With our mild winters and my sandy soil I leave the carrots and trunips in the ground. Tom

Immediately after harvest, soak them for 10 mins. in an ice water bath. Shake well but don't dry them. Then into a ziplock bag or sealed tupperware container and into the fridge. They need cold and moisture to stay fresh. ;)

Dave

A paper towel placed into that sealed plastic bag will hold moisture nicely, and prevent veggies from becoming slimy.

Thanks for the help, here are some followup questions..:)

Tom....what climate are you in, We have had several very mild winters here but we potentially could be fairly cold and snowy/icy. I am not sure here I could keep them in the ground.

Dave....are you doing this with all the crops including carrots, radishes, turnips, rutabaga, etc? Are you leaving the greens on them still or are you doing any other trimming (i.e. the long tap root on a turnip or radish)? How long do you seem to be able to keep them still crunchy and usable with this method?

daria...excellent suggestion, we do that with grapes and some other fruits but didn't think of it with root veggies

kendra

Here in zone 5b I leave turnips, carrots and beets in the ground and pile hay thickly on top. When I need some, I wait for a warm afternoon and dig enough for a couple of weeks. This won't work for the big fall radishes because they have too much water in them. I dig those and store them for months in the veggie bin in the fridge. They keep into March, though the best keeper is Greenheart.

Dave....are you doing this with all the crops including carrots, radishes, turnips, rutabaga, etc? Are you leaving the greens on them still or are you doing any other trimming (i.e. the long tap root on a turnip or radish)? How long do you seem to be able to keep them still crunchy and usable with this method?

Yes, but remove the greens - they get slimey. You can trim tap roots if you want - they fit into the bag easier. ;) In the fridge veggie bins they will keep for a couple of months.

If you have too many for the fridge then in-ground with heavy mulch cover works well just like we used to store them in underground root cellars. ;)

You can also slice, blanch, and freeze them in freezer bags for later use in cooking.

Dave

thanks again. We will be picking another round of radishes and turnips soon and will have to try the bag method.

We already slice and freeze most of the carrots for use all winter in soups and stews, but we have always had trouble keeping them crunchy for a few days while we may want to eat them fresh or with salads...:)

This may sound silly but how cold does your guy's veggie bin get, because even when I store them in the fridge they seem to get rubbery fairly quickly..:) Does this mean ours is too cold?

kendra

"Does this mean ours is too cold?"

I think most of your question is covered by the previous posts. But yes, it is possible for the veggie bin to get so cold it freezes the veggies. But that would be more apparent on delicate things like lettuce, not on root vegetables except maybe radishes. I've had it happen. An inexpensive refrigerator thermometer is good to have.

Jim

I kept carrots in the ground last year until December, and thats with a cold WISCONSIN fall weather pattern. I think it was single digits a few times before i picked the last of the carrots. ALL of them were fine. This year i didn't have as many and already ate them! They taste better later in the year too. I should really be doing 2 crops of carrots every year.

kendra, our zone 7 usually has a few days/winter when the lows get into single digits. Most of the winter lows are in the 20's and low 30's; very mild compared to most places. The thing we have to deal with here is the rainfall which averages around 70"/year. The sandy soil helps. I leave Autumn King carrots, Lutz beets, golden turnips and jerusalem artichokes in the ground for the winter. Tom

Ardnek,

I live in Eastern MA and have successfully kept carrots underground until February a few years ago. I mulched heavily and was lucky to have good snow cover, which further insulated them. They were crunchy and delicious when I dug them up during a thaw. I'm trying it again this year, mulching with about 5" of white pine needles. If the local rabbit doesn't ferrit them out, we shall see what is left come mid/late winter.

If your root veggies get rubbery in the vegetable bin in the fridge, it is usually dessication rather than freezing. Refridgerators are normally frost free, which means they draw the moisture out of whatever is exposed in the fridge, condense it on the coils, then melt the water into the drip pan during the defrost cycle. Be sure to keep your root veggies in bags to retain their moisture and they will last for many months. The closer the temp to 32 without actually freezing the longer they will keep.

Properly prepared carrots and beets keep very well in the freezer. When you cook them, they are much closer to fresh than canned ones are, plus it is a lot less work to freeze them than it is to can them with a pressure cooker to prevent food poisoning.

I harvest my remaining beets and most of the carrots as late as possible without actually letting the ground freeze, usually sometime in October. Cut the entire top off the carrots, leave 1 1/2 to 2 inches of the stems on beets. Put them in a plastic bag, such as a grocery bag and tie the top, then store them in the coolest place available, often an unheated but insulated porch. I remove them if we get well below 0 and it freezes in there. I also have an incubator room which is maintained at around 40 degrees throughout the winter and often snag a little room to store the bags in there.

Keeping them in the ground and heavily mulched until you need them is great and probably preserves them better than digging and storing. Beets don't really like being frozen in the garden, but carrots don't seem to mind much unless it gets really cold. That's where a heavy mulch will keep them cold without getting too cold. I usually harvest a few jerusalem artichokes in March when cleaning up whatever remains of last year's stalks after the livestock get done grazing and they never seem to be the least bit harmed by being frozen in the ground all winter with no surface protection. I don't grow parsnips, but they used to grow "wild" in the orchard and they were always best if dug in the early spring after overwintering in the frozen ground.

Just a few thoughts and experiences--feel free to experiment and see what works for you. Some root crops will do fine without any protection over the winter, some will do fine with protection, some need to be dug. It all depends on your climate and what you like to grow.