Storing root crops and cabbage

August 14, 8:54 PMDetroit Organic Gardening ExaminerBill Canaday

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Assorted potatoes. Photo W. Canaday, 2009

If you planted potatoes this spring, and if they did not succumb to blight, by now you are looking around for ways to store them over the winter. Here are several tips to help you along.

First, if they are stored raw, they need to be kept in a cool (not freezing) place that is both dark and relatively dry. Here are some suggestions about how to achieve this.

*    Sink an old refrigerator into the ground. Dig a hole several inches larger than the fridge and as deep as  its front-to-back dimension. Lay the fridge in the hole on its back. Toss several inches of straw in the fridge to allow ventilation around the spuds and put the spuds inside. The insulation of the refridgerator will keep them from freezing and the door will make them easy to get to. If you don't have enough spuds to fill it, use the extra space for carrots, beets, rutabaga or other root crops. Drill drainage holes to let any snow or rain that accidentally enters the fridge to drain.

*    Dig a pit in the ground a couple of feet deep and larger than you think you will need. Line the pit with loose straw. Place the potatoes carefully in layers and put additional straw between layers. Keep layering as needed and top off with a layer of dirt. Make certain that you allow this to mound up higher than the surrounding soil u.*

*    Make a potato clamp as detailed here. Bear in mind that potatoes exude a small amount of heat, so they will stay safe from freezing here a little longer than you might expect. You can get clean baled straw at Chaps Feedstore on Five Mile near Merriman in Livonia for about $3.50 a bale.

*    Make a cold cellar in your basement by walling a section of it off and ducting it to the outside. This is perhaps the ultimate answer, as it does not require you to recruit a child to go outside during a howling blizzard to get potatoes for dinner.

But raw is not the only way to store root crops.

*    Can them. That's right, the Ball Blue Book of canning recipes (about $4 locally - try Meijers, K-Mart or ACO) has time-tested, safety-proven recipes for preserving whole and cut up potatoes, parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, beets and carrots. Once you own the basic tools for home-canning (for low-acid veggies like potatoes you'll need a pressure canner, Mason jars, and a handful of other supplies), the cost per quart is really quite low. For home-grown produce, the price can be as low as 15 cents per quart. Since a pressure canner is the largest single expense and since it is a life-long investment, the numbers quickly start to look attractive. Try canning up creamy colcannon soup (potatoes, kale and vegetable broth blended together to a creamy consistency. No kale? Substitute leaves from cabbage, broccoli or collard greens.) for a true, stick-to-the-ribs, nutritionally sound, hearty winter soup.

*   Dry them. Once reconstituted, dried vegetables are a more-than-adequate substitute for fresh. The above list of root crops all clock in at about 70-90% water, so you lose most of their weight when dehydrating them. Store them in a tightly sealed plastic bag by expelling most of the air.  This is where one of those vacuum attachments for sucking the air out of plastic bags would come in handy.

Know of another way to preserve root crops for winter eating? E-mail me at billexaminer@gmail.com or tweet me on Twitter @billindetroit

*Note, to store excess cabbage, pull them - roots and all - from the ground in the late fall ... just before the ground freezes for the year. Then dig a hole a foot or two deep, lining it with several inches of straw. Invert the cabbage in the hole, cover with additional straw and top off with dirt, leaving several inches of the roots exposed as a marker and handle. As time passes, the outer leaves may start to 'go bad', but the inner leaves will remain just fine. Pull the cabbage from the dirt as needed, cut off any 'bad' parts, rinse the remainder and carry on as before. This method will also work with most root crops. You'll just have to keep track of where they are buried.