a foot each way larger than the refrigerator and toss some rocks in for drainage. Ease the empty frig down into the hole and position it so it’s on its back. The door will now swing up like a chest freezer. The top surface of the buried refrigerator should be at or slightly below soil level. If you want to store several kinds of vegetables in the frig, you can leave one or two shelves in for dividers.
Fill in between the refrigerator and the ground with loose soil. When you’ve packed your vegetables away, heap bales of hay or bags of leaves on the refrigerator lid to keep winter cold from descending into the buried box. It’s a good idea too to cover the lid with scrap boards or metal roofing (we used a heavy piece of ribbed rubber matting) to prevent water from seeping into the joint between the lid and the body and freezing them together.
You can keep apples, potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips, celeriac, kohlrabi, and rutabagas in a buried refrigerator. You might find that you need to run a small vent pipe into the refrigerator to admit fresh air.
Trench storage works well for leafy vegetables like celery, Chinese cabbage, cabbage, and chard, which might spoil if heaped in a pile. You’ll need a shovel, dirt, and straw as you did for the clamp, but you’ll get to do a little more digging on this one. Remember, you’re counting on the moderating temperature of the deep-down soil as well as the insulating effect of the batts of hay and leaves you pile on top.
Dig your trench before you uproot the vegetables that will go in it. Save the fine topsoil to sift around the roots. Make the trench about 2 feet deep and as wide as necessary to accommodate the vegetables without crowding them. Then spade up your leafy vegetables, root and all, and replant them in the trench. Cover the roots with fine soil and water them, using a long-spouted watering can so you don’t douse the leaves. Wet leaves will rot quickly in a trench. Place boards over the trench to serve as a roof for the vegetables and top the boards with a 12- to 18-inch layer of hay, leaf-stuffed bags, or corn stalks. Some gardeners like to nail two boards together at right angles to form a little peaked roof that will shed water better than the flat roof.
While temperatures in a clamp are highest at the top of the vegetable pile, trench temperatures are usually highest at the bottom of the trench closest to the earth’s constant moderating influence.
Cabbage is often treated in another way — positioned root-up, with the head resting on a three-inch layer of straw, leaves, or other padding in the bottom of the trench, then covered with boards and more hay or other insulating material over the boards. Trench storage is especially good for cabbage since it sometimes affects the flavor of other foods if stored close to them.
Another trenching arrangement involves placing a triangular frame of scrap wood at each end of the trench and nailing pieces of lath to these frames to form a sort of triangular crate. Pile a layer of straw over the frame and then pack on a six-inch covering of soil over the sides of the frame. Leave the ends open for ventilation, and stuff them firmly with dry straw.
The underground barrel root cellar is an old favorite, but large drain tiles are probably cheaper and easier to find than barrels these days. If you have an old barrel, though, here’s how to install it as a vegetable keeper.
Get out your shovel again. If the ground is rocky, you may even need a pick to pry out the stones. This root cellar business does wonders for the appetite! In a shady spot, dig a hole deep enough to accept the barrel positioned at a 45-degree angle. Scrape out the loose dirt and toss a layer or rocks into the bottom of the hole. Lower the barrel into the hole, then firm the soil around it and pack a good two feet of dirt over and around the barrel so you end up with kind of a hunched mound.
Now you can fill the barrel with vegetables. If you’re putting in an assortment of vegetables, include some of each kind in every layer you put in, so you don’t have to eat your way through all the turnips to get to the beets. As you put the vegetables in the barrel, tuck straw, hay, leaves, or moss around them to insulate and cushion them. Stop loading before you get to the top of the barrel. Fill the last four or five inches with an armful of hay or straw for insulation. Then clap on the wooden lid, jam a foot-thick wedge of straw over the lid, and press a board over the straw. Finally, roll up one of those big stones you had to pry out while you were digging and wedge it against the board to keep the whole arrangement together. One of our respected country consultants tells us that his family always waxed the oak barrel in which they stored their underground vegetables to make it more waterproof.
To bury a big clay drain tile flue liner or a galvanized lidded can, just dig a hole straight down, not at an angle, large enough to accept the container. Pour an inch or two of gravel in the whole and then put the tile or garbage can in place. (The tile would be our first choice. Clay insulates better than metal and won’t rust out as the metal can eventually will.) If you’re at all unsure of the drainage, put a layer of rocks in the bottom of the tile before filling it with vegetables. You can set baskets of produce right in the tile and lift them out. The tiles may be obtained in 18- by 20-inch or 24- by 24-inch sizes.
Doesn’t all this digging make you feel virtuous and fit? Here’s another way to store your vegetables without using any of the expensive, oil-based kind of energy. Dig a hole not too far from the kitchen door, big enough to accommodate a box about two by four feet. You can make the box larger, but we wouldn’t make it any smaller than two by three feet. Construct a simple wooden box out of scrap lumber to fit in the hole. Line the box with hardware cloth to keep out gnawing rodents. Arrange the vegetables on a bed of hay with hay, straw, leaves, or moss packed between the layers. Cover with a three- to four-inch layer of hay. Top with a hardware-cloth-lined lid — not hinged, just laid on top. Put hay bales on top of the lid and enjoy visiting your underground store when the roads are frozen and more snow’s on the way.
