Stored crops

[Laura Hillier]

Hi All,

We have been discussing the best ways to store crops and what fruit and veg we will be squirrelling away.

So, we were wondering - which crops will you be storing/are you storing? And how will you be doing this? Do any of you have any unusual storage methods?

Answers may be edited and published in the November 2014 issue of Grow Your Own.

Laura

[planetologist]

As far as possible, I "store" my vegetables by leaving them in the ground (carrot, parsnip, leek, swede, beetroot). Beetroot isn't very frost hardy, so needs to be eaten early or dug up and stored in damp sand, in a cold year by November, but in a mild year, like last winter, will stay in the ground. Apples and potatoes get stored in my unheated kitchen and will last until April, after which I eat bottled apple (Transition Norwich Blog: Stored summer) until the soft fruit is ripe, and dried carbohydrates like beans, amaranth and quinoa, though I have yet to manage to make those last until the next potato harvest. If there's a surplus of fruit at any time in summer, that gets bottled too. For me, that tends to be blackcurrants, which mostly gets eaten by adding sugar and then eating it on bread (I don't bother with pectin). Pumpkin is subject to low temperature rot if it goes below 10 C, so lives in the living room and needs to be checked regularly. It's a bit of a faff, but I love eating pumpkin. Many biennial and perennial greens also get left in the ground, but they mostly don't provide much to eat in the depth of winter, but they are good in early winter and late winter. The herbs that I eat the most of in winter are sage leaves, which survive any weather throughout winter, and ground lovage seeds.
PS. Unusual? Maybe right now it's unusual to have only one heated room in the house. I'm told that in the 1970s this was perfectly normal, and I expect that in 25 years it will be normal again.

[Alison]

Store potatoes in hessian sacks in the garage, onions in tights, garlic in vinegar as lazy garlic, squashes on a frost free shelf, salted runner beans, fruit as jams, jellies and leathers, all sorts of stuff in chutneys, freezer full of peas, more beans, courgettes and more fruit, dehydrated tomatoes, herbs and some veggies, dried beans, bottled passata and some fruits and the likes of carrots, parsnips, swede, cabbage, kale and other brassicas in the ground as well as winter salad crops. Also grow longkeeping varieties of tomato which kept in a bowl in the kitchen until almost Easter last season. Probably more things but that's most of it.

[Penellype]

Most of mine go in the freezer - chopped onions, turnips, kohl rabi, peas and chopped tomatoes. Also as cooked sauces and soups (particularly variations of courgette soup), but also carrot soup. I am hoping to have enough blueberries to freeze some this year.

Potatoes are grown in bags, and when the tops die down I cut them off then move the whole bag to the garage. I was harvesting Desiree potatoes from bags like this until February - the very last ones were just beginning to show slight signs of growth in the eyes. This year I am experimenting with freezing potato cakes.

Onions are stored on strings in the garage. I grow Sturon for keeping and I was eating these right through to July. I have kept one small one back in my kitchen, waiting to see if/when it starts to deteriorate - it is currently still firm and clean at the end of August!

[solanaceae]

This year we've been growing an extreme amount of tomato plants, so I decided to buy a pressure canner with mason jars to preserve any tomatoes that we haven't used.

'Canning' as it's called, is commonly done by individual growers every year in other countries such as the USA, where the growing season is longer and warmer than ours, therefore their harvest is greater than ours in the UK (although we do quite well for ourselves!).

So far I've canned 12 litre sized jars and with the amount of tomatoes still to harvest along with the hope of some pleasant weather coming up, it looks like i'm going to be busy for a fair while yet with the canning side of things.

In other years I would have opted to freeze the tomatoes, but there wouldn't have been enough room in the freezer this year.

Apart from having more freezer storage space available, the tomatoes are supposed to retain flavour and quality for upto 2 years.

[Alison]

'Canning' as it's called

Canning is the US name, traditionally it was bottling in the UK which makes more sense as it's usually in glass jars . Agree it's a great way to store stuff (I use a pasturiser rather than a pressure cooker) and was very common here in years gone by but less so now. They do a lot in other parts or Europe though so not just a US thing.

[Greenleaves]

I have often thought of making a "clamp" for spuds, carrots, swede etc but find far too much variation in written guidance. My old pops used to too make one for spuds and all other veg was stored in wooden boxes and coved with sandin the larder

[pulse]

Like most I store potatoes in hessian sacks and tie up onions and garlic and leave them hanging in the garage.

A glut of courgette and peppers are usually dealt with by pickling or even making vegetable breads and freezing them.

The massive amount of strawberries were dealt with by making jams and fruity lollipops!

[rosiepumpkin]

I mostly grow to store. Pumpkins are next to the window in the living room, marrows are stacked in the cupboard, grape leaves drying in paper bags in the cupboard, so far grapes and tomatoes in the dehyrator, the usual jams chutneys etc, masses of apple sauce kept in crannies ( in the gaps of my partner's video kit for his business, that kind of thing). I'm aiming not to resort to behind the sofa and under the bed like last year.