Root Cellar Update

As you may recall, I root-cellared about 30 lbs of carrots this year. That was towards the end of October and so it's been just over 4 months now. I was just hauling some out to make some pea soup when I realised I hadn't written an update yet. I went down to the front corner of the basement and hauled a bunch of carrots out of the box of sand, and put them into a bucket to carry them to the kitchen.

As you may recall, a few years ago I experimented with storing carrots in the front corner of the cellar, but they all dried out really badly over the winter. So this time I packed them in sand with hopes of avoiding the drying problem. It worked pretty well actually, although in hindsight there are some problems with doing this, and clearly from the photos you can see there is room for improvement. But for my first time trying it, I'm actually extremely pleased with the results.

In the above photo you can see a selection of the carrots that I retrieved. They still have the sand on them there, but already it is clear that while some are in pristine condition, others are far from it. I would estimate that at this point I suffered about a 20% to 25% loss, based on the sample I retrieved just now. Obviously, previous samples earlier on were not as bad. But still, I consider this to be a success for the most part. Something to learn from, and improve upon.

Here are the same carrots in the same order, after they have been scrubbed but before being peeled. You can see the 2 on the left are fairly dried out, but otherwise actually in good shape with no blight. The 3rd one from the left is the only one that I was unable to get any use out of - so again I consider this to be quite a success. The next 3 are obviously quite blemished and the last of those 3 clearly has quite a bit of blight at the bottom of it. Well, OK, I'm not sure if that is blight or not, but that's what I'm calling it! The rest of them you can see are in very good condition, with little to no blemishes.

And once peeled, all but one of the carrots yielded most of their mass as usable. The blemishes and even the blight were only skin deep and were easily removed with a quick pass of the vegetable peeler. The carrots shown here produced about 2.5 cups of finely chopped product for my soup.

Here is a shot of the rest of what was in my bucket - I'll likely make another batch of in-the-jar soup with them.

The Problem with Sand

Sand is not the best way to do this, as I realised as I was cleaning them just now. The blight will have contaminated the sand, so it should not be reused without somehow cleaning it, which I'm sure is not easy to do. Next time I'll use saw dust which can be composted at the end of the root cellaring season, and also has the advantage of being able to absorb water from the surface of the carrots hopefully to help avoid blight in the first place.

We'll see how it goes next year. This year was a success but still lots to learn here. And this is only carrots. Next year I hope to expand to other vegetables.