root cellar preparation

As soon as the ground is soft enough we'll be getting in the potato harvest. It's a big job; no one wants to make it harder by digging while the earth is dry and hard. This year looks like the crop will be excellent, which is nice after last year's drought and poor potato harvest.

Cleaning out the root cellar happens every year. There's always something left in there among the empty crates and wire rack shelves: this year it was an unexpected crate of potatoes, when we thought we'd eaten them all by the end of June, and that on short rations, too. The discovered potatoes were too late to matter, since we've been harvesting new potatoes for several weeks, and nothing compares with new potatoes. The pigs, however, were glad to deal with the old ones, which were still sound and good.

Mostly we just rake out the gravel floor, scrape the footer that goes around the base of the wall, and sprinkle some ag lime around. Sometimes we whitewash the walls. This year we found some standing water in one corner, so we hauled a ton of limestone (34's to dust) and put down a couple of inches of new floor material before we limed the footers. The 13-year-old repaired the door frame and reinforced the door where an unwanted visitor had gnawed a hole. Shelves and crates were carried out on the lawn, sprayed down, and aired.

Potatoes, after being dug and cured, will go down cellar in plastic milk crates and old feed sacks. Pontiacs produce best; Yukon Golds store longest -- so we eat them in that order.