How to Store Your Garden Produce

The Key to Self-Sufficiency

Piers Warren, Tessa Pettingell

• Publisher: Green Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781907448010
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

The modern guide to storing and preserving your garden produce, enabling you to eat home-grown goodness all year round.

Part One

The Methods

GENERAL GUIDELINES

1. Harvest produce for storage in its peak condition.

2. Handle produce carefully – bruised fruit and vegetables will rot quickly.

3. If you have to process your produce in some way before storage (e.g. the freezing of peas) do this immediately after harvesting, as enzymes can get to work very quickly and reduce the quality of the product.

4. Some varieties store better than others – if you are growing some crops for storage, research your varieties first.

5. Do not store near strong-smelling substances or hazardous chemicals – often a problem when storing in a garage or garden shed. Creosoteflavoured potatoes are not my favourite.

6. Always label any stored produce with a description of contents and the date of preserving or storing.

7. Check your stored produce regularly – remove any that is rotting to reduce the chance of it spreading.

8. Plan what you store (and therefore grow) according to your family’s tastes. There’s little point in storing twenty pumpkins if your family is bored with eating them after two or three.

9. The priority should always be to EAT the freshest produce while fresh, then store the excess. If you have a freezer full of year-old broccoli, you have simply grown too much broccoli.

10. As well as storage techniques, extend your growing season, if you can, using a greenhouse, polytunnel and/or cold-frames. You will be eating fresh produce for longer, and can grow a wider range of varieties.

BASIC STORAGE

In some cases the very simplest form of storage is to leave it to nature. Various crops, like leeks for example, can be left in the ground until required. I have often harvested perfectly good leeks in May that were sown twelve months earlier. Of course the vegetable has to be frosthardy to survive the winter, so in many other cases it is better to harvest the produce when it is in peak condition and place it in an environment where long-term storage is possible. Often this means a location which is cool but frost-free. For many years cellars have been used for this purpose, and in some countries it is common to have a ‘root-cellar’ specifically built with storage in mind. People without cellars, especially in modern urban houses, will have to resort to sheds and garages which, although not ideal, can be perfectly adequate.

Potatoes, for example, can be stored for long periods in a cool, dark location, in paper, hessian or cotton sacks, or even cardboard boxes. Humidity needs to be low to deter fungal growth, which is why they should not be stored in plastic bags for any period of time. The problem with a small garden shed is that it will warm up in the spring and the tubers may start to sprout roots and shoots, so a cooler brick or stone outbuilding will enable longer storage. A really hard frost may freeze a wooden shed and all its contents solid – thereby spoiling any produce stored within when it thaws.

Fruits such as apples and pears can be stored on shelves or in boxes. They need a slightly different environment in that they like the air to be a little moist. A cool dark outhouse is ideal – you can occasionally wet the floor to keep the humidity up. Choose only perfect unblemished specimens for dry storage. The fruit should not be touching, so either space them apart or wrap individually in paper – this stops the rotting fungi and bacteria spreading from one to another. Greaseproof paper is good, but even newspaper is better than nothing. If you have hundreds of apples you may not have the patience for wrapping each one, so why not just wrap a few crates-worth for the longest storage – you should still be eating them next spring. Note that the fruit that ripens late in the season will keep better, and some varieties, such as Cox and Bramley, keep better than others.

When produce is stored short-term in the kitchen, it helps if you use a receptacle that allows plenty of ventilation in order to decrease the humidity and therefore the likelihood of rotting due to fungal growths. You can buy special fruit bowls with holes around the bottom, wire baskets, or even use a colander. It’s also a good idea to store bananas separately from other fruits as when they are yellow they are already at an advanced stage of ripeness and release a gas called ethylene which encourages surrounding fruit to ripen faster. ‘Banana trees’ (usually a metal hook on a stand) are a stylish way of hanging a bunch of bananas, and you could then position this at the opposite end of the kitchen from your fruit bowl or even in a different room.

