How can you store your potatoes so they’ll keep long into the cold winter months? For lack of a root cellar, here is super quick and easy method.
If you are a sensible person, you will consider growing lots of potatoes. Potatoes (and other tubers and root crops) are high in energy and are great for keeping bellies filled for longer. You might know that they are originally from the Andes Mountains. There the Incas built and fed an empire on them! Since then, potatoes have been become a naturalized staple to every peasant table in most Northern European cultures. Now, you can’t imagine a German or Swedish supper table without something more natively German or Swedish on it than potatoes! I still remember as a kid when l learned about the actual origins of potatoes how I had to come to terms with the fact that Vikings did not have potatoes. Did you have to come to terms with things like that too? I figured so…
What is the best sort of place store your potatoes?
If you want to grow potatoes, it only makes sense that you would want to grow more than a few meal’s worth. It pays to plant enough so that you have good stock of them for a good long while. However, in order to store your potatoes, they need to be kept in a cool, dark place at around 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit. For this reason, root cellars were an essential part of every farmstead.
Nowadays, I would consider you fortunate indeed if you already had your own root cellar. I would actually be quite envious. Because in an age that boasts practicality and usefulness, such a practical and useful building is no longer a given. So, if you wanted to be able to grow an abundance of potatoes, where would you store them? Even basements nowadays are not always suitable for the task. Mine, though unfinished, is still too warm from the furnace with too many windows to provide a good and dark storage area. Thus are the inconveniences of standard modern living these days.
Believe me, I would love to drop everything and build a proper root cellar in my hillside. However, at the moment, there always seems to more pressing projects and a family life to juggle. Thus, I could see that it just was not going to happen in the near future.
However, I remember reading about how you can sink a container of sorts in the ground to store your potatoes in so I decided to give it a try.
The Poor Man’s Root Cellar
Quite easily, I dug a pit in the hillside of my backyard and buried a metal bin. It has a snug-fitting lid and the bin is water-tight. As you can see in the photo above, I left an inch or two the rim exposed. This is so that ground water would not seep inside around the lid.
I then packed my potatoes inside. I put them down in layers at a time, with a layer of cardboard between each layer of potatoes. In case one were to go bad, the rot would not spread as quick to the other layers.
After closing the lid on, I then piled a thick layer of straw on top for insulation. There was nothing left to do but to wait and see how it worked.
That January we went through a cold couple of weeks of below-zero temperatures. After the cold-snap passed, I figured it was a good time to check to see how my little darlings fared. By George, they did great! How about that?–Nathanael
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