Rotten squash provide an afternoon snack for Petunia the pig.
Grandpa Snedd . . . was the saving kind. When he sent a youngster downstairs for a bowl of apples for the evening snack, he’d order, “Look through for any that have spots, and bring those. One bad apple can spoil the whole crate.”
Aunt Carrie was his daughter, but she never agreed. “Bring the best apples you can find,” she’d say. “That way, even when they’re all spotted, we’ll still be getting the best of the batch.”
Eupha Shanly
“The Farm Cellar,” Poor Joe’s Pennsylvania Almanac
We’ve become so accustomed to controlled standardization in our purchased foods, to at least surface perfection, that there is no room in our scheme of things for the idea of decay. When you buy two cellopacked green peppers in the supermarket, you expect them to be sound, and that’s reasonable. (What most of us fail to realize is that fully 25 percent of the produce harvested commercially in the United States is never eaten because it spoils after harvest but before it can be purchased. Mechanical handling and long-distance shipping of produce that was picked green no doubt contribute to this unfortunate waste. Surely you and I can do better than that.) If you’ve frozen or canned foods carefully, you’ll get little if any spoilage, and even many home gardeners consider a rotten vegetable to be a sign of failure.
Not so, though. The bad apple and the squishy squash happen to all of us who store foods unprocessed, even under the best of conditions. It’s natural for a few vegetables to deteriorate before winter is out. The idea in root cellaring is to grow enough, and store enough, so that a few small losses won’t matter. Don’t be surprised or threatened when one of your pumpkins collapses from within or an apple goes leathery with brown rot. Expect some spoilage and work around it.
If one-third or more of your stored beets or apples or whatever fails to make it into serious winter storage, though, then it’s time to look for reasons. Were the vegetables immature? Bruised? Washed, or too closely trimmed before storage? Were storage temperature and humidity right for the food? Were they stacked in large poorly ventilated piles?
When a small percentage of a stored crop decays in storage, you’ll often find that it is the bruised sweet potato, the immature squash, the stemless pumpkin that goes first. Bacteria and fungi take advantage of small skin breaks and poorly cured innards to set up thriving colonies that continue to break down the unsound tissue. While this is annoying when it happens to food you intended to eat, consider that we’d be stuck with mountains of useless garbage if it were not for this action of microorganisms, the ultimate reducers.
Most serious gardeners have great respect for the process of decay, which turns a heap of leaves and plant trimmings into rich, crumbly compost. So if you must toss a few vegetables on the compost pile, just figure that they started their journey in that direction a bit early. You’ll meet them again in next spring’s compost and next summer’s garden produce.
Deterioration of stored vegetables is not always absolute, though. Often you can catch signs of decay — small black or soft spots, weeping areas, and so on before they spread. If you cut out all the bad parts, you can still use the food. But be sure to avoid including any moldy tissue with the parts of the vegetable you intend to use. Many fungi and bacteria produce toxins as by-products of metabolism, and you don’t want to eat these toxins with your supper.
A half-gone squash you may not consider sound enough to rescue for the table may still serve an intermediate purpose before sinking back into the earth. Give it to the chickens or cut it into pieces to recover the seeds, which usually remain in good condition for a while after the flesh decays.
Some people use up unsound foods first, in order to catch them before they spoil. This frugal practice makes a good deal of sense at the beginning of the storage season, but if you find as winter progresses that you are always eating the second-rate vegetables so they won’t go bad on you, and leaving the best ones in the bin, then perhaps you should reconsider priorities. As long as food is not actually scarce, enjoy the good stuff while it’s really good. If a handful of questionable vegetables is nagging at your conscience, pickle them or make apple butter, squash butter, sauerkraut, or catsup if you have the time. If not, discard them unmourned and concentrate on the good apples in the barrel.
Rotten squash provide an afternoon snack for Petunia the pig.
Occasionally some produce will freeze, because it was either left outside on a very cold night or insufficiently insulated in storage. All is not lost. Carrots, beets, and other sweet root vegetables may be used in soups and stews even if they’ve been frozen. Frozen onions and cabbage are perfectly all right to use too. Once frozen and then thawed, the softened tissues of the vegetables spoil much more readily, through, so frozen vegetables that have thawed should be used promptly.
The only way to prevent the spread of decay from unsound vegetables to good ones is to inspect your stored hoard weekly and cull the early quitters from your good keepers. There are 50 kinds of rot that can affect a stored apple and all of them are ready and eager to go to work on all the good apples that are in contact with a single bad one.
These weekly checking sessions can be just a chore, or they can give you a chance to gloat (while shivering slightly) over all the good food you’ve managed to grow and put by. You choose.