Storing Root Vegetables for the Winter

In my last post I talked about some of the methods I use to preserve my garden harvest. Fermenting, freezing and canning (water bath and pressure canning) are all great ways to store foods and also to create resilience in case of an emergency.

But what if I just want to eat my veggies fresh?

Let’s face it, the biggest push for vegetable gardening in the first place is so that you can eat your own delicious, fresh vegetables! There really is nothing like a fresh picked green pea, sweet delicious tomatoes or a carrot or beet pulled out of the frosty soil. So how can you stretch that fresh veggie season out for as long as possible? It can be tricky but it can be done.

The three biggest factors in preserving your fresh veggies are:

• choosing vegetables that are going to store well in the first place
• In some cases (potatoes, winter squash, onions for example) curing those vegetables to harden them off
• controlling moisture
• controlling heat

In short, start by choosing and preparing vegetables that store well and then find the right place to keep them.

Have you ever wondered what your ancestors who came to the prairies ate all winter? I have, but I also know the answer, at least for my Ukrainian family. They ate meat, dairy, root vegetables, grains and cabbage. These are foods that can be grown in our short season and that will store well in the right environment.

In days gone by most people would have put up their winter vegetables in an underground root cellar, which would have offered the perfect temperature and humidity for most of their produce to last the winter. Root cellars are dark, consistently cool and a bit damp. These are perfect conditions for storing vegetables. The modern refrigerator tries to emulate this but often comes up short, particularly in the humidity department. This is one of the reasons that the crisper drawer often becomes the rotter drawer – at least it does in my house!

I was slow in harvesting my carrots this year and this has resulted in a big bunch of carrots that will need to be kept as fresh as possible and likely for a while. So….

I am trying a new method for storing root vegetables this year

Many resources will tell you that storing carrots and beets is best done in a container of damp sand. Though that doesn’t sound hard the idea of going out and lugging a bag of heavy sand home has always seemed a bit arduous. I know, poor me.

Recently though I saw an article suggesting damp peat moss. I am careful about using peat moss because all though it is a product harvested in Canada, many consider peat to be a non-renewable resource (though here is an interesting article debunking that a bit).

Anyway, the peat moss idea got me thinking that coco coir would likely also work well. Coco coir, while more renewable, also has environmental drawbacks. Although it is environmentally sustainable at the harvest level, coconuts are not exactly a local product! However, because it is pH neutral it makes a fabulous bedding material for vermicompost so I happened to have half a package in my garage.

To store my carrots I shook off the dirt, cut their tops to just one inch above the carrot and laid them on their sides between layers of my moistened coco coir. I started with about 1″ of coir and used about the same amount between each layer. I did not let the carrots touch each other. Hopefully his takes care of the moisture part of the equation.

Now I need to find a cool place to keep them. A cold but not freezing garage, an unheated basement, or a cold room would all work. Since I neglected to dig a cold room under my garage when we designed the house (I kick myself regularly for that), and my basement has in-floor heating making it pretty warm, I am going to try the garage. We do heat it, but we try to keep it as cool as the furnace will allow. This may still be too warm, I guess only time will tell.

If anyone has any ideas for keeping things cool I’m all ears!

I’ll keep y’all up to date on how it goes.