zuni

I am wondering if you'd get a better response over on the Harvest forum. That's where people who preserve garden harvests, canning, freezing and making jams/jellies, hang out. They can probably advise you about using the concrete box in the basement of your house as your root cellar. Not many of us have the luxury or the know-how!

"Does the food need to be packed in sand also?"

Some kinds do, esp the ones that can dry out easily, like carrots and parsnips, etc. Most people who use that method prefer damp (not wet) sand, and I would suspect that they use white silica sand, not just playground sandbox sand.

Sue

If the storage area is completely closed up unventilated like that then the roots have to be buried and damp so they have no air contact, and quite cold. Below 40, closer to 32. Otherwise don't bother, it will rot before you get to it.

I have had better success with outdoor pits. This year I had about a hundred pounds of potatoes outside in a two-foot deep hole with leaves on top and capped with plywood. Normally that works perfect but we got so much precipitation that they were a little too wet so there was a lot of sprouting and skin-cracking. Still kept better than the ones in the root-cellar which had quite a few rot.

Climate is changing rapidly in the northeast IME, and it is affecting food storage. Potatoes and carrots have to stand more warm weather in the fall before it cold enough to put them up; indoor spaces suffer from more winter warm-ups and outdoor the ground is wetter in winter as I mentioned. I keep cabbages outside also under leaves on the north side of a wall or other shelter from sun. Usually those keep until early may but this year is a warm spring and they are starting to go already.

I grew up in an old house with a root cellar. Mom kept about a truck load of potatoes down there and we had them EVERY night for dinner. It was cool and dark, dirt floor. The canned food was kept on shelves in that room too.

I have a small room built into a dark unused area of the basement at my current house. It is supposed to be my wine cellar, but I keep winter squash and potatoes down there too. It is a constant cool temp and it works pretty well. Carrots I kept in a covered box out in the garage for much of the winter and they kept ok, finally started to sprout. It never freezes out there but is pretty cold all winter.

We had a bomb shelter in the garden, but luckily the war was over, so the space was used as a root cellar. Carrots were stuck into damp sand (where they developed fine, white roots). I don't remember anything else kept there, but the frogs/toads jumped lustily about whenever we (kids) got near on our errands to go fetch stuff. I disliked the duty intensely.....

I found a site that listed the moisture content and temps of the crops stored.
I even found one where a basement escape window well was converted into an insulated cold storage root cellar inside the basement.

When you keep cabbage outside under leaves do you protect against mice or other rodents, PN?