The harvest comes all at once

Gardens do not give food evenly. You get a flood of zucchini in July, a pile of tomatoes in August, and potatoes and squash in fall. Then, for months, almost nothing.

Storage is what turns a summer garden into winter food. It is also where a lot of homegrown food is lost, to rot, mold, pests or poor planning.

Each crop has its own needs. Match the crop to the method, and match the amount to what you will really eat.

Four ways to keep food

• Cold storage: keeping whole crops alive and dormant in cool conditions, as in a root cellar. Little energy, little processing.
• Drying: removing most of the water, so mold and bacteria cannot grow.
• Freezing: stopping spoilage with cold. Easy, but it uses electricity all year.
• Canning: sealing food in jars and heating it to destroy germs and keep new ones out.

Some foods can also be fermented, like sauerkraut. Tested fermentation methods are on the National Center for Home Food Preservation site.

Root cellars

A root cellar is any cool, dark, humid space for storing crops: a basement corner, a buried chamber, or an insulated box in a garage that does not freeze.

Very roughly, many root crops, such as carrots, beets and cabbage, keep best near 32 to 35 °F (0 to 2 °C) with very high humidity, about 95% or more. Potatoes prefer about 40 °F (4 °C) with 90 to 95% humidity (Iowa State Extension).

• Keep a thermometer and a humidity meter inside, and check them often.
• Some fruits, like apples, release a gas called ethylene as they ripen. It can sprout potatoes and shorten the life of stored squash, so store them apart.
• Check stored crops every week or two, and remove anything going soft.

Climate shapes your options. Cold-winter places can use the ground and outdoor air to keep a cellar cool. Warm-winter places often need a fridge instead.

Cool and dry, frozen or dried

Some crops want the opposite of a root cellar.

• Winter squash and pumpkins keep best somewhat warmer, roughly 50 to 55 °F (10 to 13 °C), with moderate humidity (Iowa State Extension).
• Onions and garlic want cool, dry air with good airflow, once they are cured, which means dried in the sun or shade for a few weeks after harvest.

Freezing is simple and keeps quality well. A freezer runs all year, though, and is a steady load on an off-grid system. Check its yearly kWh label and add it to your load list. In a power outage, a full freezer kept closed stays frozen longer than a half-full one.

Drying works best in dry air or with a dehydrator. Dried food takes little space, but must stay dry once stored.

Canning: two methods

Canning safety depends on how acidic a food is.

• High-acid foods, like most fruits, jams, and pickles with enough vinegar, can be processed in a boiling-water canner.
• Low-acid foods, like most vegetables, beans and meats, must be processed in a pressure canner. Only a pressure canner gets hot enough to destroy the spores of the germ that causes botulism.

Botulism is a rare but serious and sometimes fatal illness from a toxin made by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. It can grow in sealed jars of low-acid food that were not processed correctly. You cannot see, smell or taste it.

Match the crop to the method

Compare the methods

Most homesteads use a mix, chosen crop by crop.

Check

Summary

• Match each crop to its conditions: cold and humid, cool and dry, frozen, dried or canned.
• A root cellar uses little energy but needs checking. Freezers use power all year.
• Low-acid foods need a pressure canner. High-acid foods can use a boiling-water canner.
• Use only tested USDA or NCHFP recipes. Botulism is rare, serious and invisible.

This is the end of the Food track. Next, you will look at toilets, septic systems and waste.