Cardboard vegetable boxes

The Main Idea

Keeping root vegetables in a cellar or in piles of straw used to be a common way of looking ahead and providing fresh produce for one's family throughout the winter. Though the practice is no longer common, it is simple, and I'll show you how to keep various kinds of vegetables and tubers fresh for several weeks or months.

The principle of the thing is simple: Cover the vegetables with something that will stay damp (not wet), and make them feel like they are resting in the ground, waiting to be used.

This requires only a few things:

• A cellar, or cool basment
• Cardboard boxes of any appropriate size for the vegetables you have
• Root vegetables or potatoes
• Filler. Most things besides potatoes do well with peat moss, sand, or wood chips (be careful, certain types of chips can be toxic, so check first). Potatoes do best with newspaper.
• A spray bottle or squirt bottle with plain water in it

You will want to rub the dirt off potatoes before storing them, but most other things, such as beets or carrots, can be left dirty, and in most cases, should be. I usually pack my vegetables in their boxes straight out of the garden, supposing I'm not using them for dinner that evening. Vegetables should have two or three inches of top left on them, as this keeps them from drying out and deteriorating quickly. If you accidentally remove all but a stub of stalks and leaves, you should eat the vegetable soon, rather than storing it.

Examples From My Cellar

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This is a very nice root cellar. It was designed with the total needs of the farm in mind, so has lots of room for canned goods, as well as fresh. The boxes in the center all contain beets, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, and potatoes.

This box has turnips and rutabagas. It is normal for the plants to continue to grow a bit during warm weather, but they should not grow out of the boxes and use all the roots' energy. I used wood chips from a planer to cover them.

This box contains beets, and is filled with peat moss. Like the sawdust, it is kept damp. If your filler dries up, your root vegetables will too. The boxes are normally kept closed, and the cellar is usually quite dark.

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