Growing or Buying Fresh Food For Root Cellaring
Sharon March 12th, 2008
If you are going to use natural cool storage to keep vegetables and fruits in a root cellar, it matters a great deal which varieties you grow or purchase from farmers. Some varieties simply will not keep, others will last nearly forever. So as you are planning, make sure that if you intend to root cellar, you are choosing seed varieties (or talking to your local farmer) with keeping qualities in mind.
The definitive (and highly recommended) book on this subject is Mike and Nancy Bubel’s _Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables_ and they list many varieties there. I’ll list varieties that have done well for me here, but their book is definitely worth owning if you are using natural cold temperatures.
(BTW, I’m going to try and put together a store section of books on preserving food fairly soon, so you should be able to get most or all of the books I recommend through my site, if you’d like to.)
One note on root cellaring - while you don’t have to keep your food in a cellar (we keep ours in a partly insulated above-ground porch), you do have to keep it in a place that gets fairly cool. In warm climates, even shallow under-ground spots may not be cool enough - but if you live in a warm place, you may be able to grow year ’round, and not need a root cellar. So think about whether your location has the right combination of cool temps, frostlines, and a need for storing fresh food for long periods.
Ok:
Apples - We store *tons* of these, and the best keeping varieties we’ve found are: Roxbury Russet, Northern Spy, Winesap, Lady, Winter Keeper, Smokehouse, Winterbanana, Mutsu, Sheepnose, Cortland.
Some apples, by the way, turn into mush instantly - Macs and summer apples are the worst, but lots of other varieties don’t store well, so make sure you are storing the right kinds.
Beets - Lutz Longkeeper is by far the most famous storage variety, but Fedco reports it may have been dropped entirely from the commercial trade - Seed Savers still has it, a good reason to become a member and save your own! Detroit Dark Red does reasonably well, but our favorite storage variety is Rote Kugel, huge and dense and delicious. Seed is available from www.abundantlifeseeds.com
Cabbage - January King and Glory of Enkuizen are my best keepers - I got seed for both from www.rareseeds.com. Mammoth Red Rock, a red cabbage, stores almost as well. I’ve had great luck with older heirlooms, and not bothered with hybrids here. We’re still eating our own cabbage, and will run out before it spoils.
Carrots - I’ve found that most large carrots store fairly well. “Oxheart” stores very well for us in buckets of moist sand, but any thick variety will do well.
Garlic - All my garlic lasts just fine - no issues there.
Potatoes - The big issue with potatoes is that you want to store late-crop potatoes, for the most part, because they haven’t been sitting around. Katahdin, Green Mountain, Carola, Yukon Gold, German Butterball, Purple Peruvian - all store well for us.
Pears - Bosc, Anjou, Bartlett and Kieffer all store a couple of months
Quince - I’ve only grown one variety - it seems to keep several months.
Rutabagas - Laurentian keeps very well in sand.
Turnips - Purple Top White does the very best keeping for us, but Golden Ball is a close second and tastier.
Daikons - all seem to keep a couple of months
Onions - Of the OP Onions, New York Early does very well for me. Stuttgarter, the common set hybrid also does very well. For sweet onions, Candy will keep a month or two. New York early came to me through Fedco, listed below.
Sweet Potatoes and Squash like the same winter temps we have - 50s and 60s houses. So don’t store them in the root cellar, bring them into the house and keep them in closet, under your bed, or in a convenient corner. I’ve not noticed any difference between the sweet potato varieties we grow (Georgia Jet, Porto Rico). Johnny’s sells northern adapted sweet potato varities www.johnnyseeds.com as does Pinetree www.superseeds.com
Squash varies a great deal - there are lots of excellent keepers out there, but some of our favorites are - Marina de Chioggia, Butternut, Green Hubbard (the big ones keep much better than the little hubbards), Pink Banana, Futsu, Hopi Orange, Thelma Sanders - I get most of mine either from seed savers www.seedsavers.org or Fedco www.fedcoseeds.com.
I hope this helps someone!
Sharon
sharonastyk.com |
