Leaf-Bags For Easy Garden Root Storage

30 December 2014

Illustration of a traditional root clamp.
I have a better idea...

Clamps were once a reliable pre-industrial method of storing root crops through a cold winter and into spring. Clamps will once again be a reliable method of food storage in the post-industrial era ahead of us. Thus it is that using clamps to store potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, cabbages, and even apples, is a food storage technique worth learning. 

The best way to learn about keeping roots in garden clamps is to first read the literature about this ancient food preservation technique, then personally experiment every year with different ideas until you perfect your own clamping system that is relatively easy and consistently reliable.

The traditional-style garden clamp is an earthen mound with straw-insulated vegetables inside, like you see in the illustration above.

Old-time farmers used larger clamps for storage of various root crops, which they fed to their cattle in the winter. Turnips and rutabagas were popular cattle feed. Here is an illustration of a farm-scale clamp design...

Longtime readers may recall that I have made small garden clamps in past years to store root crops. I’ve used variations on the earthen-mound clamp, and have had excellent success keeping roots in such clamps, right in my garden, through a cold New York State winter, and into spring. It’s mighty satisfying to have mounds of perfectly preserved, “fresh”  root-food in the garden all winter. 

The only problem with making a traditional root clamp is that it requires a fair amount of shoveling and moving of soil.  Then, in the spring, the ground needs quite a bit of work to be put right again for planting. Also, traditional-style clamps require a supply of straw. If you have a farm, you may have all the straw you need. If you don’t have a farm (and most people do not) then you need to buy some straw.

Those drawbacks to the traditional clamp led me to try something very different this year. I made a clamp with a standard plastic pail, some hardware cloth, and 5 bags filled with dry leaves. A couple days ago I opened it up to see how 26 pounds of carrots had fared through snow, and rain, and cold. I made an impromptu YouTube video of the opening....

As the video shows, the clamp is very simple to make, and the carrots came out just fine. I will be using several of these clamps for root storage next winter. However, I will modify the design just a bit. If you watch the YouTube clip, you can see that there is a lot of moisture under the top bag of leaves when I remove it. The moisture is due, I’m sure, to the fact that we have had lots of rain during the December thaw. But it is also due to the fact that the clamp has no ventilation shaft to let excess moisture out. So the one modification I’ll make in next year’s leaf-bag clamps is to add a small ventilation shaft consisting of a bundle of goldenrod stems. The shaft will extend from the screened top of the clamp cylinder, up through the middle of the top bag of leaves. The plastic pail, the 1/2” hardware cloth, and even the poly twine used around the leaf-bags are an inexpensive, one-time investment that can be reused for many years. The thin garbage bags used for leaves are cheap. The leaves and goldenrod stems are free. Another advantage to my leaf-bag clamps is that you can get into them during the winter without destroying the integrity of the clamp. You can simply take the top bag off, remove the screened lid, reach in, take out a bunch of roots, then replace the top bag (and weight it down with a rock or chunk of firewood). With a traditional garden clamp, you typically have to remove all the contents once the clamp is opened.

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