In general, produce which traditionally grows and ripens in a warm environment will store better in the average kitchen than in the fridge. Bananas (which are of course from the tropics), for example, quickly go black if stored in the fridge, and tomatoes (which originated in the warm deserts of South America) will ripen properly and keep a better flavour on the kitchen surface rather than when refrigerated. Incidentally, while we’re talking of tomatoes and bananas, if you have picked a number of tomatoes which haven’t ripened fully (at the end of the season for example) and you want to speed the process up, you can put them in a jar or bag with a ripe banana in a warm room and the ethylene produced will help speed the tomatoes along.

Hanging is a simple technique mainly used for onions and squashes. The best place to hang vegetables for storage is in a dry cool airy place which won’t be hit by hard frosts. A stone or brick outbuilding is ideal as long as it isn’t too damp. A garage might suffice as long as it doesn’t smell of petrol or oil, but certainly not the warm kitchen – no matter how attractive strings of onions may look.

Squashes such as marrows and pumpkins can be hung in nets – just make sure the fruits are not touching each other. Save any netting or net bags for this purpose: such as the net sacks that stock-feed carrots often come in. Netting bags (or even tights) can be used for hanging onions or garlic, but just aren’t as picturesque as stringing. Instructions on how to create a string can be found in the Onions section in Part Two, page 97.

Some roots, such as carrots, parsnips and beetroots, can be stored in sand or sawdust (or a peat substitute). The important points are:

1. Use sand that is only just moist - if too wet, prepare in advance by spreading out your sand on a plastic sheet in the hot sun in the summer, then keep in plastic sacks under cover until needed.

2. Make layers of sand and roots (unwashed but with excess soil gently brushed off) in containers such as barrels, crates, deep seed trays – making sure the roots don’t touch each other.

3. Store the containers in a dry, frost-free place. If they are large, fill them in situ (have you ever tried to lift a barrel full of sand?).

CLAMPING

Clamping is a simple method for storing a large quantity of root vegetables outside. It’s a useful technique where indoor storage space is limited, but not so good if you have very hard frosts. Basically it is a pile of roots with straw and earth on top. The following guidelines will help your clamped roots store longer:

1. Choose a site on a piece of ground unlikely to become waterlogged.

2. Harvest your root crops and allow them to dry on the surface of the soil for a couple of hours.

3. To build the clamp, start with a good layer of straw or bracken, and on top of this pile up your potatoes or other roots in a pyramid shape.

4. Cover the pile with a layer of straw or bracken and leave to sweat for a day or two (the evaporation of excess moisture).

5. Then cover the straw with a layer of fairly dry earth about 15cm / 6 inches thick – making sure there are a few small tunnels of straw sticking through the earth along the bottom and chimneys along the top to allow for air circulation. Pat the earth flat with a spade to form a smooth, steep-sided pyramid that rain will easily run off.

Make a series of smaller clamps rather than one enormous one – when you want a handful of potatoes it’s not easy to burrow into a clamp and then rebuild it. It’s better to dismantle a small clamp and bring a sackful of spuds into a shed or garage for easy access until the next clamp is needed.

FREEZING

Freezing is a method that has relatively recently revolutionised the storage of fruit and vegetables for many households. It’s also quick, easy, and very effective.

Freezing halts, or at least dramatically slows down, the action of enzymes (which break down vitamins, for example) which occurs from the moment food is harvested. So food frozen shortly after picking will be among the healthiest of stored produce. The cold also stops microorganisms from growing and spreading. Many fruit and vegetables can be stored in a deep-freezer for up to twelve months – giving you yearround access to home-grown goodness. As already mentioned, you should never need to keep anything longer than a year, so if frozen produce gets this old, discard it and replace with smaller quantities of freshly harvested crops.

If you are serious about storage you will soon find you need a chest freezer (or two!). For the average home, the ideal combination would be to have an upright fridge-freezer in the kitchen, where you can store small amounts for quick access, and then a chest (or upright) freezer in a garage, utility room etc., for the bulk of your frozen produce.

A few general rules

1. Freeze food as quickly as possible after harvesting: some produce, like peas and sweetcorn for example, will start to lose its sweetness within minutes of being picked. Timing is everything.

2. Freeze your best. If you don’t like tough, stringy beans, you won’t like them after they’ve been frozen either. Freeze young and tender and perfect – not forgetting to EAT as much fresh as you want first, of course.

3. Pack food in appropr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: The Methods
• Part Two: The Produce
• Index