125 comments on Preserving Produce without Heat
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125 comments on Preserving Produce without Heat
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I can't offer any experience yet, but I am having a root cellar installed in my basement tomorrow. I used a book called Root Cellaring (I can't remember the authors' names) as my source, and it is basically an insulated room with a cold air intake and second air outlet to keep the room cool and keep the air from becoming stale.
I am also very interested in drying foods, but I attended a workshop on food preservation, and was told that here in the Midwest, it is too humid to use solar drying effectively. Of course, I manage to dry herbs and preserve garlic and onions in braids without too much trouble from the humidity, but I have been reluctant to purchase an electric food dryer because, like you, I would like to get away from fossil fuel inputs for food storage. It's got to be a lot more energy efficient than canning or freezing, though, so I may change my mind!
Vegetables I am still digging from the garden, even here in the frozen Midwest: parsnips, rutabagas and turnips. I still had a little arugala and spinach and cilantro until we got snow this week. The next thing I hope to experiment with is a cold frame. Four-Season Harvest is a book about getting vegetables nearly year-round, even in Maine, so I'm optimistic I can, with patience, trial and error, have some success with that.
http://www.amazon.com/Root-Cellaring-Natural-Storage-Vegetables/dp/08826...
We put one in a couple of years ago. It's about 6' wide, by 5' high, by three feet deep. We have a 4" intake duct from the back of the house (North) to the bottom of the root cellar, with a damper in the duct and a booster fan. The exhaust duct goes to the garage (minor problem when I'm working on something smelly in the garage.) It also has a booster fan. The two booster fans are wired to a solid-state switch, which is wired to power for the fans and a thermostat. It took me a while to find a thermostat that was dumb enough to cool to low temperatures (think cheap!). Most of them wouldn't accept an AC temp below 60F. The thermostat is mounted approximately in the middle of the root cellar on the bottom of a shelf. Costs were ~$25 each for the duct fans, $25 or so for the duct work and damper, $40 or so for the plastic, styrofoam, and tarp, ~$20 for the thermostat, ~$75 for the switch (bought years ago), and maybe another $25 for the other electrical stuff. The pantry shelving was there already, but it shouldn't have cost too much.
The root cellar is in the northeast corner of the basement, so two of its walls and the floor are concrete. That makes a nice thermal mass. One side wall is shared with pantry shelving, and I put in styrofoam panels and plastic sheet to insulate between them. The ceiling is covered with plastic sheet and styrofoam panels except for the corner where the exhaust duct goes up. The front of the root cellar, where we get access to the shelves, has styrofoam panels for part of it, a sheet of plastic that covers the whole front, with a tarp that covers that. I have nails placed where the tarp grommets go to hold the plastic and tarp tight against the walls.
In the fall, I put the power for the fans on a timer, so the thermostat turns on the switch when the cellar is too warm, but the timer only allows the fans to run at night. Around mid November the fans aren't needed anymore. Around mid December I have to start closing the intake damper or it would get too cold in the root cellar.
Last year we found that potatoes, onions, squash, and citrus fruit kept darn near all winter in there. The only problem was the squash getting soft spots. That's because the root cellar was too cold. The room the root cellar is in (the pantry) stays around 50, which is a better temperature for the squash and pumpkins. Ideally, we could put apples in the root cellar too, but apples off-gas ethylene, which is supposed to cause potatoes to start growing. The apples seem to do OK in the pantry outside of the root cellar, but we go through them pretty fast so it's hard to say. We tried keeping bok choy in the root cellar last year, in boxes lined with plastic with a layer of damp peat in the bottom that we rooted them in. Unfortunately, we kept the box lids closed and didn't do an adequate job of removing slugs when we put them in, so we ended up with something fit only for the compost bin.
This year we put potatoes and citrus in there, as well as our first honey from our bees and last spring's maple syrup from our tree. Those don't need the cold, but we figured it wouldn't hurt.
> here in the Midwest, it is too humid to use solar drying effectively
It is apparently too humid for most solar dryer designs. But by serendipity someone at the geopathfinder.com web site came up with a design for "A Solar Food Dryer That Works! (even in the humid upper-Midwest)". Since I don't live in the upper Midwest I can't say much about it, but maybe it will solve your problem.