Root Vegetable Storage Guide

Earlier this fall, as we were bringing in veggies, we found ourselves referring often to curing-and-storing guides.  Most sources we found were overly comprehensive, including fruits and vegetables from all regions of the world and dividing up the information into unintuitive (to us, anyway) groupings.  Eventually, we decided to compile all the information we needed for our modest garden into one chart: what we grow (or will grow soon), how to cure it, how to store it, and what not to store it with.

In the off chance that you might find it useful, too, we wanted to make it downloadable as a .pdf to print off and hang on your fridge (which is what we did to help memorize the contents).  But youll have to earn it!  Its not hard. Visit us on Facebook, where youll find a link to the download.  You dont have to Like the page to download the file, but it will help us out a little (in Facebooks eyes) if you do, and it gives you another way to follow us if you dont want to subscribe to the e-mail list or add us to your RSS feed.  In addition to the free .pdf file, youll also earn our undying gratitude for helping to spread the word about THL.  What a deal!

How to use the guide: RH = relative humidity; storage humidity is also given as relative humidity.  Avoid storing ethylene-producing crops  with ethylene-susceptible crops as much as possible.  Chill susceptible veggies go bad quickly if their storage temperature dips below the minimum of the recommended range.

(Alternatively, if youre not a Facebookian, you can always download the low-res image above as a jpeg.)
Also, if you have any suggestions for how to improve the chart, or additional vegetables you think would be useful, let us know in the comments section below!

Ok, ready? Go!

Hose Storage Solution The 30 gallon Metal Trash Can

As we noted in our garden lessons learned post the other week, were starting to accumulate quite a bit of garden hose infrastructure.  And with that infrastructure comes the need to store it over the winter.  A quick Google image search shows that there are lots of interesting home-made apparatuses to wrap a hose around, but most look to hold about 50-100 feet of hose.  Weve got two 6-footers, a 15-footer, six 50-footers, and easily another 100 feet of drip irrigation hoses.  We needed something nearly as compact as the tight-as-a-tiger wonder-coils the hose manufacturers create by some sort of sorcery.

Enter: the 30-gallon trash can.  With a base diameter of 18", a top diameter of a 20.625", and a height of 27", they can hold an awful lot of hose coiled up inside (even without the help of sorcerers).  How much? Time for some math!

We need some dimensions to get a ballpark figure.  In the United States, most hoses are 5/8 inch (0.625") in diameter, meaning that if they were stacked perfectly, 43 coils would fit in 27".  If the diameter of the can increases from 18" to 20.625" over those 27", each coil gets an extra 0.061" in diameter.  The circumference (which is the length of hose that fits in one coil) therefore increases from 4.71 feet at the bottom to 5.38 feet at the top.  In sum, that equals just over 217 feet of hose!

Good news: we should be able to fit all our hoses in just two trash cans.

More good news: the hole left in the center has plenty of room for holding hose accessories like sprayer nozzles, unused drip irrigation parts, motion-detector sprinklers, or a five-gallon bucket with even-more-tightly-coiled hose.

Even more good news: the garden-irrigation season and the meat chicken-growing season are mostly concurrent, meaning that when those metal trash cans are empty of hoses, they can be full of chicken feed.

The last two are also advantages over the arguably-better-looking plastic box hose reels of similar capacity.  Plus, the cans are less-expensive and are American-made!

Hose storage solution: success!  Not quite as cleanly coiled as our theory predicted in the first picture, but chalk this one up in the win column.

How do you store your hoses for the winter?