Tag: Crop Storage

Harvesting Winter Squash for Peak Flavor and Optimal Storage Life

By Caleb Goossen Winter squash look ready to harvest before they actually are mature. It is important to wait for maturity to maximize storage life and eating quality, whenever possible. The fruit of most squash varieties reach full size by 20 days after pollination (fruit set). Accumulation of starch and other dry matter peaks at

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Storing Garden Vegetables

by Eric Sideman, PhD and Cheryl Wixson, P.E. Apples Use caution when storing apples with other vegetables as they give off ethylene gas that causes other vegetables to rot. They can be stored in tubs with lids to prevent this effect. Choose varieties that are good winter keepers, like golden russet, Belle de Boskeep, winter

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Sharing the Harvest

Patty Manson with baskets of peas alongside her 1812 house in Washington, Maine One of the vegetable gardens, bordered by an old apple tree Cole crops and asparagus grow in another garden plot. Manson cans over 300 quarts of fruits and vegetables each year for her family. 100 meat birds are raised each year for

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Low Energy Food Storage Solutions

Warm air from an attic is blown through this cabinet to dry produce. The drying cabinet setup. Warm air from the basement keeps plants in the coldframe from freezing. A small, well insulated box in the garage stores root crops. By Eric Evans My wife, Laura, and I love to eat the fruit and veggies

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Storing Saved Seeds

‘Chateau Rose’ tomatoes. English photo A display of seed saving in the Exhibition Hall at the Common Ground Country Fair. Amy LeBlanc photo By Jean English Many garden seeds can be collected now and stored for planting in spring. Echinacea seeds are drying on their seed heads – at least those that the goldfinches aren’t

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If You Can Keep It You Can Eat It

Vegetables ready for storage – some fermented, some as harvested. We store carrots, beets, rutabagas and celeriac in wooden boxes with damp spruce wood shavings. The uniform boxes stack and keep out rodents. The boxes also were sized to hold Mason jars. How we store our year-round supply of produce By Anneli Carter-Sundqvist Photos by

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Harvest Kitchen

Toki Oshima drawing By Roberta Bailey Every spring, along with the usual house cleaning, I sort out the freezers and the canned goods in the pantry, making room for the first bags of spinach and fiddleheads, and for the new jars of strawberry jam and pickled snap peas. Nothing makes last year’s canned goods look

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Root Cellars and Ginger

Ginger is an increasingly popular crop to grow and store in Maine. Polly Shyka and Prentice Grassi of Villageside Farm in Freedom grew this ‘King Yai’ ginger, which earned a Judges’ Award in the Exhibition Hall at MOFGA’s Common Ground Country Fair. English photo. By Roberta Bailey I have lived with a root cellar my

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Dehydration

Assorted dehydrated foods. Ana Antaki photo. By Hannah Kreitzer Roy and Ana Antaki of Weeping Duck Farm in Montville believe that when it comes to food preservation, basic is best. The Antakis employ four main food preservation methods: dehydration, lacto-fermentation, steam canning, and freezing, with an emphasis on the first two. At their 2012 Common

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Bulkhead Root Cellar

A bulkhead offers great conditions for storing produce over winter – once stairs are removed to make space, and insulation is added. Adam Tomash photo. The stair module, removed for storage outdoors over winter. Adam Tomash photo. The bulkhead with stairs removed and the first layer of insulation applied. Adam Tomash photos. By Adam Tomash

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