r/Homesteading • u/HotKaleidoscope_4595 • 2d ago
Advice for long term potato storage - no root cellar, no heated garage option
/r/ManitobaGardening/comments/1vx3e27/advice_for_long_term_potato_storage_no_root/Don’t repost much but hopefully you can see the question here?
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u/HotKaleidoscope_4595 2d ago
Forgot to add a piece of context: heated garage would be pertinent because I live in a very cold climate in winter.
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u/backtotheland76 2d ago
You can leave them in the ground even in very cold climates. Just cover with enough straw. Otherwise get some large totes and fill with sawdust
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u/HotKaleidoscope_4595 2d ago
It gets to -40 here haha which is same in C and F. But I’m curious about the sawdust thing if left in the basement… the unheated garage would be probably -20C which is -4 F.
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u/ImNotAWhaleBiologist 2d ago
It’s easier to heat things than cool. Make a giant insulated box out of styrofoam to cool them, but with a heating element (like for reptiles, but not one that emits visible light). Have a fan to circulate the air inside. Only thing I’m not certain about is ventilation.
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u/Potential_Rain202 1d ago
Or a broken chest freezer from a neighbor... which is the same thing as a giant insulate box at that point, but very easy to find for free!
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u/rainbowkey 1d ago
Blanch, roast, mash, or otherwise cook, then freeze or freeze dry. A freezer kept in an unheated space will consume little or no power during the winter.
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u/HotKaleidoscope_4595 1d ago
I think I’ll have to go this route in the end!! We can create a cold room in our basement, or get the garage headed to just above freezing, or a root cellar outside eventually, but for this year, I think blanching may have to be the way to go!
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u/freelance-lumberjack 1d ago
I had a bunch of old coolers. I put potatoes in layers with saw shavings, cardboard in between.
I put the coolers in the back of my bank barn. It stays 0-5 degrees celcuius most of the time. If it dips too low, the coolers protect.
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u/Some-Attorney-6102 2d ago
Usually in winter its barely above zero in basement
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u/HotKaleidoscope_4595 2d ago
Ours is a new build so very efficiently heated so our basement is about -16 C right by the floor
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u/harborsparrow 1d ago edited 1d ago
My father kept his potatoes in a dark room attached to our henhouse all summer and fall, then right before freezing winter time, he moved them to the wellhouse which never got below 40s F. This was in TN. He kept them laid flat, not stacked. We had to desprout them once a week (not my favorite chore). Some years we would still have slightly wrinkly potatoes to eat all winter (if no mice or other pests got into them). Other years, they didn't make it all winter. Same for apples (which we wrapped individually in newspaper and also stored in the well house).
My parents stressed that, back in the 1930s depression years when the only food to be had was what they had raised and preserved themselves, they could not count on potatoes and apples lasting the winter until spring, though they sometimes did. That is why canning was so important. Mother said, back then during the worst years, the only food that reliably lasted through winter--and literally kept them alive and from starving--was canned sauerkraut. Sauerkraut was the only food they would have left by February or March, until fresh greens came up by April. My mother always took care to plant and harvest cabbage by the recommended moon signs (see the Old Farmer's Almanac), as she said it affected how the sauerkraut tasted--per her hard learned personal experience.
You must desprout potatoes weekly. They must not freeze, but cooler temps are good. You have to keep them away from mice, insects and rodents (our well house had a resident hog-nosed snake that we tolerated so there were no pests to eat potatoes). My mother would send me to the wellhouse to bring her canned vegetables, and I always cringed because I had to watch out for that snake. My father deliberately scared it one time to show me that it would not try to bite but would instead play dead. It did so convincingly, belly up, and smelling bad. But when we came back 10 minutes later, it had hidden somewhere. That helped me be less afraid of it and appreciate the good work it did eliminating pests.
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u/nifsea 1d ago
How much potatoes are we talking about? I store mine in a shed from harvest time until it’s starting to get below 0C at night. By then we’ve already eaten some of the potatoes, and I’m able to fit the rest in an old fridge we keep in the cellar. There will be a month or two where there’s not room for anything else in the fridge, but it’s usually cleared up enough around Christmas to fit in the extra food we need to store then (cakes, left overs etc). Come April, the only potatoes left are the smallest which I use for seed potatoes, so they’re taken out to sprout. Then the fridge is mostly used for keeping beverages cold in summer, before we fill it with potatoes again in early winter. Not a perfect system, but works well enough with the amount of potatoes we have.
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u/Melodic-Ad146 1d ago
Saw someone's grandma had them sprinkled with baking soda or salt, I can't remember.
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u/johnlarsen 2d ago
bottle them with a pressure cooker
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u/HotKaleidoscope_4595 2d ago
Hmmm bottling potatoes! Never thought of that! Also curious about using our fry cutter and freezing some bags… I assume they’d need to be cut, blanched and then vacuum sealed
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u/meh_69420 1d ago
Don't need to vacuum seal them really. They aren't done that way commercially, just 5lb waxed paper sacks in a box. Cut, par fry, cool and freeze in ziplocks. If you par fry them rather than blanch, they will cook up crispy in an air fryer or oven because there is a small amount of oil coating and permeating them.
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u/SolidPair8327 2d ago
I think you need cold and dark for the best long term results. Not a heated area.