A "root" cellar

What a beautiful day today! Sunny and warm, blue sky, new snow up in the mountains. Valley potato harvesting is going strong. Today I harvested more!! cherry tomatoes, swiss chard, and two eight-ball zucchini squash (summer). I can barely believe I'm still getting vegies from the garden; plants should be dead and dry by now, killed by frost.

Since I have too many carrots and onions to consume in the very near future, I decided to try "root cellaring", which is a misnomer at my house since we don't have a cellar. But I needed to do something.....so I dug as deep as I could into the earth in the sunroom on the east side of the house, which still turned out to be only about 8". Then I got a strong cardboard box that formerly held 20 lbs. of peaches, and put it in the hole. I then wrapped each carrot in newsprint-type paper and laid them, stacked in two layers, in the box. On top of the carrots I placed the unwrapped onions. (Later I learned that this is not the proper storage technique for onions, so I'll probably pull them out tomorrow or later this week; they're supposed to hang in bunches in a cool dry space.) I closed up the box, and then topped it off with several sheaves of straw from bales that I had gotten from a co-worker last year. I'm hoping the straw gives the box enough protection from the midday heat that we're still having, and, once it gets cold, from the low temperatures.