The earth pit is even easier to arrange than the wood-box safe, but if rodents intrude you’ll need to line the pit with hardware cloth. Here’s how to make one.
Choose a shady, well-drained spot within shouting distance of the kitchen door. Dig a pit about four feet wide and two feet deep. Pack the earth around the pit to form a sloping collar that will direct water runoff away from the opening, then dig a trench all around the pit to channel off rain water. Shovel a two-inch layer of dry sand or sawdust into the open pit, and lay the vegetables carefully on the sand, sifting more sand or sawdust between the vegetables until you’ve built up a layer of vegetables a foot high. Top this with another two or three inches of sand or sawdust, then a foot-thick blanket of hay, leaves, straw, and so on. Spread a layer of plastic sheeting over the straw and place an old door or several planks on top to hold it down. You’ll feel like you’re earning those vegetables as you pry your way in to find them, but they should be in good shape when you get there.
These pits are good for potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets, parsnips, and rutabagas. You can keep apples in earth pits too, but not with other fruits and vegetables.
Who’d think of hiding a melon in the oat bin? This is where Grandfather often put the last cantaloupes of the season, to ripen while he did the fall chores. A bin of barley, wheat, or rye will work just as well. The grain admits some air but cushions and insulates the fruit — a neat arrangement. Old-timers often kept cured hams deep down in grain bins, too.
You may not have a basement or a hill to dig a root cellar into, but if you have a garage or other outbuilding, you can make it work for you at harvest time. Your climate will determine how long you can store your produce in an unheated outbuilding. We’ve used our shaded garage and shed to store apples, potatoes, onions, nuts, beets, and some other fall vegetables during the first few postharvest weeks when night-time temperatures dropped below freezing but not too far below. We’ve also stored vegetables and apples well into winter in small heaps covered with bags of leaves in an unheated garage in central Pennsylvania. When we spent a year in Wisconsin, in our innocence we left a late picking of apples in an insulated camping cooler in a small yard shed. The apples froze, but even though they were mushy and icy in January, they were very sweet and so good that we ate them all.
You can carry vegetable protection one step further by packing your produce in cartons, coolers, boxes, bins, and so on with an insulating layer of sawdust or hay on the bottom, sides, and between layers. Thus jacketed and stored in a garage, they’ll keep through December at least in our area — and often into January. But soon after New Year’s Day we find ourselves quoting that old saying: “When the days begin to lengthen, then the cold begins to strengthen.” It seems to be true, so any vegetable kept outside under wraps should be brought to a more protected spot by early January — an unheated porch, perhaps, or a cold attic. In far northern states, you’d need to keep a watchful eye on insulated outside edibles in December and bring them in when temperatures head for the low teens.
If your garage or shed has a dirt floor, you could excavate a pit right there for vegetable storage. With walls and roof protecting the pit from ice and snow, you’d have less trouble breaking into it. One man dug a shallow trench along the wall of his shed to store cabbages. Another clever gardener mentioned in Keeping the Harvest by Nancy Thurber and Gretchen Mead, buried a metal wall locker in his garage for stashing vegetables away. This is a particularly neat solution because the metal sides keep out mice and rats, a locker is usually already ventilated, and lockers often are available for a song from salvage sales. One enterprising family with a garage built into a hill used a necessary wall repair job as an opportunity to burrow another few feet into the hill, through the inner garage wall, to make a winter vegetable closet.
We know an apple grower who hangs baskets of his fruit from the rafters of the head-high basement space under the front porch of his log cabin. He twists wire coat hangers into hooks for this purpose. The hung-high fruit is safe from flooding, pretty safe from mice, and easy to get to. You could do the same thing with beets or turnips if you had a similar space.
Another family we stopped to visit had an unused underground concrete cistern they intended to convert to a root cellar. They’ll need to run pipes into the former water vault to ventilate it, keep a ladder in it for access, and add a more convenient trapdoor on top, but we’d guess that with a little tinkering their ready-made root cellar should work out very well. Being able to use a facility they already have helps to make up for the inconvenience of climbing down the ladder to reach the stored food.
These are just a few of the many imaginative arrangements that could be worked out. Look around your place and list the nooks and crannies where you might tuck a carton or a cooler of carrots. Then figure out how you could fend off the frigid air from that place a bit more effectively — by hanging old blankets on an inside shed wall, mounding up leaf-stuffed bags, or exhausting some house or dryer heat into the garage through a vent or window. Although your carrots, beets, and apples might not last until spring in a shed, they could last well into the winter, depending on how well you can cushion them, and while you’re enjoying those extra weeks of vegetable independence, you can be figuring out how to extend them.
The average house has at least one unsuspected area that would make a good root cellaring space. If you’re lucky, you’ll find several! Remember that you’re looking for more than one set of conditions — a cold, damp space for potatoes and other root vegetables, and a warmish dry spot for pumpkins and squash, and perhaps a cool dry corner for garlic and onions.
