Gone Gardenin’ – Make certain plants, vegetables in storage are wintering well

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/03/2012 (5345 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As we busy ourselves with winter activities and our indoor gardening occupies our thoughts, we must be mindful and tend to the plants and vegetables we have in winter storage.

The place I start in our house is the extra refrigerator that we have in our garage. At the beginning of the winter it was absolutely full of vegetables: bags of carrots and beets, a couple of large cabbages, and several large kohlrabi to name a few.

By Early December the cabbages had been used, as had a bag of Swiss chard and a bag of radishes — these two were the last vegetables to be harvested from the garden before it was tilled. The beets were used up before the end of the year.

I check the carrots for any sign of rot — I can do this without opening the plastic bags which are perforated with holes to prevent the carrots from getting too wet. Only if I observe some rot occurring do I open the bag.

In the fridge crisper are a few tuberous begonia bulbs, still encased in the peat-based soil in which they were grown — I simply slipped them out of their pots, put them into a paper bag, and put them in the fridge. They seem to be wintering fine.

Next I open some of the cardboard boxes in which the dahlias, cannas, callas, and Peruvian daffodils are stored. The dahlias were left in clumps, the cannas are basically bare root, while the callas and Peruvian daffodils were slipped out of their pots and the entire root balls were placed inside the boxes.

I check for signs of rot, check to ensure the roots are not so dry that they are becoming desiccated, and look for any mould or other problems. The boxes are stored in our heated garage where the temperature hovers just above the freezing mark.

On various ledges in the garage are stacked my pots of oxalis. The pots were brought into the garage while they still had some green foliage but this has long since dried off and been removed.

The soil in the pots is bone dry and the bulbs are dormant. There is only one small window in the garage so the light levels are low enough so as not to encourage the plants to start growing.

In a basement storage area, I check the winter (Butternut) squash and the onions. Throughout the winter, whenever we go to use an onion or a squash, we check them over — they are stored in open shallow cardboard boxes — and use first those that look like they are beginning to spoil.

Generally a squash will develop a softness around the stem if it begins to spoil.

Both squash and onions like a warmer and drier environment than the garage provides. Storing them in the basement seems to work.

The final check is done in the furnace room where my light garden is located. Stored here are my gladiola bulbs. Until early December the corms sat drying on an old blanket on the furnace room floor. It was only then that I removed the old dead corms from the new ones that had developed during the summer, cleaned up the corms and put them into large paper bags.

Any corms that didn’t look healthy were discarded. A few were completely wizened while some others looked like they were turning black, but by and large, most looked very healthy and were put into storage.

I gave the corms a dusting of bulb dust which contains both an insecticide and a fungicide, gave each bag a shake to distribute the dust, and closed the bags tightly and placed them in the back corner of the room, out of direct light.

With the vegetables, plants and bulbs etc. that I have in storage checked to ensure that they are wintering well, I can go back to my light garden and my sun room and putter, knowing that we can continue to enjoy the harvest from of vegetable garden for a while yet and that I will have lots of my favourite bulbs and corms to use in my outdoor garden again this coming spring.

Albert Parsons is a consultant for garden design and landscaping who lives in Minnedosa.

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