Checking over the storage potatoes
While
you're planning your Christmas dinner, this is a good time to take a
stroll through your storage
fruits and vegetables
and see how they're doing. I'm sure you've heard that a rotten
apple can spoil the barrel --- time to catch those rotten apples before
they have a chance.
We tried out two
different methods of storing our white potatoes this year --- under my
bed and in
the fridge.
Neither is optimal, but with just a few vegetables prefering root
cellar conditions, we didn't think it was worth adding to our busy fall
by fixing the refrigerator
root cellar.
Over the last month or so, I noticed that the under-the-bed potatoes
were starting to sprout, while those in the fridge were still hard as
rocks, but my most recent foray into under-the-bed tubers shows dark
spots popping up in their flesh. I suspect that last week's
serious cold spell froze the tubers touching the floor, cutting their
shelf life down and putting them into the "eat now" category.
Still, keeping potatoes for 5 months with no special storage facilities
isn't bad at all.
Next up, I'll be
checking over the sweet potatoes, garlic, and butternuts. I've
noticed that a few of the butternuts have rotten spots --- probably
time to roast them up and freeze the flesh for later eating now that
there's a bit of space opened up in the freezer. A little bit of
management every month tends to keep us eating fresh food all winter,
and I get a kick out of checking over our produce and seeing how much
bounty remains after the solstice.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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