Do you have an attic? That’s a great place to winter pumpkins and squash. Most attics are unheated and it’s usually easy to open a door or vent from the house to admit some additional heat from time to time of that is necessary. The only problem you might have with attic storage, providing the attic doesn’t freeze, is that produce you put up there is easily forgotten. Write notes on your appointment calendar to remind yourself to use and periodically inspect your upper-level larder. It’s always nice to find something you didn’t know you had, unless that something is a mushy two-year-old squash.
The unheated room can be a real asset in winter. Perhaps it’s a spare bedroom, an unused extra bath, a pantry, or just a big coat-closet. Keep the door closed for a day, put a thermometer in the room to give you an idea of how cold it gets, and then decide what kind of vegetables would keep well there (see chapters 8 and 9).
You can sneak several bushels of produce into a room without making it look like a warehouse, in case you need to use the room occasionally. Cover stacked cartons with an afghan, quilt, or attractive print sheet. Hide small quantities of vegetables under the floor-length skirt of a corner table. Line up interesting baskets full of sweet potatoes along one wall of the room. Toss a small throw rug over a filled crate.
The old house on our farm hasn’t a single closet, but it does have a cold back room, exposed to the west wind, where squash, onions, garlic, and sweet potatoes keep quite well from November until March and often April. (During the few bitter cold days we usually experience every winter, we simply move the produce to an upstairs room where it’s a few degrees warmer.) Since we heat the house with an airtight wood box stove, the kitchen and the upstairs bedrooms are comfortably warm. Other rooms, into which the heat doesn’t circulate without the help of a fan, are cool and sometimes cold in winter. (The house is not insulated.) In homes like ours, where reliance on wood heat has replaced dependence on central heating systems run on purchased fuel, it’s usually easy to find a gradation of cool and cold rooms that are useful for food storage. In old houses, where rodents can easily enter through the foundation, you’ll need to keep an eye out for mice and set traps if necessary, if you have a lot of foodstuffs stored out in the open.
An enclosed porch is as good as an unheated room, and so is a cellar, of course. And don’t overlook those odd spades under the porch steps or in a breezeway or outside cellar entry. It’s all very well to have a perfectly finished, efficient house, but some of these irregular little cubbyholes that might make an architect shudder will prove mighty useful for natural cold storage.
The crawl space under a porch or elevated house is dark, cold, and damp for most of the fall — good root storage conditions. When outside weather turns very cold, produce kept in crawl spaces will freeze without additional protection. Insulating the space and packing your vegetables in sawdust or leaves will help to extend the useful period of your crawl space larder.
A Virginia gardener wrote to tell us about his under-porch root cellar. He has a high screened porch on the northeast side of his house. There are steps down to the cellar under the porch, but the furnace makes the cellar too hot for food storage and the space is too small to partition.
So our gardener friend made a framed-in root cellar in the dirt area under the porch, right next to the basement steps. First he dug a hole in the ground to a depth of 18 inches. Then, using two-by-fours, he framed in a rectangular space 46 inches long, 42 inches high, and 25 inches wide. He used old planks to cover the sides, ceiling, ad floor of the little root cellar. Next he lined the walls with sheet tin to keep out varmints. Finally, he put on a simple door — just a plank frame, lined with tin, which he pins in place at the bottom with nails bent upward. A plank propped against an upright under the porch adds the strength of a buttress to keep the door closed. Soil heaped around the half-buried box helps to insulate it.
A closet on the north side of the house could be given over to fruit or vegetable storage. Wall space along basement and attic stairways might be fitted with shelves to hold small cartons of onions. If you have steps leading directly from your basement to the outside, the cold outside air descending through the passageway will refrigerate baskets of produce you set on the steps. You can even vary the conditions to suit different foods. It’s usually coldest on the top steps closest to the outdoors, and warmer on the lower steps near the cellar. If the cellar door is exposed to the sun, or your area gets very cold, it might be worth your while to insulate the door, either with Styrofoam or fiberglass fastened to the inside, or hay bales or bags of leaves piled on the outside if it’s a slanting bulkhead door. You can spread damp burlap sacks over the produce to increase moisture.
Basement window wells offer a small area but they’re easy to fix up for vegetable storage. In an old home, thick basement walls may permit you to box-in an interior space, which you can cool by opening the basement window, and warm by admitting heated basement air through a vent in the box. Or, if you live in a newer house that has an exterior window well, you can place a box with a hinged lid in the window well, insulate around the outside of the box with shavings, straw, or whatever, prop open the basement window, and wall in the sides of the enclosure with scrap boards. In effect, you’ve just extended the basement area into the window well. Such an arrangement will allow you to reach through the open basement window to open the box lid and remove the vegetables you need for dinner. Mice like these cozy set-ups too, so watch for evidence of them or cover the box with hardware cloth if mice are already a problem.
Now that you’ve surveyed your homeplace, we hope you’ve been able to find several good storage spots that will keep you in fresh vegetables longer than ever before. And we hope you’ve had some fun improvising and experimenting, too, using materials at hand to come up with a good solution for your situation. What can you come up with? We’d like to hear from you. Would you let us know about any different storage arrangements you work out?
