By Barbara Damrosch
Storing root crops isn’t the necessity it once was, when they stood between you and starvation from late winter to spring, but it’s great to have a stash of them on hand for the winter table.
I’m going to assume that most of you don’t have a root cellar. You are more likely to have a wine cellar, or maybe a bomb shelter, or just a crisper drawer in your fridge. But there are other storage solutions less ambitious than the traditional cavern, filled with potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, celery root, kohlrabi, and more.
Let’s start with the garden. For fall storage, I like to leave as many crops in the garden as long as I can, before the soil freezes up. Parsnips are the champion when it comes to in-ground storage. I have also seen carrots winter over in a garden row as far north as Vermont. Leafy brassicas, such as cabbages and kale, may be harvestable for much of the winter. Spinach, too. Even potatoes may keep if you pile straw or evergreen boughs on top of them, keeping the soil diggable — unless you have an active vole or mouse population. They may take this nice mulch as an invitation to move in, and feast.
If you have a cold part of your house, or an outbuilding, that stays cool in winter but offers some protection against freezing, that’s a good bet. The garage? A shed? An enclosed porch? (The best way to test a spot is to put a cup of water there on a cold night and see if it’s frozen hard in the morning.) A spare fridge also makes a good minicellar if you have room for one. Gardeners have come up with ingenious personal solutions. My friend Debby stores root vegetables in her car.
You can also use metal garbage cans as outdoor minicellars if you sink them into the ground vertically. Use one can per crop, or divide one vertically with a piece of plywood, so that two crops can use the same space. Insulate each lid with a disk of foam insulation, or stuff a plastic bag full of dry leaves beneath it. Plastic or metal picnic coolers will work too.
But let’s say you get very serious about this and decide to dig a real, old-fashioned root cellar. What would it look like? In the old days, a family had a root cellar under the house, barn, or shed, accessed by a staircase or ladder. Sometimes it was a cave-like room dug sideways into a steep hillside. Building materials included wood, stone, brick, sod, or just earth. It was common to give the cellar a dirt floor, as certain crops, especially the hearty greens, can actually be stored there in the dark with their roots in the ground. One year we tried digging some full-grown cabbages — stem, roots, and all — and planted them in soil in our root cellar. They kept just fine.
A cellar’s purpose is to use the earth’s warmth to keep food from freezing but cool enough to keep it in suspended animation so that it can last until new crops start to bear aboveground. The ideal temperature for most food is just above freezing. Crops vary as to the ideal humidity. Most prefer moist air (90 to 95 percent), and it helps to spritz water around the space with a hose from time to time to keep it that way. But a few — notably onions, garlic, pumpkins, peppers, tomatoes, and squash — store best if the humidity is 75 percent or less. Winter squash are well-behaved, odorless keepers, and are just fine stored under the bed in a cool guest room, with the door closed except for occasional use.
We have two root cellars at our farm. One is built of concrete and is partly cut into a steep hill behind our barn. Large rock formations stopped us from digging farther, but soil heaped on top to extend the hill made up for that. To speed up cooling of the cellar in fall we use a low-energy CoolBot system, powered by an ordinary air conditioner. But soon the temperature settles into the ideal 33 degrees Fahrenheit or so and all the vegetables stored there keep beautifully.
Our other cellar is underneath a concrete slab. It has two rooms, one for potatoes and one for apples. It is important to store apples and other fruits in a separate place. The ethylene gas they give off will cause vegetables to ripen and prematurely spoil and, in the case of carrots, lend them a bitter flavor. Even vegetables alone will give off some ethylene, so it’s best to build a vent into your root cellar to let the gas escape, and to circulate some cold air in. Even with two root cellars, I find it handy to keep a few small buckets of root crops in the house, closer at hand.
Gardeners often wonder if they can just store their root vegetables in an ordinary basement. In my experience, yes, but not as long, especially if they share space with a heat-emitting furnace, woodstove, freezer, fridge, washer, dryer, or some combination thereof. The best solution is to close off a cool corner of the basement, preferably on the north side, with a window, using two insulated walls and a door. Ventilate the space by replacing a windowpane with a piece of insulated plywood through which two 6-inch pipes are fitted. One pipe is short and removes the warm air from the top. The other is angled down to within a foot of the floor. This pipe draws air from outside and keeps the little room cool. Use a cap or a built-in valve to stop the flow of air if it is too cold or too warm outside. Keep the room dark.
In our bounteous land we often take our food for granted, but I like having some of mine socked away for a snowy day. Security isn’t knowing that the credit limit on my platinum card has been extended. It’s the thought of all those lovely carrots, potatoes, and beets, just a few steps down.
Taken from “A Life in the Garden,” copyright 2024 by Barbara Damrosch. Published by Timber Press, Portland, Oregon. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
This excerpt was published in the fall 2025 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.