Use a Root Cellar to Store Your Root Vegetables. A root cellar is a great place to storeyour potatoes, carrots, and beets. Benefits of Cellars. Storing Potatoes. Storing Carrots. Storing Beets. Building a Cellar. Keeping Rodents Out of Cellar. Here are three reasons for having a cellar. You get to eat fresh food all winter. Canned, frozen, and dehydrated food is good, but fresh food tastes the best. You dont need to use any electricity or fuel to process and preserve your vegetables that go in the cellar. Best Way To Store Potatoes' title='Best Way To Store Potatoes' />What is the best way to store onions and how long will they last Here are the answers for how to keep the bulbs whether sweet, pungent, whole or cut. Potatoes baked in the oven taste much better than potatoes baked in the microwave. From the oven they develop a sort of crispy skin with a really fluffy center. Easy Finger Food Appetizers. We use lots of onions, so need to store them in reasonably large quantity. Unfortunately, while we bring them home from the store in plastic bags, storing them in. But it is important to note that all of this depends on the way potatoes are prepared. The healthiest way to eat potatoes is to first cook them in a microwave oven. You save a bunch of time. Just dig up your potatoes, carrots, and beets, put them in the cellar, and youre done. Root cellars are in the ground because root vegetables like potatoes, carrots, and beets need to stay Moist Cool. Potatoes last all winter in the cellar. Most homes are kept at temperatures between 6. F much higher than the ideal storage temperatures for a potato 4. F. Potatoes contain approximately 8. Storing potatoes in a dry place will cause them to become dehydrated. In commercial storage facilities, potatoes are stored at 9. RH, but home environment are typically not this humid. A potato tuber accumulated chlorophyll when exposed to light, which turns the tuber green. University of Idaho Extension. When the weather starts warming up, and the pit is not cool, the potatoes will start growing eyes. Cut your potatoes up and replant them. Each section that has an eye will become a new potato plant. Look at that Youll never have to buy new potato starts again. Just use your old sprouting potatoes. Great money saver Make sure to save your best potatoes to replant. The new potatoes will be in the image of their mother potato. If you plant the small, leftover potatoes youll harvest small puny potatoes. Growing Potatoes. Back to Top. When you dig up your carrots and put them in the cellar, put the larger carrots on the bottom. Use the smaller carrots first because they dont last as long as the big carrots. Cut off all the green so that the carrots dont start sprouting. They last longer this way. Another way to store your carrots is to leave them in the ground all winter. You can dig up your carrots whenever you need them. Storing carrots this way keeps them tasting really sweet. To keep the ground around your carrots from freezing, cover them with straw or leaves. To keep the rain and snow out, place a tarp on top of the straw and leaves. Use rocks or logs to hold your tarp down. Your carrots will stay fresh all winter. Theyll start to get mushy when the ground begins to thaw in the spring. If you have any left when the ground begins to thaw, dig them up and make carrot juice. Fresh carrot juice is a great source of nutrition, and its yummy Weve tried root cellars and leaving them in the ground. Both methods work. I prefer the vegetable cellar because I dont have to dig carrots in the middle of the winter. Canning carrots. is another way to preserve your carrots. I can some and put some in the cellar diversification Also see. Back to Top. Beets will last until February or March in the cellar. When they start to go bad, theyll get a little moldy and soft. Theyre great while they last. Canning Beets. is another way to preserve you beets. I can some and put some in the cellar. Use the fresh beets first. Also see. Growing Beets. There are many types of root cellars. Ill teach you how to build a simple cellar that works. Weve built some that havent worked, but I dont need to go into that story. Rodents, snakes, and others small animals will sometimes get into your cellar. Your vegetables provide a great winter feast for them. We didnt have any trouble the first few years we had our root cellar, but one winter mice gnawed a hole in the wood and got into our potatoes. The next spring we lined our root cellar with hardware cloth. Hardware cloth comes in all sizes. We used the 14 x 14 size. This solved the rodent problem. Here are a few different options for 14 x 14 Hardware Cloth. They come in different size rolls. Pick the option that best fits your building plan. Inch Mesh 2. 4 Inch Tall x 5 Feet Long Hardware Cloth. G B 3. 08. 24. B 2. Inch x 5. Foot 14 Inch Galvanized Mesh Garden Cloth. Mat Midwest 3. 08. A Air Tech 4. 8 Inch by 5. Foot 14 by 14 Inch Mesh 2. Gauge Hardware Cloth. Mat Midwest Air Tech 3. B 3. 6 Inch by 1. Foot 14 Inch Mesh 2. Gauge Hardware Cloth. You can also use use hardware cloth to put around your young fruit trees. The cloth keeps the small animals from eating the bark off the bottom of your tender trees during the winter. One winter we lost 6. The mice chewed a ring around the young trees at snow level. After a few years, the trees get a rougher bark. The mice dont seem to bother the older trees. You can remove the hardware cloth so the wood doesnt grow into the cloth. This hardware cloth comes in handy. Back to Top. Return to Storing Vegetables from Root Cellar. How to Store Apples. Storing and Preserving Tomatoes Growing and Storing Onions.