How to Properly Store Your Fall Garden Harvest – Ep. 275

The frost has settled, most of the garden has gone to sleep, and now we’re turning our attention to what’s left — the fruits (and roots) of our labor.
I’m talking about how to store and preserve that late-season harvest, so all your hard work continues to pay off well into winter.

Today on Just Grow Something We’ll look at how long certain crops can remain in the garden, essentially in storage mode before you truly have to bring them inside, best practices for storing roots and late fall greens, and preservation options that retain nutrition and flavor.

Let’s dig in!

Resources:
Preparing to Preserve: Basic Canning Supplies for Beginners – Ep. 211: https://justgrowsomethingpodcast.com/episode/preparing-to-preserve-basic-canning-supplies-for-beginners-ep-211
Ep. 109 – Preserving, Part One: Freezing: https://justgrowsomethingpodcast.com/episode/ep-109-preserving-part-one-freezing
Ep. 110 – Preserving Basics, Part Two: Water-Bath Canning: https://justgrowsomethingpodcast.com/episode/ep-110-preserving-basics-part-two-water-bath-canning
Ep. 111 – Preserving Basics, Part Three: Pressure Canning: https://justgrowsomethingpodcast.com/episode/ep-111-preserving-basics-part-three-pressure-canning
Ep. 113 – Dehydrating, Cold Storage, and Fermenting: More Ways to Store Your Harvest: https://justgrowsomethingpodcast.com/episode/ep-113-dehydrating-cold-storage-and-fermenting-more-ways-to-store-your-harvest
Getting Started in Fermenting – Ep. 160: https://justgrowsomethingpodcast.com/episode/getting-started-in-fermenting-ep-160
National Center for Home Food Preservation: https://nchfp.uga.edu/

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So, we are just about to the midpoint of November. For most of us, the frost has started to settle in regularly in the garden. Most of the garden has gone to sleep and now we are turning our attention to what’s left, which is the fruits and the roots of our labor. I’m talking about how to store and preserve that late seasoned harvest so that all of our hard work continues to pay off for us well into winter. Today on Just Grow Something, we’re going to look at how long certain crops can remain in the garden, essentially in storage mode before you truly have to bring them inside. Best practices for storing your roots and your late fall greens, and then some preservation options that are going to retain the nutrition and the flavor if you really don’t have enough room in the fridge or in a basement to store a lot of these things. Let’s dig in. Hey, I’m Karen and what started as a small backyard garden 20 years ago turned into a lifelong passion for growing food. Now, as a market farmer and horiculturist, I want to help you do the same. On this podcast, I am your friend in the garden, teaching evidence-based techniques to help you grow your favorites and build confidence in your own garden space. So, grab your garden journal and a cup of coffee and get ready to just grow something. So, honestly, it’s kind of sad to say, but food waste is actually sort of a hidden garden problem. Like, after all of that hard work, nothing hurts more than going into, you know, your storage and pulling out a mushy carrot or a moldy onion. So, we really want to make sure that we are preparing ourselves appropriately for the proper storage because that’s going to extend the shelf life. It’s going to reduce that waste and it gives us access to our own homegrown produce even when there’s like a foot of snow outside in the middle of the winter time. Right? The cool thing about a lot of our late fall stuff is that things can actually be stored out in the garden. And I’m using the term stored loosely, but the reason I say stored is because a lot of these things aren’t going to be actively growing while they’re sitting out there after a certain time in the season. As a day length begins to decrease, that means the growth of our plants also starts to decrease. And at some point, they basically just kind of sit into a sort of stasis, right? And so especially once we get down below what we call that pcphanany period was which is where the day length is shorter than 10 hours per day nothing’s really growing or it’s growing at a very minuscule rate. So one of the benefits is we can get a lot of these crops to their mature size and leave them in the garden to be able to harvest off of them for an extended period of time. Now depending on where you live there are certain things that do really well with this. If you’re in really really cold zones zones, oftentimes you’re very limited on the things that you can do this with and you really have to do a lot of row covers and and plastics and so it’s not really worth it to you at that point. It’s better just to bring it in. But if you’re in a more moderate climate, there are a lot of things that you can keep out there. Um hardy greens specifically, so kale and spinach and collards, they don’t mind being out there after a frost or multiple frosts. I have overwintered kale and spinach very successfully out in the gardens with very minimal row cover. Um, one simple frost cloth is really all it took and I was able to go out there and harvest off of those plants all winter