The harvest season puts a lot of pressure on a lot of areas. Obviously there’s the demanding physical labor and all the efforts that go into absorbing a very large amount of produce in a short period of time. But, the demand for cold storage is absolutely critical.
In years past, we’ve demonstrated that we do have a chest freezer that we operate at “refrigerator” temperatures. We use this as a drink refrigerator, but some seasons it also comes in clutch for temporarily storing our produce. However, we generally prefer a different way, storing things outdoors!
One of the great things about the north this time of year is that basically, the outdoors can be a pretty reliable refrigerator. Temperatures are typically in the 40’s, sometimes dipping down into the 30’s. Sure, it’s not Samsung or LG level temperature control, but effectively, the outdoors can operate like a refrigerator.
We’ll often use the outdoors as our primary staging area for various produce while we’re carving time for preservations. In some cases, we do “try” to prevent our gardens from taking over all of our indoor spaces. So, we might store tomatoes or tomatillo outdoors until we’re ready to bring them in for force ripening. We only have so many places to put produce for various purposes and we’re further preparing a lot of produce!
Now, this obviously only works up to a certain point. Eventually, temperatures start dipping into freezing and our nice refrigerator becomes a giant freezer. But, usually for several weeks to an entire month of our major harvest season, we do have a very convenient “unlimited size” refrigerator that really helps us out.
Creative solutions to real problems are vital in northern gardening. Especially if you’re trying to grow and harvest a lot more than you can reasonably deal with, given full time jobs and other winter preparations. Even though it doesn’t “seem” like it sometimes, we do try to find the simplest way of doing things whenever possible.
We’re definitely knocking things down here! We finished tearing down our deck container gardens this weekend, which advanced our winter preparations significantly. We’re starting to eyeball our final crops of the season, the cold hardiest of them all. While we are “urgently” interested in harvesting these, we also have a bit more flexibility since the colder temperatures we’re seeing aren’t as much a factor at this point.
