Root Cellar Alternatives for Storing Winter Harvests
Reading Time: 5 minutes
Explore root cellar alternatives for your home and learn how to store winter vegetables to maximize your harvest.
by Jenny Underwood
Many articles and books focus on how to grow and prepare vegetables, but that’s only half the battle. The next essential part is how to store your precious produce so it doesn’t spoil and waste all your time, money, and hard work. This can be frustrating if you don’t have a specified root cellar or pantry. Don’t worry; people have used creative and cheap (or free) plans to store winter produce for millennia.
- First, take a good look and assess your current home.
- Make a list of possible places you could store produce. Include attics, crawl spaces, basements, stairs, unused closets, and garages.
- Next, list the vegetables and fruits you need to store.
- Make a list of containers you can use. Examples are milk crates, clean or lined trashcans, buckets, and any shelves you aren’t using or could clear off. Now you’re ready to make plans.
While many vegetables and fruits can remain in chilly environments, none should freeze. This goes for both canned and fresh produce. Make sure your storage area doesn’t go below freezing. If it does, you’ll need supplemental heat. For example, we store our fresh winter produce in our crawlspace. It’s completely enclosed and stays chilly but well above freezing, even in the coldest weather. If your crawlspace isn’t entirely enclosed and you have cold winters, you’ll need to block in a portion and insulate it.
Root Cellar Alternatives in the Home
Attics can be good places to store pumpkins and other squash along with dried foods, such as herbs or peppers. Place your items in ventilated boxes, not directly on floors or beams. This allows for air circulation and is helpful if you need to move them in a hurry or if one goes bad so it doesn’t rot on your floor. Attics aren’t the best place for potatoes or cabbage, as the rising heat will likely cause them to rot early.
Instead, consider utilizing the tallest portion of a concrete block crawlspace. In the tallest end of ours, we can stand up without hitting our heads. Your crawlspace may not be this tall. If that’s the case, put your produce in smaller crates that are easy to slide and can be reached from the doorway. If it’s too difficult to get in and out, you’ll probably neglect the produce. We built shelves out of repurposed material for ours, then built crates to fit, see Countryside article on DIY homestead projects for directions: Homestead Projects You Can DIY In a Weekend.
Onions were easy to keep in netted bags hanging from the floor rafters. We tacked a nail into the rafter and hung the drawstring on it. When we needed onions, we simply grabbed a new bag that held approximately three pounds. After the bag was empty, we stored it for the next year, so there was no waste.
In this environment, we successfully stored sweet potatoes (10 months), Irish potatoes (six months), onions (four months), cushaw squash (seven months), blue Hubbard squash (eight months), and sugar pie pumpkin (nine months). We also store many of our dry goods down there in waterproof, food-grade barrels with locking lids.
No matter where you store your food, keep your eyes open for pests. Bugs and rodents are the main problems. Keeping sticky traps around your storage area or on shelves is a wonderful way to help prevent damage and catch the problem before it becomes an issue. Just assume pests will try to attack your food and be proactive in your approach. Hanging food from rafters, placing wire screens around the boxes, and checking frequently are all good safety measures.
Unconventional Ways to Create a Root Cellar
Use an old deep freeze. You can bury this in the backyard and stack bales of straw on the top through the winter. This is a good way to store your potatoes, carrots, etc. Check frequently for rot, and don’t bury the lid, or water will run in and ruin your harvest.
Many people used to make mounds in the garden by digging a hole and lining it with straw. They would place the produce in it, fill it full of straw, and then top with dirt. This isn’t a convenient method, but it would work if you accessed it infrequently. Unfortunately, I feel this would also be pest-friendly, so plan on some loss.
If you have a basement, you can build sturdy shelves and make a huge root cellar. Even an 8×8 space can store a large amount of produce for your family.
How to Store Winter Vegetables
Some fruits and a wide array of vegetables are good candidates for long-term storage, but my favorites are winter squash, pumpkin, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, cabbage, onions, garlic, turnips, apples, and pears.
Make sure your produce is dusted off but not washed. Check for damage before storing and use or preserve those first. Store apples with the stem on. Hang cabbage upside down by the roots. Keep the outer papery layers on onions and garlic. Cut the tops off carrots and store them layered with sand in boxes or buckets.
Potatoes are notorious for sprouting, so keep them in the dark and cool if possible. Another option might be to plant a potato that’s harvested in the fall versus summer and extend storability that way. We blanched and froze some, and we also pressure-canned them.
Remember, rotting vegetables or fruit are a menace to healthy food. Go through your produce regularly and use or compost anything starting to go soft.
With a little creativity, you can make your own storage even if you don’t have a root cellar!
Jenny Underwood is a homeschooling mama to four lively blessings. She makes her home in the rural foothills of the Ozark Mountains with her husband of 20 years. You can find her reading a good book, drinking coffee, and gardening on their little fifth-generation homestead. Keep up on her blog here.
Originally published in the September/October 2024 issue of Countryside and Small Stock Journal and regularly vetted for accuracy.