long and then in the spring those plants immediately bounce back with their growth and I had an early spring harvest of those greens. So that was fantastic. But there are other leafy greens that maybe could use a little bit extra protection and they still will continue to survive for a little while. So lettuce or arugula and shard can absolutely continue going, especially if you’re in an area where the frosts are very infrequent early in the season. That’s kind of where we are in west central Missouri. As we’ve gotten a little bit warmer over the seasons, our frosts have showed up a little bit later. Our normal first frost date in the fall used to be right around the 15th or 20th of October. And now this year, I didn’t experience the first frost in my garden until Halloween. Um it was overnight October 31st into November 1st that before I saw my first frost, which is absolutely unheard of. And then immediately later that that same week, it bumped up to 70° during the week and it was fully sunny. And so we’re not seeing a bunch of frosts right now. So it’s super easy for those plants to be able to be out in that environment with just very light cover and then be uncovered for a while and then just me keep an eye out for when the next frost might hit. Um, if you’re in an area that’s even warmer than I am, then oftentimes you don’t even have to worry about covers at all with some of these things until you really start to get into, you know, the the the heaviest or the coldest part of winter. Other than greens, we also have root crops that can be stored in the ground until that ground begins to freeze solid. So again, if you are in one of the colder zones further north in the northern hemisphere, then you might be pulling these crops earlier than what I would be, but it still means that these are the the last things that you necessarily need to harvest. And you can extend that a little bit by adding those layers of heavy mulch. So straw mulch is great for things like beets and carrots and turnipss and parsnips to keep that soil just warm enough where you still have the ability to be able to dig in there and harvest those things as needed. And then once you get down to an area like mine, you know, our ground doesn’t really start to freeze solid until like sometime in December, maybe late December. And so I can honestly keep those crops out there in the garden as long as the garden soil is fairly loose. Like you know if you have very very tight soil this isn’t going to work as well. But because we have you know amended our soil really well and also because I’m growing it a lot in the raised beds. Um the soil is loose enough to be able to do this. The one thing that you do have to worry about is if you are in raised beds knowing that the volume of soil that’s in those beds is obviously less than what it is in the ground. Duh. But it’s it means it’s going to freeze earlier than what the soil in your inground gardens is going to. So that is something that you have to pay attention to. Okay. How early is that soil freezing? But in most instances, again, as long as you’ve got some insulation, these things can be held in the ground until it begins to freeze solid. And you can extend that by using heavy straw mulch. Essentially, you have a garden refrigerator. Okay. So then once we get to the stage where these things absolutely need to be harvested or if they’re things that you have harvested earlier in the season, what types of conditions do we need in order to be able to keep these going without that, you know, feeling of disappointment of going into your root seller or your basement or whatever and grabbing a potato that has gone to mush, right? Most root crops like conditions that are going to mimic a root seller. So, we want something that’s around 32 to 40° Fahrenheit, okay? And higher humidity. So, this is for things like carrots and beets and turnipss. Like, they like like a 95% humidity level. Potatoes also like this temperature um and this this humidity as well. If we’re looking at onions and garlic and like our winter squashes, we want warmer temperatures, but we want lower humidity. So the temperature could go, you know, as much as 60° Fahrenheit, but that humidity should be around 65%. Okay. So we kind of have these two different categories of how we need to store things. So you know, carrots and beets and parsnips and turnipss, they all do well in like damp sand or in sawdust in a box or in a bucket. Um, your potatoes again, they’re also going to like that, you know, that temperature around 40 degrees or so and that high humidity like the root vegetables, but they prefer to be in something like a paper bag or a burlap bag or even a a paper box in a in a cool, you know, dark place. That is for regular potatoes. Sweet potatoes, however, do not like that same temperature. As a matter of fact, you get much below 60° Fahrenheit and you’re going to start to see some damage on your sweet potatoes. They’re also not going to store as long for you. So, sweet potatoes are more like the 55 to 60° Fahrenheit range with about 60 to 75% humidity. This is also the same temperatures and humidity range that you’re looking for for like your winter squashes. Um, and even your