Root cellaring: natural cold storage of fruits and vegetables

Stretch the resources of your small backyard garden further than ever before, without devoting hundreds of hours to canning! This informative and inspiring guide shows you not only how to construct your own root cellar, but how to best use the earth's naturally cool, stable temperature as an energy-saving way to store nearly 100 varieties of perishable fruits and vegetables. Discover how easy it can be to turn some extra space in your basement, garage, or even your closet into your very own root cellar. Mike Bubel co-authored the classic best-selling guide Root Cellaring with his wife, Nancy. They were avid gardeners for many years in Philadelphia and then on their farm in Wellsville, Pennsylvania. Nancy Bubel, co-author of the classic best-selling guide, Root Cellaring, was a gardening columnist for Country Journal magazine and wrote for Mother Earth News, Organic Gardening, Horticulture, Family Circle, Woman's Day and New Shelter magazines. She was a member of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and the Society for Economic Botany, and a life member of both the Seed Savers Exchange and the Friends of the Trees Society. Preface Introduction Section One: Starting Right With Storage Vegetables 1. Planting Crops for Fall Storage 2. Good Keepers 3. Growers Keepers: How to Raise Top-Quality Storage Vegetables Section Two: Bringing in the Harvest 4. How to Harvest and Prepare Vegetables for Storage 5. Life After Picking 6. Spoilage 7. Food Value in Winter Keepers Section Three: All the Winter Keepers and How to TreatThem 8. Vegetables 9. Fruits 10. The Underground Garden 11. Other Good Foods to Keep in Natural Cold Storage Section Four: Food Cellars for Everyone 12. Trenches, Keeping-Closets, and Other Vegetable and Fruit Hideaways 13. Planning Your Root Cellar 14. Keeping Things Humming in the Root Cellar 15. The Basement Root Cellar 16. The Excavated Root Cellar Section Five: "Here's What We D" 17. Root Cellaring Experiences Section Six: Recipes 18. Cooking Sturdy Keepers Bibliography Sources IndeX Root cellaring, as many people remember but only a few people still practice, is a way of using the earth's naturally cool, stable temperature to store perishable fruits and vegetables. Root cellaring, as Mike and Nancy Bubel explain here, is a no-cost, simple, low-technology, energy-saving way to keep the harvest fresh all year long. In Root Cellaring, the Bubels tell how to successfully use this natural storage approach. It's the first book devoted entirely to the subject, and it covers the subject with a thoroughness that makes it the only book you'll ever need on root cellaring. Root Cellaring will tell you: * How to choose vegetable and fruit varieties that will store best * Specific individual storage requirements for nearly 100 home garden crops * How to use root cellars in the country, in the city, and in any environment * How to build root cellars, indoors and out, big and small, plain and fancy * Case histories -- reports on the root cellaring techniques and experiences of many households all over North America Root cellaring need not be strictly a country concept. Though it's often thought of as an adjunct to a large garden, a root cellar can in fact considerably stretch the resources of a small garden, making it easy to grow late succession crops for storage instead of many rows for canning and freezing. Best of all, root cellars can easily fit anywhere. Not everyone can live in the country, but everyone can benefit from natural cold storage. "…the most complete book on the subject you are likely to find." Backwoods Home Magazine "…a book that has become a durable classic - a manual that delivers detailed guidelines for storing fruits and vegetables in the most simple way