For many years, I have used very dry sand to store my beets and carrots in buckets in the root cellar.
However, last year I had a problem getting the sand dry. I used to wait for a particularly dry stretch in August then take some buckets, a shovel and a hard hat to a sand depot nearby. I would drive in and scoop the sand off the top of the many mountains where it was bone dry. Last year there was a new system. The gravel owner had built a box outside of his fence. He had a backhoe put several buckets of sand in this new box and asked me to take it from there. It was sopping wet.
I put it out in the Sun on tarps for several days bringing it in at night. I raked it around. It seemed dry, but, my carrots and beets didn’t think so when I checked on them just into the winter. They were rotting.
So this year, I took some advice from my neighbor, Nancy. She’s been putting her beets and carrots in damp wood chips for years. It was worth a try.
I got a bag of wood chips like the ones I use in the chicken coop. I dug up my beets, cut off the tops (leaving about an inch) and set them on the picnic table to dry. After an hour or so, I put a bunch of wood chips in a pan and added some water. Nancy said for it not to be sopping wet, but damp.
I covered the bottom of the bucket with some of these chips. Dusting off the beets, I set them in the bucket not touching one another.
This I covered with another layer of damp chips.
I continued this process until the entire bucket was full of beets.
Topping it off with some more damp chips and a lid, into the root cellar it went. It definitely weighed quite a lot less than the buckets with sand. That was a plus. I did my carrots the same way. So we shall see….
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