your onions and your garlic. So, again, two sort of separate categories for how to store these things. You know, onions ideally they like that cool environment um between 40 and 60 Fahrenheit. So cool but not cold. Okay. And this temperature range is going to keep them fresher longer. It also prevents the sprouting and the rotting. That that humidity is crucial for onion storage. Um it’s going to prevent them from drying out, but it’s also not so high that it’s going to cause them to mold and and get rotten. Proper airflow is also pretty important here. Especially for onions. We kind of want them to be in mesh bags or baskets or open crates because we want to allow that air circulation. That’s going to keep them dry and it’s going to keep them fresh. This is not something that we want to put in a plastic bag because that’s going to trap the moisture. Your carrots and your beets and those things would actually appreciate a plastic bag if you don’t have them in sand in order to help trap that humidity. Okay. Um, onions also should be kept in a very dark place. We don’t want them to sprout. Exposure to light can trigger that sprouting process. And of course, that reduces their shelf life. So, we want to eat these, not grow these. If you don’t have a cellar, you can use a basement. You can use a garage. You can even use a cooler. Like, if you have extra coolers that you can throw, you know, into a corner somewhere, um, you know, in a basement or in a garage or whatever that’s going to keep things colder, then great, use those. But we do want to keep in mind again we kind of have these two categories. We don’t want to store onions and potatoes together. Okay, this is going to lead to faster spoilage for both of them. And there is some science behind this. Onions naturally emit ethylene gas and ethylene is that plant hormone that promotes ripening in a lot of our fruits and our vegetables. So, when we have our potatoes near our onions, that gas is going to cause the potatoes to sprout and it’s also going to cause them to soften more quickly and that is going to lead to spoilage. On the flip side of this, potatoes have a really high moisture content and they release moisture as they sit. And we just said that we want to keep our onions dry because this moisture can actually cause those onions to become moldy or mushy and that reduces their shelf life. So the combination of the ethylene gas from the onions and the moisture from the potatoes just creates an environment that is not good for anybody in that situation. So, all the more reason for us to basically have two separate sort of storage, I don’t know, um, approaches and two separate storage areas for the things that like the cool, dark, but very humid conditions versus the ones that like it a little bit warmer. So, I would say let’s over here we’ve got cold, not even cool. I would consider 35°, you know, Fahrenheit to be cold. So 35 to 40 or even down to 32 is cold, right? So cold and dark and high humidity versus cool and dark with a more humidity. And no matter what, we definitely want that air flow for everybody involved. Okay. So what about for those greens um that we were talking about? You know, the kale, the collards, the spinach, the things that you know maybe can stay outside for an extended period of time, but at some point depending on your climate do need to come in to be stored. I really do like to harvest these things after they have been hit by a frost because they taste better. You know, it’s something about the frost that induces a much stronger, almost sweeter flavor in these greens. And so, I like to wait at least until after we’ve had a good couple of frosts before I harvest them. Clip off the rest of whatever it is that you need to bring in. You want to store them unwashed in a perforated bag in your refrigerator. They’re going to hold for a longer period of time if you can put them unwashed because you’re not introducing additional moisture that they don’t need, which is also going to introduce the possibility of them just getting yucky and funky. So, if you can make sure they’re nice and dry before you put them in the perforated bag in the fridge and then take them out and wash them as needed until you have used them all up or until you start to hit like that 2 week period because then they don’t tend to to store as well. So, we’re extending the life of these greens by basically letting them stay out in the garden as long as they possibly can until we have no choice but to bring them in. Then we’re going to bring them in and we’re going to store them unwashed for up to two weeks. If you see that you have more than what you could possibly use in two weeks, then we have some other options. Blanching and freezing is probably one of the best ways that you can do this for these particular greens because they hold up. Now, I am not a huge fan of frozen greens. It’s just not my thing. Some people have no problem with it. Some people really like frozen greens, and that’s fine. If you like frozen spinach, then by all means, blanch it and freeze it. It’s one of the easiest ways that you can preserve things. One of my more favorite methods here recently is to do some fermenting. So, we’re making