Cold room /root celler w/no basement?

[Cindlady2]

OK, here's the thing, we have a big garden and a fairly big ranch style house but no basement. just a dirt/gravel crawl space. I need a place to store root crops and squash over the winter. We have a large attached garage but it freezes in winter. We live in Wisconsin so snow and fluctuating temps are an issue. Hubby doesn't want to run another frig. and I've found they are too moist in most cases to keep things long term anyway. Any ideas?

 

[so lucky]

Maybe you could dig a smallish root cellar. Let's see--bury a plastic barrel? Large storage box? I don't know what requirements there are to keep something underground. Waterproof and gnaw proof, I guess. And accessable. Maybe cover it with straw and a board, so you could get into it without having to dig it up. Take out enough food to last you the month, then forget about it till you run out of taters.

 

[moolie]

I keep winter squash on the floor in my front living/dining room near the windows--our windows come pretty low to the floor and it's a bit colder near them. But in our old place I just kept squash on the floor in the corner of my kitchen and they did just fine throughout the winter. So squash don't really need a root cellar. It actually ends up looking like a sort of "harvest" theme decoration.

We do have a basement, but it's not any colder than our main floor because of the furnace. So we keep our root veggies in 5 gallon buckets layered with damp sand and keep the buckets in our basement spare room with the door closed and the heat vent blocked off. The room stays at about 62-65F that way, not much colder than the 68 we keep the rest of the house at during the heating season, but it seems to work ok for carrots, parsnips, beets and potatoes through January/February (some veggies keep longer than others, with the carrots and parsnips lasting the longest--we haven't actually grown potatoes for keeping for the past 5 years since moving to this house so it's been a while since we've had keeping potatoes).

Hope that helps!

 

[k15n1]

There are basically 2 types of cold storage: cool/dry and cold/moist. Onions and many winter squashes fall in the first category and most root vegtables fall in the other. Perhaps you can do the cool/dry storage without too many modifications?

Whatever you do, make sure it's convenient to check over the produce weekly or better. This way you will minimize losses.

 

[SSDreamin]

We needed to store potatoes and squash last year, in a makeshift/hurry-up fashion. We kept them in 5 gallon buckets, in the unheated attached garage, up against the common wall with the house. It worked pretty well.

 

[Theo]

I'm in the same spot--no cellar in my farmhouse, because the water table is too high 9 months out of the year. Digging a cellar=digging a well. We do have a well house, which would be cold/damp storage (we keep it above freezing with a lightbulb on an automatic switch--it turns on when the temp gets below 40 degrees). Potatoes store well in that space but squash do not. I later learned that squash should be stored at about 50 degrees, so this year they are going to live in an unheated spare bedroom. Onions did ok in our living room, but they do not match the decor, so they will also go live in the unheated bedroom.

I think canned food will go into the unheated room as well. It's too hot in that room until the end of September, but after that it is consistantly cool. By the time warm weather rolls around again in spring, we will have eaten all the canned stuff.

 

[Cindlady2]

Thanks! You gave me stuff to think about. But by all means keep the ideas coming! Ease of access is important because we're both around 60 and it's getting harder to dig and such. Hubby can get food grade 5 gal. buckets for free so that's a thought... just got to keep them cool without freezing.

 

[~gd]

We had rot and sprout problems with plastic buckets for Apples, Potatoes,& onions, wooden crates and onion bags worked better. We often built a storage hut out of straw bales. If they were done before the ground froze they usually worked ok.

 

[Mickey328]

Plastic buckets might work providing you drill enough holes in them for good ventilation...it's the build up of moisture that encourages rot.

 

[moolie]

We keep apples in cardboard boxes on the floor of our front door coat closet, that overhangs into our attached garage--keeps them at about fridge temp during the freezing months, for now we keep them in the cardboard boxes sitting on the basement floor which is not quite cold enough but most are still on the trees and we won't pick them till we have to. I would never keep apples in plastic, they off-gas and need to be kept away from other produce unless you want it to rot, especially potatoes. They can be stored near carrots though.

There's another thread around here about keeping potatoes, we haven't grown a large amount of keeping potatoes since our old house which had a big wooden potato bin in the basement cold room (insulated from the rest of the basement) so we just keep them in buckets of sand--no lids. But we only buy about 3 months worth of potatoes at a time from the farmers market a couple of times throughout the winter, so they aren't keeping for very long.

We've just put up 60 lbs of carrots in 5 gallon buckets layered with sand, lids sitting loosely on top--we keep them in our cool basement guest room next to our shelves of home canned food--has always worked well in the past for us. This also works really well for beets and parsnips, but this year we had a pocket gopher eat nearly all of our parsnips (from the bottom up!) and our beets didn't do very well so all that we harvested went straight into borscht for canning.