sauerkraut, we’re making kimchi, um we’re pickling some of these things, right? It’s adding probiotics. It has a better flavor to it. Um and to me, the texture is better. So, when it comes to, you know, just our greens, that’s another way that you can do it. Obviously, you can do some canning. We’re not going to go into canning in this episode, but you can also can up some of these these greens if you like that texture. Once again, I do not. So, this is not something that I do. But if I find that I have a ton of these greens and I’ve already saved what I could in terms of, you know, fermenting, the other thing that I have been known to do is to dehydrate these greens and crush them down into a powder. So again, it kind of goes with that whole garden waste thing, food waste thing of things coming out of the garden. I spent all this time growing these things. I don’t want it to go to waste. I still want to give those nutrients the opportunity to be able to do something for us throughout the winter time, especially in the winter time. We don’t have as much access to the really fresh things. And so what I found is if I can dehydrate these things at a lower temperature where it is preserving the nutrient content and I’m just grinding them up into a powder, I can add that powder to my smoothies. I can toss it into soups or into stews or into sauces. It’s adding flavor for sure. You are getting the flavor coming through, but then it’s also adding those nutrients, too. So, some of my favorite combinations have been spinach and kale and beet greens. If you like the flavor of beets, the beet greens carry that same earthiness. I know if you’re not a fan of beets, you’re going to say it tastes like dirt, and I get that. Okay, then you don’t have to include the beet greens. But, you know, if you can gr grind these things up into a powder and just keep them stored in a mason jar and you can add it to your stuff, I’m telling you, it is a great way to get the nutrition and also feel like you didn’t waste the stuff that was coming out of your garden. And if we’re talking about things other than the greens, you know, there are other things you can also ferment. You know, you can ferment the the pickles that are or the pickles. You can ferment the radishes. You can pickle those in a ferment um as they’re coming out of the garden. You can do this with turnups and, you know, other root vegetables. Uh, again, really, really great for your gut. These can all also be dehydrated, too. Whether you choose to dehydrate them and then use them sort of like in soups and stews, or you want to rehydrate them and use them in other ways, then that’s great, too. I would just always say, you know, if you’re new to any of these types of preserving methods, and I will go back and I will go ahead and link in the show notes all of the different episodes that we have done on preservation of your food. But always use tested recipes and guidelines from either the USDA or the Ball Blue Book of canning, any of your um university extension service resources. These have all been tested for safety. So, don’t go willy-nilly and start, you know, doing some crazy things with the fermenting or with the, you know, dehydrating and stuff until you have an idea of what it is that you’re doing and you are using a trusted source to teach you how to do these things. [Music] And then a final note about storage is just to make sure that you are checking your stored crops pretty frequently. I mean, and I would almost recommend doing it weekly because when things do start to go south, they can go south really fast. And unfortunately, when you have one that starts to go bad, it can sort of spread that to the other ones that are in that same container or box, and it can really wreck havoc through everything that you’ve stored at that point. So, make sure that you’re removing anything that is soft or that’s sprouting or that’s got any mold or anything to it. Once again, ventilation is key here. So, we get that airflow going. We make sure that, you know, if there is anything that is, you know, giving off that ethylene gas, um, that it’s kind of clearing it out too, so it’s not promoting overripening of the other things. So, I just say, you know, a well stored harvest really is a reminder that gardening isn’t just about the actual growing of the thing. Yes, that’s what we put all of our energy to into, but like the end result is the stuff that we’re eating, right? And so, as we’re pulling stuff from like our pantry or from our freezer or out of our jars and stuff, we get to take a minute to kind of celebrate what it is that we grew. And sometimes that’s a bit overwhelming in the summertime when we have so much stuff coming in and, you know, we’re going from one activity to another and we’re trying to preserve things. It’s in the preservation and the using of those preserved things that I feel like we really get a chance to kind of savor and appreciate the work that we put into things throughout the rest of the gardening season. And I don’t know, that’s a little bit of motivation for me to make sure that I do it again come springtime. Until next time, my gardening friends, keep on cultivating that dream garden and we’ll talk again soon.